Why "Local" Farming is Important to the GTA

There are some trends and patterns in our food system that 100 years ago, hardy folks would have considered complete insanity and with good reason. Urban areas in North America for the most part rely on a "just in time" food supply chain. A city like Toronto has, at any given moment, not much more than a 3 day food supply {according to a local food security NGO}. Most food which is produced within Southern Ontario is not produced for local markets, it mostly goes into the larger global food distribution network and thus travels elsewhere. Indeed it's been a world-wide trend ever since colonialism that farmers are encouraged to be specialized and export-oriented.
Theres very little infrastructure for food processing and packaging here in Southern Ontario. I have come across these facts in past readings, and really should cite them before I throw them out there... but... if you can prove me wrong, that would actually mean great news for us. There are no more major commercial canneries left in the Niagara region. Many (most?) vegetables grown in the Holland Marsh go as far away as Chicago to be put into plastic bags. Likewise for most Muskoka cranberries, they go to Montreal to be bagged. Whitefish from the Great Lakes go to China to be cut up and packaged for sale.
Because regional and global trading agreements force countries to export certain things and import certain things, food swapping happens all the time. The UK both imports and exports Milk. Ethiopia used to, I don't know if it still is, be a grain exporter - even and especially in the 80s when they were having a starvation crisis. Indeed many many countries where people go hungry, well, they export food. In my kitchen I have Basmati rice from India, a country where some people rely on imports for part of their daily caloric intake.
Does any of this make sense?

Privileged first-worlders like myself often think that "well okay food security is a problem, but not for me!" Well, in reality: we have just been buffered by our money, nothing else. First off, people do go hungry in my city, while food goes to waste all the time. Second off: remember the 3-day food supply thing? Fact: alot of that comes across the US border. A shit load of it. If California stopped exporting greens and veggies, we'd have a shortage in Toronto. If the US border closed down for whatever reason tomorrow, our 3-day supply would dry up, not being able to be replaced by local sources quickly enough

My point with all of this is, and I don't think anyone can disprove this thesis: our modern urban societies are not resilient. Without our utility grids, without electricity, cities couldn't operate. Without our global commodity chain, we wouldn't have any resupply of most of the things we need. If our just-in-time food supply system were to have a sudden hiccup, in a week we'd lack most of the variety and amount of food we're used to. Theres no way to argue ourselves out of this predicament. "The government" could maybe get us some corn and meat, but not much else and not for long.

"Resilience" in ecological terms is "the ability of an ecosystem to respond to stress." It's a forest having enough diversity of vegetation that in drought, the whole thing wouldn't dry up because some species, and some cohorts in any one specie, would be able to face the crisis. Resilience to a bird means that it can eat many different insects, not just one kind. It's evolutionarily beneficial to have back-up systems, to be able to handle stresses by being opportunistic.


The only way a city like Toronto survives right now is our just-in-time food supply system. The only reason that 90+% of us aren't hungry right now is because of the status quo of our access to a global food supply. But, recall that in early 2008 food prices went up around the world, and food riots took place in at least 30 different countries. Yes there is enough food to feed everyone in the world right now, but it's not distributed evenly (because it's a commodity, not "right"). Our growth mantra means that we're supposed to be feeding an extra 3 billion mouths, and more % of them more lavishly, in 30 years. But industrialized agricultural systems for the most part can't yield more and more and more off the same chunk of land in perpetuity. Without a focus on soil science, nutrients gets depleted. These and more facts add up to a wider dilemma, which is that: our food supply system are not designed to be resilient. Farms on par are not set up with the paradigm of "we want to produce food in perpetuity," no, they are set up to produce as much profit as quickly as possible.
This all adds up. I think that if we (globally, and nationally, and in this city) don't change our philosophical and physical relationship to food soon, then, well, one day money won't be a buffer, and we will realize just how vulnerable we really are.