Food Insecurity, Mileage - We Need a Resilient Food System

Here and now, in Toronto within the bioregion of Southern Ontario, we currently rely on an agricultural production, trading, and consumption system which is an environmentally unsustainable dead-end, and which does not provide a secure food source which is resilient to stresses. According to Lori Stahlbrand of Local Food Plus (in 2007 “Food for Talk” seminar), at any given moment there is only about 3 days worth of food in the GTA's markets and warehouses; many environmentalists/locavores cite this as a standard for first-world cities, 3 days. Our food "life support system" relies on fossil fuels to transport virtually all of our produce, most of it from vast distances. Our carbon footprint is larger than if we ate locally; and that the environmental costs of our consumption are offloaded onto other people's land. Meanwhile, the Farmland Preservation Research Project at the University of Guelph in a 2004 publication pointed out that 52% of Canada's best soil for agriculture is in southern Ontario, that more than half of that "can be seen from the CN Tower" (on a clear day). We are gradually diminishing our most vital local resource - Class One soil, a rare quality of cropland in the world - to export-oriented industrial farms (which tend to erode soil and biodiversity) and to urban sprawl.

Food Security, according to the World Health Organization, “is defined as [a] populations both economic and physical access to a supply of food, sufficient in both quantity and quality at all times, regardless of climate and harvest, social level and income.” (Viljoen, 2005, Glossary). This definition indirectly refers to a humanitarian goal of "food as a right," but is weak on identifying a few very important questions: where/who a population gets its food from; whether its system of food production and/or trade is resilient (able to handle stress); and whether it is able to be sustained indefinitely. Food insecurity can at times be a simple ecological issue of carrying capacity – a population which has grown to have too many mouths to feed and/or has too few resources - while at other times, food insecurity is a geopolitical issue related to poverty, land access, trade (export) quotas and so on. By including the phrase “regardless of harvest” the WHO likely referring to food trade (or aid) undertaken to account for seasonal crop shortages, or a chronic lack of local production. I would argue that politicians and other influential people need to think about a broader form of food security however: any reliance on long-distance imports for sustenance is short-sighted, as it creates a dependency on a cheap transport and a constant supply line. Any interruption to that status quo, like a border being closed, energy costs going up, or food exporters deciding to redirect or hoard their surpluses, and the populace who depends on said imports is suddenly facing a crisis. A forward-thinking population should first and foremost pay attention to the productivity and sustainability of local food-production systems, add to the integrity of local cropland (through improving soil quality, biodiversity and other conditions which lead to surpluses), and focus on the goal of having a reliable and resilient food source.

As Micheal Hough (1995) points out when defining “Cities and Natural Processes, modern urban societies operate as if there is no understanding or valuing of the natural processes required to sustain life (1-2). Cities before the industrial revolution, he argues, were planned on a "vernacular" scale; or, adapted to local conditions. An urban population would generally not grow larger than could be supported by local food and water sources (the exception being imperial port cities like Rome); before the industrial revolution long-distance freight transport was laborious, risky, and inefficient. Towns and cities were surrounded by fields that supported most of their diet; public squares, parks, and church-yards were used for planting orchards, vegetables, and raising livestock; experientially, urbanites were constantly aware of what it took to sustain their diet (10-13).

In the introductory paragraph, it was mentioned that southern Ontario hosts some of the best agricultural land in Canada, and is one of the warmest parts of the nation (minus some parts of B.C). 60 years ago the GTA likely got about 80% of its food from within Southern Ontario, most of it from the "Greater Golden Horseshoe" (from the Niagara Peninsula to Lake Simcoe to Peterborough/Oshawa region)[unfortunately cannot recall where I got this figure, hence “likely”]. Today that figure is somewhere around 10-15%; visit any supermarket, and it is very clear that much of our food comes from outside Canada. Raw and processed agricultural goods regularly cross national borders and oceans. In "Eat Here" (2004), academic Brian Halweil outlines that “food trade” has grown to be $443-billion industry by 2002, threefold from the 1961 level, while in the same period the actual amount of produce being traded has increased four times from 200 to 898-million tonnes [29]. Surveys in American supermarkets show that the average fruit or vegetable travels 2,500-to-4,000 kilometres by truck, train, boat, and plane.

The United Kingdom is an extreme example to look at: visit a grocery store in England and you can buy Strawberries from California (8,772 km by plane), Broccoli from Guatemala (8,780 km plane), Blueberries from New Zealand (18,835 km by plane), Beef from Australia (21,462 km by boat), Potatoes from Italy (2,447 km by truck), Runner Beans from Thailand (9,532 km by plane) and Carrots from South Africa (9,620 km by plane). Keep in mind - every crop named above could and is produced within the U.K itself, and could be transported mere dozens of km from field to table [31]. Halweil points out even more illogic to the food trade system: countries regularly export what they also import. "The UK imports large amounts of milk, pork, lamb, and other major commodities even as it exports comparable quantities of the same foods, shuttling hundreds of millions of tonnes of identical food in opposite directions… this is an artefact of subsidized transportation, centralized buying by supermarkets and food manufacturers, and trade agreements that set food import quotas even for food self-sufficient nations" (38). In 1997, the UK imported 126-million litres of milk and exported 270-million litres (Viljoen, 42). Similarly, visit a Toronto supermarket, and you can find carrots and lettuce from California, apples from Chile, and so on. Crops that 50 years ago were mostly bought from within a couple hundred kilometres (and eaten in season) now spend weeks in transport, storage and processing.

As Britt Erickson points out: there are land use by-laws in multiple counties in southern Ontario which prevent farmers from processing and packaging food on site even if they do plan on selling them in local markets (Food for Talk, 2007). A farmer may have to ship their onions from the Holland Marsh to Chicago in order to packaged, only to return to a market in Toronto; Cranberries from Muskoka usually travel to Montreal to be placed in plastic bags before being making their way back.

People from any other time in history would have considered this situation to be reckless and insane. Not just because “people from the past” would also scoff at many other cultural, economic, and political trends in the world today, but for good reason. Before we became addicted to the multi-thousand-kilometer diet, people understood the notion of resilience. "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 droughts, the whole ecosystem wouldn't dry up and die 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 and plant by-products, not just one kind. It's evolutionarily beneficial to have back-up systems, to be able to handle stresses by being opportunistic. Ecologists regularily notice that in disturbed ecosystems it is the ‘generalists’ who survive (and even thrive), while specialists are very prone to disappearing.

Human beings by our very nature are generalists: we have been able to migrate to and set up societies in every bioregion of this planet (aside from Antarctica) because we are able to explore landscapes thoroughly and figure out what’s edible. Societies have only been able to grow and develop over time because people would have a consistent, plentiful, and nutritious food supply, and have back-up systems to deal with stresses or interruptions in the form of multiple ecosystems to gather from or multiple crops to fall back on. I think very few people who argue with the preposition that the most useful survival mechanism we humans have evolved is the ability to plan ahead for disasters, and the most “universally preferable” planning strategy is to have biodiverse and resilient agro-ecosystems and stockpiles of staples. Better to have many crops to fall back in a drought than just one or none; better to be able to still be self-sufficient on ones farm than to have to go hunting in nearby forests, or invade other societies/regions out of desperation.

These days we rely on food trade not just to fill gaps in our diets but for our basic sustenance. While not a figure for Toronto, this is still relevant: the Region of Waterloo's dept. of Public Health, in a 2005 study found that “imports of 58 commonly eaten foods travel an average of 4,497 km to Waterloo Region. These imports account for 51,709 tonnes of GHG emissions annually,” and get this, these were foods weren’t tropical fruits these were 58 crops that grow in Waterloo Region.

Now why do we not think about local self-reliance? How is it considered sane or normal for a city, a province, a country not be food self-reliant even when we can be? Objectively speaking isn’t it short-sighted and immature to have a food-production and food-supply system that assumes “we will always have cheap petroleum, open borders, high purchasing power, and thus the ability to import?” Can we depend on infinite and cheap petroleum for our food miles, and mechanized farming system? Can we Canadians depend that we will always be a “first world country” with a dollar strong enough that we can import whatever we want to? Can we depend on our own industrial farms to keep producing surpluses without soil erosion, loss of agricultural biodiversity, and the pesticide treadmill catching up to us?

The only reliable and resilient type of food system is one which can keep putting out surpluses in perpetuity without externalized inputs other than human labor and maybe seeds/genes. The only sustainable forms of agriculture are those which are able to be sustained indefinitely, i.e. that preserve soil, agri-biodiversity, that wouldn’t collapse if the global economy collapsed or we hit peak oil. Hence the only farming we can really depend on to feed us forever is one that is truly local and ecologically designed: all inputs into farms are locally acquired; all food for a population is grown close enough to not need excessive or cheap amount of fuel for transport; all labor is locally acquired too (we don’t even have this covered – in Ontario we import migrant labourers to pick a huge portion of our fruits and veggies). Better that we work on fixing these problems before we HAVE to. Even if the status quo could hypothetically carry on forever, better to have an “insurance policy” against starvation so to speak.

Erickson, Britt (2007). Regional Food Systems Planning. Food for Talk: Student Colloquium - U of T, February 23 2007.

Farmland Preservation Research Project. (2004) Farmland in Ontario - Are We Losing a Valuable Resrouce. Fact Sheet, August 2004. Retrieved March 12, http://www.farmland.uoguelph.ca/publications/factsheetaugust2004.pdf.

Halwell, Brian. (2004). Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket. New York: Worldwatch Institute; Norton

Hough, Michael. (1995). Cities and Natural Processes. Routeledge.

Stahlbrand, Lori. (2007). Local Flavor Plus - strategies for local food to local institutions and markets. Food for Talk: Agricultural Sustainability in the Greater Golden Horseshoe - York U, March 9 2007.

Watkins, Melissa (2007). Ontario Farmland Trust: Achieving Agricultural Sustainability. Food for Talk: Agricultural Sustainability in the Greater Golden Horseshoe - York U, March 9 2007.

Viljoen, Andre ed. (2005). Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes: Designing Urban Agriculture for Sustainable Cities. Burlington: Architectural Press.

Xuereb, Marc. (2005). Food Miles: Environmental Implications of Food Imports to Waterloo Region. Region of Waterloo Public Health. Found on < http://www.leopold.iastate.edu/research/marketing_files/foodmiles_Canada_1105.pdf>