Fishkill: Noun or Verb

It's understandable, but unacceptable. Last week's monsoon-like rain led to an extensive fishkill in three rivers in Western PEI. There's been the usual hand-wringing and accusations, and promises to fully investigate and make improvements. I feel sad and discouraged for the watershed management groups who volunteer so much time and can see stocking efforts lost in a heartbeat, for the many farmers who have taken steps to farm more responsibly but will be tarred with the same brush as the few who haven't,  and for people who expect that whomever is responsible (the final verdict isn't in, but all signs point to fungicide, possibly insecticide runoff from a potato field) will be held accountable, because that too is unlikely.  These fishkills are difficult  to investigate (dead fish are found hours even days after they died, and often well away from where they were killed, water samples are diluted, etc. etc). Prosecution presents more challenges. Judges have been convinced that  if farmers have the proper buffer zone (fifteen meters) and are following the same practices as other farmers,  then they can't be held responsible.

Here are a few things I learned  over the years:
1. Most farmers are very well aware that they're handling dangerous materials when they head out into the field with the sprayer, but as the Irish potato famine attested, if a farmer (conventional or organic) doesn't spray to prevent late blight (it's too late once the fungus lands on the potato leaf, these fungicides coat the leaves to kill the fungus spores blown in on the wind) then they won't have a crop to harvest, and the multiplication of spores will make them very unwelcome to their neighbours as well.

2. As potato farms got bigger to cope with low prices, farmers have little choice but to spray when they'd rather not: when the wind is blowing for example, or just before big rains are predicted.  It's a bad excuse, but a legitimate one.

3. Organic farming in and of itself is no solution.  The copper-based fungicides used by organic farmers to control late blight are just as dangerous to fish as the ones used by conventional farmers:

4. Unfortunately, hilling potatoes creates perfect gutter-like furrows that can move a lot of water and soil very quickly where there's any slope. One solution for this is something some farmers on PEI are using called a dammer-diker.

It creates a series of small reservoirs in the furrows that capture and hold runoff. Could this (should this) be mandatory equipment on sloping land around waterways??

5. I think the real solution is what's called a riparian zone around waterways. This upgrades the fifteen meter buffer zone to include shrubs and trees that can soak up runoff (not just pesticides but nitrates as well).

This is obviously a long-term project.  Here's what I'm thinking: whether farmers like it or not, fifteen meters is the law,  so maybe take the outside five meters for planting trees and shrubs. There is financial support to do this, and in fact the ALUS program will also make yearly payments if the outside 5 meters are turned into a riparian zone.  I think this gives farmers some cover as well to continue to use the pesticides that are unfortunately absolutely necessary to staying in business, organic or not. If these pesticides remain on the field where they're needed rather than in waterways, then everyone and everything is better off.

6. And finally I wish all of this had been dealt with fifteen years ago when the Royal Commission on Land Use presented its report. There would have been a lot of upheaval, anger, and political fallout at the time, but maybe, just maybe the province would be better prepared to deal with more severe weather events from  climate change, and the word fishkill might slowly be forgotten.

Doing Real Work

We're just over half way through a three week stretch when  Red Lane Gardens is open to the public. It's a fairly large (about 800 cultivars) garden specializing in daylillies, and run by my partner Nancy. The cold nights through June have set everything back about three weeks, and an apparently difficult tourism season means business is down by about fifty percent.  There's lots of sweat equity (and labour) in the business so we'll survive, but I do worry about other operations counting on visitors to make their year.

When it comes to weather, and the business of farming, and fishing,  people coming to the garden fall into two distinct camps: those with a direct involvement in primary industries quickly go into a rant about how discouraging and difficult things are. I try (not always successfully) to lay off those that  have no connection to farming or fishing, because I don't want them leaving the garden thinking there's some crazy man claiming the end is near, and we don't ever want to go back there again.

There is a very smart writer from California (I'm trying to find the reference again) who wrote something that helps explain this divide (and something I wish I'd thought of). He said as long as people think their food comes from a supermarket, then they'll do everything they can to defend and support the economic system and structure that puts lots of reasonably priced (often cheap) food on the shelves:  free trade, and corporate concentration in food processing, wholesaling and retailing.  If consumers could really be convinced that food actually comes from farms, then they would be just as determined to defend and support  primary producers, and demand from politicians that rural economies and the environment must be preserved.  I know this argument will sound very simplistic to some,  but I think he's on to something.  The very slick marketing done by food retailers and processors essentially says "Don't  think about where food comes from, just come to this store, or look for this product, and you and your family will be well fed."  Almost everyone now can eat the way only royalty did on those historical dramas we see on TV. It's an extraordinary achievement, but I think one with serious consequences (see months of earlier posts as to why and yeah I'm a crazy guy and I do want you to come back to this blog, so I'll stop).


And here's a piece about food safety that raises lot of questions about this complex food system we live with:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/irradiation-and-the-ick-factor/?pagemode=print



Irradiation and the ‘Ick Factor’
By MARK BITTMAN


After the E. coli outbreak in Europe last month — which sickened more than 3000 people and killed at least 50 — it was impossible not to think about irradiation. “What if,” I asked myself, “those little fenugreek seeds had been irradiated?” Might there have been fewer deaths, fewer cases of hemolytic-uremic syndrome (essentially, kidney failure; there were 900), fewer tragic stories?

The answer is “yes.” But it’s not the only question.

When it comes to irradiation, you might need a primer. (I did.) Simply put, irradiation — first approved by the FDA in 1963 to control insects in wheat and flour — kills pathogens in food by passing radiation through it. It doesn’t make the food radioactive any more than passing X-rays through your body makes you radioactive; it just causes changes in the food. Proponents say those changes are beneficial: like killing E. coli viruses or salmonella bacteria. Opponents say they’re harmful: like destroying nutrients or creating damaging free radicals.

Many people are virulently for or against. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says that irradiation “could do for food what pasteurization has done for milk.” (The main difference between irradiation and pasteurization is the source of the energy used to kill microbes.) Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food & Water Watch — which calls irradiation “a gross failure” — told me it was “expensive and impractical, a band-aid on the real problems with our food system.”

There are a few people in the middle. Former assistant secretary of the Department of Agriculture (USDA) Carol Tucker-Foreman is mostly anti-, but said that if she ran a nursing home or a children’s hospital — a place where people with weaker-than-average immune systems were cared for — it “might be something I wanted to do.” Marion Nestle, a New York University nutrition professor and the author of “Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety” (and a food-movement icon), allows that “the bottom line is that it works pretty well if done right, and I’m not aware of any credible evidence that it does any worse harm to foods than cooking. But it isn’t always done right, and foods can become re-contaminated after irradiation.”

My gut tells me that everyone quoted above is correct; the feelings are different but the information isn’t conflicting. If irradiation were called “cold pasteurization” — as it sometimes is — it wouldn’t have the “ick factor,” and we might be more accepting of it. If we were more accepting of it, it might be less cumbersome and less expensive. But it’s too late for that, and though both USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have approved it for use in specific instances, few people are buying it. (It’s mostly used for spices and a little bit of meat and poultry.)

I don’t believe irradiation is harmful; I do believe it could be beneficial, as beneficial as Mike Osterholm says; at the least it could be a useful tool. (It’s not a panacea; nothing is.) But I doubt we’ll see it used on a large scale; in a world of international trade and 60 zillion approval processes it’s just too tough a nut to crack. People don’t like the sound of it — it’s not going to get re-labeled cold pasteurization — and it’s expensive. (Still, if there were another massive E. coli outbreak here, there could be a groundswell.)

The ironies are that irradiation would be beneficial, not hazardous, and that irradiated food is almost certainly safer than, for example, meat from animals routinely fed antibiotics. But because irradiated food is branded with this “radura” you can — wisely or not — reject it. As — wisely or not — you’d probably reject genetically engineered food were it so labeled. As — wisely or not — you might decide to reject pasteurized milk were you not already used to it.

But take this a step further: Would you reject vegetables with a sprayer icon, one that represented the use of chemical pesticides? Would you reject meat that featured a nice bold CAFO label, telling you how the animals had been treated, or one with a syringe, indicating that they’d been given prophylactic antibiotics? Would knowledge of air miles that food had traveled affect your buying decisions? How about carbon footprint? How much knowledge do you want, or, for that matter, can you handle?

The big question is this: How do we get the safest and most ethical food system possible while adequately feeding ourselves? The answer will come in steps — better regulation and inspection of food production; stricter labor laws; more rigorous testing for pathogens, to name just a few — and eventually those steps may lead to a point where irradiation is unnecessary.

To get to that point we must be fully informed about the issues and decide — through a combination of our shopping patterns and support of regulatory agencies like FDA and USDA — which issues are most important to us. If it were up to me, I’d implement more widespread irradiation; but I’d also embark on a massive overhaul of the food system.

Since neither of these things is about to happen, here’s something a little more practical: let’s support and fully fund — at a piddling $183 million — the FDA’s Food Safety Modernization Act, which for the first time begins to really look at safety as food travels from the farm to the table. Only by having an agency regulating every single step of food production, processing and marketing can we approach a system that quickly improves on the one we have now. This would go a long way towards addressing the dangers that irradiation is meant to prevent — and then some.

Yes the Weather is Getting.....

A big conference in Halifax of people who have to care about the weather: people breeding seeds for the crops that will have to cope with the weather extremes that seem to becoming the norm. And note this: "In most cases, weeds come out the winner," Bullock says, noting that current controls may not continue to be a solution. Glyphosate efficacy has dropped when there is an increase in carbon dioxide, one of the effects of climate change. "That's a bit of a cause for concern."

Glyphosphate is our old pal round-up. It's wide use is already leading to resistance in weeds.

http://www.fcc-fac.ca/newsletters/en/express/articles/20110722_e.asp#story_1

Climate change impact on weather explored

by Allison Finnamore

About 500 experts in Canadian plant science gathered in Halifax this week for the Plant Canada conference.

The Canadian Societies of Agronomy, Horticultural Science, Plant Physiologists, Phytopathological, Weed Science and the Canadian Botanical Association met to discuss plant adaptation to environmental changes. The societies held some joint meetings and tours of Nova Scotia, but also held their own association meetings and discussed recent research projects and findings within specific fields of research.

David Phillips, senior climatologist with Environment Canada and Paul Bullock of the Department of Soil Science at the University of Manitoba delivered keynote speeches to the group, both noting that climate change and changing weather is having an impact on Canadian crops.

Phillips pointed out that extreme weather events -- ice storms, rain, wind and snow -- are happening more, calling recent meteorological events "an epidemic of ferocious, killer, catastrophic weather everywhere."

At the same time, seasons are more unpredictable, he says, noting that parts of Saskatchewan last year were in drought conditions, while this year, the same areas are flooded. Maple syrup producers used to begin their season when the sap started running on the first day of spring, says Phillips. Over the years, the season has shifted so that 80 per cent are now finished before the start of spring.

He says weather models predict that over time, the seasons will continue to shift and the variability of the weather will increase. That will result in longer growing seasons and more extremes in weather.

Phillips encouraged the plant scientists to continue their research "to try to get more out of the seed," to deal with the expected weather changes.

Bullock weighed the pros and cons of climate change on Canadian crops, listing yield loss, increased aridity, more severe or frequent droughts, breed tolerance to more pests and poor rainfall distribution as some concerns climate change is bringing to researchers. However, positive impacts of climate change could be more heat units, carbon dioxide stimulation of yields, northward expansion to suitable cropping areas, improved water use efficiency, deeper roots and warmer soil.

Weeds are also expected to be impacted with climate change, he notes.

"In most cases, weeds come out the winner," Bullock says, noting that current controls may not continue to be a solution. Glyphosate efficacy has dropped when there is an increase in carbon dioxide, one of the effects of climate change. "That's a bit of a cause for concern."

Precipitation, he says, is harder to predict.

"This is where we have some of the poorest knowledge about what to expect," Bullock says, noting that many studies predict "potentially longer dry periods between less frequent but more intense precipitation."

"That's not a good thing. That's a poor rainfall distribution that tends to be negative for crop yields."

Overall, Bullock says, the pros and the cons of climate change on Canadian crops are close to even.

"There is definitely some positive potential, but some negative. Where it all shakes down, I don't know," he says.

Happier Together

John Wayne or Moses Coady. It was always tempting to describe farmers and fishermen as rugged individualists who faced the challenge of weather, highly competitive markets, worked harder and smarter than their neighbours, and enjoyed the benefits of their labour (think John Wayne in the movies anyway). However in a business where middlemen, processors, and retailers have gained enormous economic control over the last twenty years, it always seemed in those moments when primary producers acted (often against their instincts) in a collective way (think Moses Coady), that good things happened.

Potato growers suffered for years from over production and low prices in North America. French fry companies and fast food restaurants were the beneficiaries, but farmers were slowly going broke. In 2004 a large potato grower from Idaho called Albert Wada and some others decided something had to be done:

"To say that the potato production industry has been struggling is not an overstatement. Technological advances and other factors have spurred an increase in the potato grower’s ability to produce more potatoes at a time when consumer demand and industry infrastructure have changed. In addition, the modern grower grapples with increasing production costs and an over-supplied marketplace. Product over-supply makes it impossible for growers to receive a reasonable price."

The United Potato Growers of America was the result. A United Potato Growers of Canada has also been created. The laws are different in both countries, not every farmer has joined,  so there's been varying success, but in the early days it definitely had a positive impact on prices for farmers. So much so that "the trade" (everyone after the farmgate) has launched a lawsuit. (an indication the United movement is working)

http://www.foodmanufacturing.com/scripts/ShowPR~RID~20531.asp

Lawsuit Alleges "Potato Cartel" Conspiracy

May 03, 2011
NEW YORK (Milberg LLP) — Milberg LLP has filed a class action lawsuit alleging that consumers were overcharged on their purchases of potatoes dating back to 2004 through the present. The complaint alleges that the defendants, an alleged cartel consisting of among the largest potato growers, cooperatives, processors and licensors, violated federal and state antitrust laws by having entered into an illegal scheme to restrict output and raise prices for potatoes. The suit covers consumers in Arizona, California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. In December 2010, the Court hearing the case appointed Milberg LLP as interim co-lead counsel.
According to the complaint, defendants, who have been publicly called the "potato cartel" and control 80% of the United States potato supply, conspired to increase prices for fresh and process potatoes in the United States starting in 2004 by reducing the potatoes grown or available for consumer markets. Defendants' actions effectively reduced competition in the markets for fresh and process potatoes throughout North America.
The defendants in the action include: United Potato Growers of America, Inc., United Potato Growers of Idaho, Inc., United II Potato Growers of Idaho, Inc., United Potato Growers of Canada, Wada Farms, Inc., Wada Farms Potatoes, Inc., Wada-Van Orden Potatoes, Inc., Albert Wada, Blaine Larsen Farms, Inc., Blaine Larsen, Potandon Produce LLC, Cornelison Farms, Inc., Keith Cornelison, Michael Cranney d/b/a Cranney Farms, Snake River Plains Potatoes, Inc., Driscoll Potatoes, Inc., Lance Funk d/b/a Lance Funk Farms, Rigby Produce, Inc., Pleasant Valley Potato, Inc., Raybould Brothers Farms LLC, RD Offutt Co., Dole Fresh Vegetables, Inc., Dole Food Company, Inc., and Idahoan Foods LLC.
The action is part of a multi-district litigation captioned In Re Fresh and Process Potatoes Antitrust Litigation pending in the United States District Court for the District of Idaho and is numbered 4:10-md-02186-BLW.


Then there's tuna. PEI fishermen have by far the largest quota of tuna in the Maritimes. Federal Fisheries has some pretty strict rules to ensure there isn't overfishing of this endangered species. (It's hook and line fishing, one fish per boat per day, etc. in North America, while in the Eastern Atlantic, in European waters, nets are used to indiscriminately catch huge numbers of fish.)  The instinct for fishermen is go out and catch fish quickly, because if they don't get them, someone else will. The challenge for fishermen is to resist this.

A couple of times PEI tuna fishermen have agreed to even stricter limits than the use of quota (splitting the season into two for example) and have been rewarded with fatter fish and better prices. Last Fall they couldn't get agreement, and the quota was caught in two days. Prices hit rock bottom, there were stories that some fish ended up dumped in back fields. Today (July 18) we hear that fishermen have once more agreed to stricter catch rules, and I say good work. Canada's position that it harvests tuna in a responsible way will be strengthened (there are still many smart fish biologists calling for a moratorium on all tuna fishing), and fishermen will be rewarded with better prices.

With my comfortable job and regular paycheck at CBC I always felt a little discomfort reporting on (and I know sometimes advocating for) collective action by farmers and fishermen. Who's to say that "dog eat dog"
isn't the way of the business world anyway.  The fact is "cheap food" is a huge benefit to the economy and the vast majority of consumers. No one is going to offer to pay primary producers more voluntarily, and if farmers and fishermen think they need more, then they've got to fight the John Wayne and embrace the Moses Coady.

The Wonders of Legumes

Yes a lot of awful things are happening out there, and the weather in Eastern Canada anyway is cold and wet, but certainly not the extremes of drought and heat in many parts of the world.  So no complaining here. In fact I want to celebrate a family of vegetables called legumes. You know them as peas, beans, soybeans, lentils, clover, alfalfa, lupins, peanuts, and there are more. What makes them special is the symbiotic relationship they have with a soil bacteria called  rhizobia. (the vast majority of bacteria are good for us). Here's what they look like:

The bacteria are capable of fixing (capturing)  nitrogen from the air. Nitrogen is necessary to produce crops and used to come essentially from animal manure, and bat quano. In the mid 1800's a German chemist called Justus von Liebig discovered the important role nitrogen plays in plant growth, and was the first to create chemical fertilizers (now made from natural gas) which have been the boon and bane of farming: huge productivity gains, accompanied by nitrate pollution of waterways and dead zones everywhere these synthetic fertilizers are used. (search for nitrates in earlier posts).

That's what makes legumes so special. There's really no need for chemical fertilizer (in fact too much available nitrogen suppresses the production by the bacteria).  All of the legumes make excellent crops for experienced or beginning gardeners. Legumes generally have higher protein levels than other vegetables (scientists think it's because of the extra nitrogen which is a key component of protein)and crops like beans can be harvested and re-harvested over several weeks. One trick I've found is wide-row planting. Because fertility isn't an issue, they can be bunched together and still be very productive. As well the wide rows shade the ground and keep weeds at a minimum, and the very best thing is you can stand in one place and harvest a lot before moving down the row. Here's what it looks like. (the peas are doing well in the cold, damp summer of 2011, beans are a little slow, they like warmer weather.)

The holy grail for many plant biologists would be developing grains that would attract the rhizobia bacteria to their roots, then you'd be able to grow wheat, barley, etc, with little or no need for chemical fertilizer, and all the cost and environmental damage that come along with it. It's this promise (I keep reading that it's a long-shot)  that maintains many people's interest in GMO research. Scientist say there's no way this would happen with conventional breeding techniques, but might through genetic engineering. A good enough reason to keep GMO research going?

More GMO Talk

There's been a fierce debate on PEI about whether the province should ban the use of GMO crops. The provincial legislature held hearings on the issue in 2005, and there were more presentations, pro and con, than on any other issue house committees have studied. Supporters of the ban argue there are still serious environmental and health questions around GMO's. As well they say it would create enormous marketing opportunities for PEI farmers. Those opposed to the ban says farmers sell into very competitive markets and need access to every available technology. Others argue that there is risk in every technological development, and opposition to GMO's has more to do with concerns about corporate control (read Monsanto) than anything else.

One of the issues that came up in the hearings is whether PEI even has the legal right to ban GMO's. It's never been tested in court, but provincial lawyers said there are no federal rules prohibiting a ban, so in their opinion, PEI could do it. There's no question that GMO promoters would test a ban in court.

Europe has long wrestled with these issues as well, and has just come out with suggested rules that would allow different EU countries to decide their own GMO regulations.  There's more on that below, but there was one regulation PEI should think about:  "Socio-economic considerations: Such as the practicality and cost of measures to avoid an unintentional presence of GMOs in other products".

A small group of PEI  farmers has developed important markets for non-GMO soybeans and canola in Japan. Cross contamination in soybeans is very unusual (bees and other pollinating insects not that interested in soybean) but canola is something very different. It could easily be cross-contaminated, and a market that farmers have worked hard to cultivate could be lost in a heartbeat. I think there's justification to at least create some zones around non-GMO canola where GM crops would be prohibited. It would take some regulations and paperwork, and some farmers would be put out, but it would respect the effort made by some farmers to find markets where producers can actually make some money. That's not something you put at risk just to be stubborn.

Here's more on what the European Commission is proposing:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/06/europe-gm-crop-bans

Europe paves way for GM crop bans

The European Parliament on Tuesday backed plans to let member states choose whether to ban the cultivation of genetically-modified (GM) crops on their territory, giving a detailed list of grounds on which such bans could be imposed.

The House voted to amend European Commission proposals for an EU regulation that would allow member states to restrict or ban the cultivation on their territory of GM crops, which have been given safety approval at EU level.

The Commission's initial proposal suggested that member states could restrict or ban their cultivation on all but health or environmental grounds, which were to be assessed solely by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

But the proposals have sparked a wave of criticism, with businesses fearing they could lead to fragmentation of the internal market, bringing legal uncertainty for farmers. Some of the EU executive's proposals have also been deemed incompatible with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

The Parliament's report seeks to provide member states with "a solid legal basis" for banning GM crop cultivation, and to give them better legal protection in the event of challenges from trading partners opposed to bans.

The report - adopted with 548 votes in favour, 84 against and 31 abstentions – lists a number of reasons to allow member states to impose bans. These include:

• Environmental grounds: Such as pesticide resistance, the invasiveness of certain crops, threats to biodiversity or a lack of data on potential negative consequences for the environment.
• Socio-economic considerations: Such as the practicality and cost of measures to avoid an unintentional presence of GMOs in other products, fragmentation of territory, changes in agricultural practices linked to intellectual property regimes, or social policy objectives such as the conservation of diversity or distinctive agricultural practices.
• Grounds relating to land use and agricultural practices.

Health Commissioner John Dalli noted that specifying the grounds on which the cultivation could be restricted would indeed enhance the EU executive proposal. "I can therefore support this approach," he said.

Dalli also welcomed the Parliament's restriction criteria for being largely inspired by the indicative list that the Commission had already developed.

But he insisted that the environmental considerations put forward for banning GMOs should be clearly distinct from those that have already been assessed by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA).

In addition, he stressed that "any grounds need to be substantiated and in line with the reality of the territory in question".

In another move, the Parliament voted to change the legal basis of the Commission proposal from Article 114 (on the approximation of national law to establish the internal market) of the EU Treaty to Article 192, which is related to the environment.

The Parliament's rapporteur, French MEP Corinne Lepage (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe), said that basing the proposal on Article 192 would give member states more say on the matter.

But Commissioner Dalli said he still thought that the Article 114 was best suited to the proposal.

The Parliament's report maintains a common EU authorisation framework for GMOs, but the House wants the risk assessment conducted at EU level by EFSA to be improved by taking into account long-term environmental effects or effects on non-target organisms before a new GMO variety can be authorised.

The Parliament also insisted that member states must take measures to prevent contamination of conventional or organic farming by GM crops, and ensure that those responsible for such incidents can be held financially liable.

Is This What's Coming?

There are some things you hear when covering stories that stick. I'd gone to an evening meeting about the deterioration of lobster fishing in the Northumberland Strait  (PEI's south shore). One of the speakers was a  very smart biologist from New Brunswick called Inka Milewski who's with the New Brunswick Conservation Council. She talked about a variety of pollution sources and environmental stresses in the Strait: a pulp and paper mill, food processing and city sewage outlets, farm run-off, erosion caused by the Confederation Bridge, scallop dragging, and at the time too many fishermen chasing a shrinking lobster stock.  It was the end result of this that stayed with me. She argued without changes the only species left in the Strait will be jelly fish.  I didn't (don't) want to believe it.

Then I read this story from the very smart George Monbiot:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/jul/08/jellyfish-overfishing-ocean-acidification


Have jellyfish come to rule the waves?
by George Monbiot  • 


Last year I began to wonder, this year doubt is seeping away, to be replaced with a rising fear. Could it really have happened? Could the fishing industry have achieved the remarkable feat of destroying the last great stock?

Until 2010, mackerel were the one reliable catch in Cardigan Bay in west Wales. Though I took to the water dozens of times, there wasn't a day in 2008 or 2009 when I failed to take 10 or more. Once every three or four trips I would hit a major shoal, and bring in 100 or 200 fish: enough, across the season, to fill the freezer and supply much of our protein for the year. Those were thrilling moments: pulling up strings of fish amid whirling flocks of shearwaters, gannets pluming into the water beside my kayak, dolphins breaching and blowing. It was, or so it seemed, the most sustainable of all the easy means of harvesting animal protein.

Even those days were nothing by comparison to what the older residents remembered: weeks on end when the sea was so thick with fish that you could fill a bucket with mackerel just by picking them off the sand, as they flung themselves through and beyond the breaking waves while pursuing their prey.

Last year it all changed. From the end of May to the end of October I scoured the bay, on one occasion paddling six or seven miles from land – the furthest I've ever been – to try to find the fish. With the exception of a day on which I caught 20, I brought them back in ones or twos, if at all. There were many days on which I caught nothing at all.

There were as many explanations as there were fishermen: the dolphins had driven them away, the north-westerlies had broken up the shoals, a monstrous fishmeal ship was stationed in the Irish Sea, hoovering up 500 tonnes a day with a fiendish new vacuum device. (Despite a wealth of detail on this story I soon discovered that no such ship existed. But that's fishermen for you).

I spoke to a number of fisheries officials and scientists, and was shocked to discover that not only did they have no explanation, they had no data either.

So I hoped for the best – that the dearth could be explained by a fluctuation of weather or ecology. When the fish failed to arrive at the end of May I told myself they must be on their way. They had, after all, been showing off the south-west of England – it could be only a matter of time. I held off until last weekend.

The conditions were perfect. There was no wind, no swell, and the best water visibility I've ever seen here. I looked at the sea and thought "today's the day when it all comes right."

I pushed my kayak off the beach and felt that delightful sensation of gliding away from land almost effortlessly – I'm so used to fighting the westerlies and the waves they whip up in these shallow seas that on this occasion I seemed almost to be drifting towards the horizon. Far below me I could see the luminous feathers I used as bait tripping over the seabed.

But I could also see something else. Jellyfish. Unimaginable numbers of them. Not the transparent cocktail umbrellas I was used to, but solid, white rubbery creatures the size of footballs. They roiled in the surface or loomed, vast and pale, in the depths. There was scarcely a cubic metre of water without one.

Apart from that – nothing. It wasn't until I reached a buoy three miles from the shore that I felt the urgent tap of a fish, and brought up a single, juvenile mackerel. Otherwise, though I paddled to all the likely spots, I detected nothing but the jellyfish rubbing against the line. As I returned to shore I hooked a greater weever – which thrashed around the boat, trying to impale me on its poisonous spines. But that was all.

Is this the moment? Have I just witnessed the beginning of the end of vertebrate ecology here? If so, the shift might not be confined to Cardigan Bay. In a perfect conjunction of two of my recent interests, last week a monstrous swarm of jellyfish succeeded where Greenpeace has failed, and shut down both reactors at the Torness nuclear power station in Scotland.

The Israeli branch of Jellyfish Action pulled off a similar feat at the nuclear power station in Hadera this week.

A combination of overfishing and ocean acidification (caused by rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) has created the perfect conditions for this shift from a system dominated by fish to a system dominated by jellyfish.

If this is indeed what we're seeing, the end of vertebrate ecology is a direct result of the end of vertebrate politics: the utter spinelessness of the people charged with protecting the life of the seas. In 2009 the Spanish fleet, for example, vastly exceeded its quota, netting twice the allowable catch of mackerel in the Cantabrian Sea, and no one stopped them until it was too late.

Last week, the European commission again failed to take action against the unilateral decision by Iceland and the Faroes to award themselves a mackerel quota several times larger than the one they agreed to, under their trilateral agreement with the EU and Norway. Iceland and the Faroes have given two fingers to the other nations, and we appear to be incapable of responding.

The mackerel haven't yet disappeared from everywhere, but my guess is that the shoals which, since time immemorial, came into Cardigan Bay, were a spillover from the mass movements up the Irish Sea. As the population falls, there's less competitive pressure pushing them towards the margins. Without data, guesswork is all we've got.

I desperately hope it's not the case, but it could be that the fish that travelled to this coast, in such numbers that it seemed they could never collapse, have gone.

Market For Organics Expands

There are a lot of rules and regulations producing for organic food markets. Exporting to other countries has generally just added to the complications. Now Canadian organic farmers who by definition produce non-gmo grains and oilseeds have access to a huge, rich market, Europe.  The deal was announced  this month.

For many an interest in organics has to do with food safety. I think  land management may be even more important.  To lessen insect, weed, and disease problems organic farmers use longer rotations (a commercial crop is grown every four or five, even seven years, rather than two or three), and organic farming demands high levels of organic material in the soil which is important for soil conservation.

Here's the information on the new trade deal.

http://www.fcc-fac.ca/newsletters/en/express/articles/20110708_e.asp#story_1

Organic deal reached with EU
by Allison Finnamore

Certified organic products can now flow freely between Canada and the European Union.

The Canada-European Union Organic Equivalency Arrangement was finalized last week, the outcome of an extensive analysis of the Canadian and EU organic production and certification systems. The arrangement will allow the import and export of certified organic products between Canada and the EU without the need for additional certification. Certified organic products can now carry the Canadian and/or the EU organic logo.

The Canadian Organic Trade Association says that global organic trade is estimated at over $55 billion per year, with 96 per cent of this represented by the U.S. and EU markets.

This is Canada's second such agreement. In June 2009, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the United States Department of Agriculture signed the first organic equivalency arrangement, which opened the U.S. organic market to Canadian exports.

Matthew Holmes, executive director of the Canada Organic Trade Association calls the agreement with the EU a game-changer for Canadian farmers and manufacturers.

"With full access to European markets, suppliers and ingredients, Canada's organic sector now has a strategic edge. This agreement will increase trade and boost Canada's organic sector, from the farm to the consumer," he says in a news release.

"The European Union is the single largest market for organic products in the world. [The] announcement is good news for Canadian producers and workers as it provides easier access to these consumers with less red tape," says International Trade Minister Ed Fast in a news release.

The Organic Trade Association calculates the Canadian organic market has grown from $2 billion in 2008 to over $2.6 billion in 2010. Canadian companies annually export over $390 million worth of organic commodities, ingredients and products to the U.S., EU and other parts of the world.

"This recognition of Canada's organic standards by both the EU and U.S. shows that Canada's organic standards are among the best in the world," Holmes says.

A Glimpse of Something Different (Better?)

I first met Stuart Hill back in the early '70's. I was teaching a course on environmental issues at Carleton University and wanted to give students the best insight possible on a variety of  topics, and invited a number of guest lecturers who knew what they were taking about (I learned a lot too).  Stuart Hill had just set up the ecological agriculture program at MacDonald College near Montreal. What impressed me at the time was how curious and non-dogmatic he was. Yes he thought organic agriculture was better than what's now called conventional agriculture, but he wasn't a purist. If one spray of a synthetic pesticide could solve a problem, when many sprays of an organic pesticide was needed, he was OK with that. What mattered to Hill is that the farmer had thought deeply about the problem (weed, insects, disease) they were facing and looked for the most natural solution, the one that most mimicked what goes on in nature.  He said then and now "When you kill an organism, you take over its job."   He admits problem solving isn't easy, that conventional agriculture offers what he calls "deceptive simplicity", the impression that some purchased product can solve the problem. Ignoring that throws a person into "confusing simplicity" when there appears to be many, many causes. The end result is something he calls "profound simplicity", a practical insight that gets at the heart of the problem. As I've written before, a salesperson for a chemical company isn't always the best person to get advice from, but farmers have been left with little  else to turn to as governments cut back extension departments, and experienced researchers and inspectors retire.


Here are a few Stuart Hillisms: from    http://www.stuartbhill.com/

• Always be humble & provisional in your knowing, & always open to new experiences & insights

• Devote most effort to the design & management of systems that can enable wellbeing, social justice & sustainability, & that are problem-proof vs. maintaining unsustainable, problem-generating systems, & devoting time to ‘problem-solving’, control, & input management

• See no ‘enemies’ – recognise such ‘triggers’ as indicators of woundedness, maldesign & mismanagement – everyone is always doing the best they can, given their potential, past experience & the present context – these are the three areas to work with


• Be paradoxical: ask for help & get on with the job (don’t postpone); give when you want to receive; give love when you might need it, or when you might feel hate


• Learn from everyone & everything, & seek mentors & collaborators at every opportunity


Stuart Hill does believe that personal change has to happen first before the world can be fixed. Many think the problems the world faces are too big and immediate to wait for that. Maybe both can happen at the same time. I did get this picture On Tuesday (July 5th, 2011) when Stuart Hill was in Charlottetown, PEI, and it was a moment.

.
Hill is the thin balding man (like me) in the middle.  He's talking to George McRobie who also has a distinguished career in problem solving. He worked for years with E.F. Schumacher, famous for Small is Beautiful. Behind them both is  Ralph Martin who is just getting ready to take up a new job at Guelph University as the first chair focusing exclusively on sustainable agriculture production.

Almost everyone knows about "Small is Beautiful", but I always thought the second part of the title of Schumacher's book was more important "Economics As If People Mattered."  Hill, Schumacher,  McRobie all try to get problems down to a scale where people can become constructively engaged, and not depend on some expert or product to fix everything.  All speak about tackling issues first within yourself, at home, in your neighborhood and community. I tend to agree, hoping that "government" will solve things could be a long wait, but starting locally to solve issues of food and energy production, protecting the natural capital that's all around us, is profoundly empowering. Reading anything by Hill, Schumacher and McRobie is a good start, and seeing Ralph Martin's interest in what they're saying speaks well for what he'll accomplish too. If I sound too optimistic, blame this week's workshop with Stuart Hill.

Here's a link to an interview with Stuart Hill:  http://www.box.net/shared/tsutpatrultgp3h7a4bj

Direct Link:  http://www.box.net/shared/static/tsutpatrultgp3h7a4bj.mp3

A Familiar Story From Across the Pond (Will and Kate Free Zone)

I've written a lot (complained really) about the shift in economic power from primary producers to middlepeople (you know who I mean) and retailers.  If you listen to retail executives it doesn't sound like anyone is having too much fun beating their brains out to maintain market share and keep shoppers coming through the door.   However there`s no question that farmers have very few buyers now, and virtually no bargaining power. The big retailers have buying desks in Toronto with access to meat and produce  from everywhere. The Canadian farmer is told what the cheapest price is and takes it or leaves it. Bottom line: a market is a very precious thing, but that market is now a pretty hostile place. And as I`ve written before, one of the  best things about the few commodities under supply management (dairy, eggs, poultry) is that farmers are assured of a reasonable share of the consumer dollar and unfortunately it takes a highly regulated marketing system to accomplish that. 

It turns out the food business is not much different in England. An investigation by a British newspaper found farmers at the mercy of a handful of powerful retailers. The details are different but the sense of loss of economic power is the same.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jul/02/british-farmers-supermarket-price-wars


British farmers forced to pay the cost of supermarket price wars
by Alex Renton  •  July 2, 2011 •

You can pick up a punnet of British raspberries – at their best this weekend – on a two-for-one offer in most supermarkets1. But as shoppers reach for that quintessential summer treat, they should perhaps ponder the fact that it is the farmer, not the supermarket, who is paying for the generous discount.

The farmer may well be making no profit at all, with no choice in the pricing and little or no idea, when he picked and shipped the raspberries, how much he would get for them. Or that the packaging would be paid for by the farm, but done by a company chosen by the supermarket – at up to twice the cost of it being packaged independently.

Farmers do not talk about these things. Many of them, during a month-long investigation, told the Observer that in the midst of the downturn they dare not risk annoying the big processors and shops. There is a "climate of fear" – the National Farmers Union's phrase – in the monopolistic world of modern food2 retail: small producers are too frightened to speak out about the abuses that are impoverishing them because they risk "reprisals", which may mean losing the only customers there are. Very few felt able to speak to us on the record.

Henry Dobell runs a fruit farm near Stowmarket in Suffolk. He has given up raspberries and now sells heritage apples from his 300-tree orchard, but only to local shops because the relationship with the supermarkets became "impossible". Their demands saw his costs rise by 30% and he was making no profit.

"One year Sainsbury's refused all my raspberries after we'd picked and packaged them," he said. "So the producer organisation [the intermediary the supermarkets insist on dealing with] sold them to Somerfield and we had to buy new packaging. But they all went on as a two-for-one offer: we had no say. At one point we were being paid less per punnet than it cost to put a lid on it.

"I used to grow tree-matured Cox for Waitrose – in the last year with them the fruit got lost in the organisation's system and I got a much lower price than I'd been promised. It took nine months to get paid. So I said I wanted to quit.

"There was no written contract, but the company threatened legal action. They wanted a £30,000-£40,000 payment if I didn't stay with them for another year, and said I had to sign a confidentiality agreement. So I stopped, and now we sell our apples direct to the Co-op in the east of England, or to farm shops. If I do a promotion, that's my choice. I sell for the same price, but keep 100% of the money rather than 25%."

These and many more restrictive and potentially illegal practices are blamed for driving 3,000 small and medium-scale farmers in Britain into poverty or out of business over the past decade. Many more have been affected abroad. The abuses could be addressed by a long-awaited piece of government legislation, the groceries code adjudicator bill: an attempt to enforce codes of conduct on the 10 biggest supermarkets and their processors over how they deal with their suppliers. It has cross-party support.

But the giant supermarket chains – four of which control almost 80% of food retail – have mounted a fierce attack on the bill, with the threat that more regulation will lead to food prices rising even more than the current 4.9% rate of inflation. This is a real concern to ministers committed to keeping inflation down.

The British Retail Consortium, which speaks for nine of the 10 supermarket chains, has issued a stern warning: "Prices are already under considerable pressure from rising global commodity costs and climbing fuel and utility prices… the extra costs of dealing with a new administrative body will make it even harder to keep price rises away from shop shelves."

Campaigners reject this as risible. Andrew George, the Liberal Democrat MP for St Ives who leads the Grocery Market Action Group, said: "The cost to each retailer for the costs of the adjudicator is put at £120,000 per annum. It's a gnat bite – nothing, given their record profits in the depths of the greatest recession of modern times. Are they saying that it will cost them more to behave decently and legally in their dealings with suppliers?"

From the NFU to Friends of the Earth and ActionAid, a surprising range of organisations say the draft bill, discussed by the House of Commons business select committee, needs an ombudsman who can investigate proactively and hear complaints anonymously or from trade organisations. Most importantly, they say, the adjudicator should be able to impose fines.

At issue are a range of problems that trouble the government: Britain's "food security", food price rises, rural poverty, food health scares and the bleak fact that nearly two-thirds of British farms are deemed not economically viable by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

At least one dairy farmer has gone out of business in Britain every day for the past decade, as supermarkets have more than doubled their share of the price of a pint of milk. As many as 30 pig farmers have gone bust in the past year, according to the National Pig Association.

At the heart of the problem, say campaigners, is public ignorance of how supermarkets buy produce and the system that allows them to offer lower prices while increasing their profits. Tesco's profits were above £3.5bn for the first time last year, and Sainsbury's rose by nearly 13%.

These results – despite the supermarkets' endless price wars – are achieved largely by getting suppliers to reduce their prices. Most sectors of British farming3, from eggs to fruit, vegetables and pork, have seen farm-gate prices drop in the past year, despite record increases in costs. "Supermarkets have handed the risk back to us: they charge ever-increasing markups, force us to take part in promotions," one Welsh farmer in vegetables and dairy told the Observer. "The farmer takes all the risk, pays all the costs and gets virtually nothing above the price of production."

Discounts such as "buy one get one free" are not a generous gift from the supermarket. What they mean is that the farmer will be paid less – but he or she has no ability to negotiate or even be informed if their crop is put on special offer. If a crop has been over-ordered and doesn't sell, the supplier may have to pick up the cost of disposal.

Fruit farmers contacted by the Observer said they had seen their produce on sale in supermarkets for less than it would have fetched on the same day at the wholesale market. Others have seen produce turned away at the packers for spurious quality reasons, because there was a glut. Yet contracts still oblige them to continue supplying.

The supermarkets, often working through agreed processors and packagers, offer binding contracts that do not specify prices. These tend to lift the brakes on how much is ordered, because the shop will not suffer if produce is not sold. This is particularly painful for soft fruit and salad growers, whose entire year's income can be ruined by a couple of rainy summer weekends when people don't want to buy summer produce.

But it affects more than just farmers. A major independent confectioner – who did not wish to be named – said that over his 30 years in business the basic dynamic of trade with supermarkets had changed.

"There has been a transfer of risk, from retailer to manufacturer. We have to take much more responsibility for what doesn't sell. Of course, they have other risks and I think it's fine if you negotiate under fair rules and there is no abuse of power. But what should not happen is a renegotiation, with subtle or overt pressure, after you've agreed something. It is possible to be trampled on by an unscrupulous customer and you can't really afford not to deal with them. I think that is where abuse occurs."

Despite years of appeals to government from producers' organisations and two damning competition commission reports, the retailers, led by Tesco and Sainsbury's, have resisted the proposed legislation for 11 years. Both companies said the existing code of practice was "working well" and there was no need for an adjudicator.

At the root of the debate is a host of restrictive practices that, suppliers say, has grown as the four biggest supermarkets, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons, have taken control of nearly 80% of British food retail. Farmers and organisations the Observer contacted were all reluctant to be named, citing regular occurrences of retribution by retailers or their favoured middlemen. "If I piss them off, they can just destroy me overnight. And there is nowhere else to go," said one north of England meat farmer.

Other farmers told of "punishments" exacted if they complained. One poultry farmer in East Anglia went public after a buyer told him verbally that his premium chickens would be put on sale at a discount. After he complained about "bullying" and the system of negotiating outside contracts at an industry conference, he found his next shipment refused on quality grounds.

This is just one among a range of unfair practices, some of them potentially illegal. These include "no-contract" deals that refuse to specify prices but tie a farmer to an outlet. There is often no right of negotiation or arbitration and farmers are frequently forced at short notice to let their crop be sold at a discount. The buyers do this verbally, not by letter.

A particular bone of contention is that supermarkets insist that packaging and processing be done by firms they nominate – even though charges are much higher than they would be on the open market for exactly the same service. Last week, in evidence to a parliamentary committee, the chairman of the NFU, Peter Kendall, said he knew that some processors and packers pay back some of the premium charged to farmers as a "backhander" to the supermarket.

"We have a lot of examples of where this sort of thing goes on," said Kendall, but added there no way of using the information without threatening the farmers' livelihood.

The groceries supply code of practice was introduced by the government last year and the adjudicator's job would be to oversee it. Consumer minister Ed Davey announced the code, saying: "We want to make sure that large retailers can't abuse their power by transferring excessive risks or unexpected costs on to their suppliers."

No farmer has yet made any complaint under the code and the retailers say that is proof it is working. But the NFU and other organisations say the lack of complaints are because farmers are frightened of revealing their identities and have often been made to sign confidentiality agreements.

Patrick Holden, former head of the Soil Association, is a dairy farmer in Lampeter, west Wales. For 20 years he farmed organic carrots for supermarkets, but gave up in 2007, frustrated at unreasonable demands that continually pushed up his overheads. He said that the decline in small and medium-sized agricultural businesses in Britain is largely because of the big retailers' "amoral" buying policies.

"Government wants food prices kept down, but the only way to do that in this country is through this tyranny of exploitation, continually screwing down the prices paid to producers. And if a producer doesn't sell to them, you go quietly out of business," he said."But we're all complicit. We shop in supermarkets, we own shares in them, our pension funds are in them. We have to question this way of providing cheap food. It has put me and tens of thousands of others out of business."
The chicken farmer

Michael Thompson, Holsworthy, Devon, 10,000 chickens

Our problems started four years ago when the big egg packers merged, controlling about 60% of the market. There wasn't any competition any more and the prices started to go down, while everything else, like the feed price, was going up. I'd be getting 91p a dozen for large free range eggs, and it had been over £1. Meanwhile, my eggs were being sold for £3, while I was losing 15p on each dozen.

I was desperate to get away, it was so unfair. I lost £40,000 last year and I could see Noble Foods' [Britain's biggest egg supplier] profits going up. It came to the end of the road when I got a letter saying: "This week your egg price is going down." No discussion. And I knew the price of my eggs in the shop was up.

I tried talking to them. I'd ring up the representative. But they'd almost laugh at you – they knew there was nothing I could do. Most suppliers believe if you speak out, they get back at you. I did speak about it publicly. And the next time my eggs went for packing the number of seconds [eggs rejected as inferior] went up 5%. I can't prove this was done as a punishment, but I believe there was nothing wrong with the eggs.

I'm at the end of the road.
The pig farmer

Stewart Houston, North Yorkshire, producing 9,000 pigs a year

I've been in this business 30 years, and it's worse than it's ever been. I think 20 or 30 pork farmers have gone out of business since last August, when the feed price suddenly soared. We had no help from the processors or the retailers at all and we've all been losing between £10 and £30 per finished pig.

We've had to cancel family holidays, and like all producers we're cutting back. You don't buy replacement gilts [young sows], so next year there'll be less pork around. I've lost £140,000. I've given evidence to the parliamentary committee on the bill, and what I want to see is that trade associations can make representations on the producers' behalf to the code adjudicator.

Usually in pork, the processor deals with the supermarket and he should represent us. But you'll never get a processor disagreeing with a retailer. The supermarkets play them off against each other on price – and the retailers bear down on any attempt to get the price up. But that's forcing producers out of business.
The dairy farmer

Ray Brown, Crewe, Cheshire, 300 dairy cows and 200 pedigree bulls

Only a quarter of the people round here who were in dairy 15 years ago are still doing it. It's a wonder we've stayed in business. In 1997, we got 25p a litre at the farm gate. We're getting 26p now. But the price in the shops then was 42p a litre and now it's anything from 70p to £1. And we've seen all the costs go up.

Now we're selling to a milk broker. My milk might end up with supermarkets or Wiseman's. I'd rather be with Tesco or Sainsbury's, because they're guaranteeing 28p a litre to farmers. But they've capped the market because they're under pressure from Aldi and Lidl. They're playing a very clever game, and it's all about the naivety of shoppers. The milk price could be much higher.

You sign up to take whatever price the middlemen set and that can be retrospective. They might say, oh we're going to give you a penny less for June's milk, and there's nothing you can do about it. There's no negotiation.

We couldn't survive without our pedigree bull business. The money for farmers has gone.

Could It BeThis Simple?

 It was an eye-opening conversation. I was talking to one of the UPEI nutritionists about the food security network, and she said something startling , a lot of young people don't know how to cook.  They'd grown up opening cans and cooking frozen stuff in the microwave. I'm in my 60's, had  to learn how to cook so I wouldn't starve to death when I left home at sixteen, but always thought it was a skill we had little choice but to pick-up. Apparently not.

I think cooking from scratch  ties in well with the local food movement. Other than frozen potato products, not a lot here goes to a plant to be canned or flash frozen, and learning what to do with a bunch of fresh carrots might be  a good start to better health and more security for farmers and  consumers.

There is an important day coming for people interested in local food on PEI. I first met Dr Stuart Hill when I was teaching a course at Carleton University in the early '70's. He's been in the forefront of sustainable agriculture all his life, and is coming to PEI to talk about a sustainable local food system. Here are the details and a couple of more pieces about cooking and local food.

'Sustaining Island Food Systems: From Scary to Hopeful Possibilities,' with Dr. Stuart Hill. Tuesday July 5, PEI Farm Centre, 420 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PEI. Full day workshop (10 - 4) followed by an evening presentation 7:00 -8:30. There is no fee. However, through the generous contributions of Soil Foodweb Atlantic and The City of Charlottetown we will provide lunch to those who register in advance. For more details write to ibs_pei@yahoo.com or contact us through www.ibspei.ca

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/local-food-movement-goes-national/article2084221/

Local food movement goes national

by JESSICA LEEDER — GLOBAL FOOD REPORTER  •  July 2, 2011

•

Local food is going national in Canada.
Driving the movement is Lori Stahlbrand, a journalist-turned-food-advocate who has spent the last six years and several million donor dollars animating her dream of creating an alternative food system that stars environmentally- and animal-friendly Canadian farmers.

Ms. Stahlbrand’s first building block was creating Local Food Plus, a non-profit that issues its private certification to progressive farmers who conform to the tough set of sustainability and production standards written for the agency by a crack team of agricultural and environmental experts. The agency then helps link certified farmers with local buyers who would not have made the connections alone, providing critical strength to the local and regional supply chain.
“We were losing our ability to feed ourselves,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “What we’re trying to do is build a different kind of food system. We’ve built the flywheel. Now it’s starting to turn.”
Using Ontario as a pilot ground, LFP has become one of the most powerful engines behind local food’s strong foothold in the province. Strengthening the local food economies of British Columbia, Manitoba and Quebec is next on the agency’s list as it launches its first phase of a national expansion, funded by the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, a Montreal-based philanthropy group.
Although LFP’s influence is not always visible, the agency is the reason that many high-end restaurants, municipalities, schools, universities and hospitals have been able to integrate locally-farmed food into their offerings, or are now eyeing the transition. LFP provides an instant menu of certified producers that offer an alternative to the large, mainstream food distributors that dominate North American food trade.
Those companies, although a vital part of the current food system, make money by moving large amounts of food, prioritizing low prices and consistent supply. For ease, most deal solely with large farm and food operations that have enough scale to satisfy their needs year-round, shunning smaller local and seasonal producers who struggle for steady access to markets and, as a consequence, for survival.
Local food advocates are working to counter this not because they have romantic notions of Canadian agriculture, but because they believe the nation’s food security requires a healthy co-mingling of large and small or regional producers. LFP’s success in moving the needle is proof that re-establishing balance in the system doesn’t necessarily require big government intervention.
“We’re not saying you have to eat the 100-mile diet. It’s not a realistic way to live your life,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “I don’t expect we’re going to stop eating oranges and bananas any time soon. But let’s be eating Ontario strawberries when they’re in season here. We’re exporting apples and we’re importing apples. Let’s eat our own apples,” she said, adding: “It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.”
Shifting even a small fraction of grocery offerings to local food can have a big economic and environmental impact, according to calculations done for LFP by Rod MacRae, a York University food policy expert and head of the agency’s standards development team. For example, in Toronto, replacing one 10-tonne truck loaded with California-grown produce with an Ontario-grown load (from within 200 kilometres of Toronto) is the environmental equivalent of taking two cars off the road for an entire year.
If 10,000 Toronto families shifted $10 of their weekly food purchases to local for a year, it would equate to taking 908 cars off the road for a year; on a per-family basis, carbon savings are equivalent to not driving a car for a month. In Halifax, the same 10,000 families shifting would be equivalent to moving 487 cars off the road for a year; per-family, it’s equivalent to parking the car for two weeks.
In economic terms, if 10,000 families in a province shift $10 per week to local, that means $5.2-million would shift away from imports and directly into local economies.

---

While building the links between producers and buyers is a key pillar of LFP’s strategy, the agency is equally focused on using the local food system to coax along a progression of environmental gains. The inspiration is borrowed from the origins of organic-growing principles, which were intended as much for environmental benefits as for consumer health. The environmental stewardship and rules of organic growing have been clouded by the category’s mass appeal, which has driven increases in cheaper organic imports from nations with varying standards. Marketers have co-opted the word as a branding tool; consumers are increasingly confused about the value of “organic” and what the word even means.
“That’s where LFP draws a distinct line in the sand,” said Brian Gilvesy, a longhorn cattle farmer who was an early LFP client in Ontario. “It’s local, it’s environmental, it’s sustainable. The people that deal with us ... get a holistic view of the farm.”
Indeed, the farms LFP certifies have to meet rigorous animal welfare and sustainability standards designed to ensure food production contributes to environmental health and biodiversity rather than detracting from it. While LFP places restrictions around farmers’ use of pesticides, antibiotics and hormones, the program was designed to allow participants to deepen their environmental commitments over time; their certification scores, rated by independent inspectors, will improve as they grow.
So will the perceptions of clients who buy their food.
“Launching into a program like this is one very demonstrable way to show we do care about the ingredients and where food comes from,” said Anne Macdonald, director of ancillary services at the University of Toronto, which began requiring its food suppliers to use a proportion of LFP-certified products in 2006. “University food services suffer a lot from a bad rap with respect to perceptions about the quality of food.”
For this reason, LFP has become an ideal marriage partner for schools and other large institutions, including McGill University in Montreal, which will launch with LFP this fall. Toronto’s Scarborough Hospital will also lean on LFP as it transitions to a new local menu later this year. For LFP, the institutional uptake, which they’re hoping will increase with the agency’s national expansion, is the holy grail – and means of securing local food’s longevity.
“Working with institutions gives us buying power,” Ms. Stahlbrand said. “No one has ever questioned institutional procurement before.”
Already, the trickle-down effect is measurable. In Winnipeg, a city anchored in a Prairie economy that relies heavily on export markets, consensus over the need to strengthen the local food trade is growing.
“In Manitoba, there’s some concern that if everybody goes local, there goes your export market,” said Kreesta Doucette, executive director of Food Matters Manitoba. “But there’s this tension between needing to export and the whole consumer preference for local food,” she said. “It’s going to be a challenge.”




http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/01/make-food-choices-simple-cook


Opinionator - A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
July 1, 2011, 11:18 pm
Make Food Choices Simple: Cook
By MARK BITTMAN

Mark Bittman on food and all things related.

Is there enough food? How do we get it to people? What is its quality? These common questions all concern supply; people spend a lifetime addressing them, and if you closely examine any one, you’re ensnared in a complex web.

Yet we don’t spend enough time discussing what happens to food once it’s in the home. Or what doesn’t happen. Which is cooking. And that part is pretty simple.

Not long ago, cooking was a common topic. Weekly food sections of newspapers were filled with it. Churches self-published cookbooks by the pile. There were even real cooking shows and cookbooks.

Now, if it weren’t for the vibrant but dwindling community of bloggers, we’d hardly see actual cooking discussed at all. There are but a fraction of the food pages there once were in newspapers, and most cookbooks are offshoots of TV “cooking” shows, almost all of which are game shows, reality television shows or shows about celebrities.

Like many professional urbanites with grown children, I often succumb to the temptation to work late and eat out with friends. That experience, effortless and pleasurable in anticipation, is usually expensive — even when it’s at a theoretically inexpensive restaurant — and frustrating; more often than not it’s unsatisfying. (Note that this means it’s also sometimes satisfying, which is why I keep doing it; it’s a gamble.)

When I cook, though, everything seems to go right. I shop an average of every two weeks in a supermarket, and make a couple of trips a week to smaller stores. I’m aware that my choices are mostly imperfect, but I rarely conclude that I should make a burger and fries for dinner or provide a pound per person of prison-raised pork served with fruit from 10,000 miles away, followed by a cake full of sugar and artificial ingredients. Yet, for the most part, that describes restaurant food.

This time of year, I’ll buy local greens and local fish and wind up eating half or less of the food I would have if I had eaten out. Dessert only happens if someone else buys or makes it because I won’t do either; I might schlep home a piece of watermelon. The starter, if there is one, might range from bread with butter or oil to homemade hummus or other bean dip to home-roasted or fried nuts, or some salami or ham, hunks of which remain in the fridge for weeks.

That’s pretty much it. The investment is minimal: A quick shopping trip takes me a half-hour, including the walk or drive. It takes me about half or three-quarters of an hour to cook, not including the time that it took to make that bean dip or bread, both of which last for days. The time spent eating is relaxing and uninterrupted by the insipid ritual: “Is everything tasting to your liking?” or “You guys O.K.?” It takes 10 minutes to clean up.

Compared with a restaurant, the frustrations and annoyances are minimal, the food is as good or better-tasting, unquestionably healthier and more environmentally friendly, and much less expensive. Saturday night, for example, I fed four people a dinner of nuts, a small frittata, fish, salad and watermelon for far less than two of us would have spent at Applebee’s.

It’s not that I’m unconcerned about the supply side. I can’t help bugging myself with questions about whether the food I buy is “good” enough: pesticides? fertilizer? endangered fish? carbon footprint? fair pay for farmworkers?

But these are shopping questions, not cooking and eating questions. Shopping is the time to be critical. (Eating is the time to enjoy.) Buy things that you feel answer to your standards, and you’ll be a cut above most restaurant food in every category. You’ll know exactly what you’re putting in your mouth and how much of it. (Who buys 20-ounce steaks for one person at home?) You’ll move in the right direction, cooking and eating less meat and junk and more plants.

In most restaurants, the questions are pointless because you relinquish all control. At McDonald’s, the main goals seem to involve making the food safe and consistent, not producing it ethically. (They would surely argue with this, and, perhaps, they’ve made some progress. But really?) In pricier restaurants, the goal seems to be to impress you with presentation, originality and glamour.

I recognize that I’m privileged, though, in fact, I have friends who are better cooks than I am, who have access to better food and who have more leisure. I recognize, too, that there are many people for whom time and money and skills and even access are challenges. The thing, though, is not to discount this argument simply because not everyone is in a position to benefit from it, but rather to use it to benefit those it can, and to create the same possibilities for everyone.