Matt Gurney: Canadians won’t starve but we aren’t spoiled for choice in our domestic food supply
Matt Gurney
When they ran out of boys, they turned to the Farmerettes.
In
1944, with the Second World War grinding on, Ontario farms were
desperately short of labour. Ontarians had to eat, and millions of
calories were also needed overseas to stop Britain from starving and
keep Canadian and Allied divisions strong enough to fight. Food was an
essential war industry, and there weren’t enough workers.
High
school students were an obvious place to start — old and strong enough
to work in the fields, too young to fight. My grandmother wanted to join
in 1944, but they only took boys that year. The next year, with the war
nearly over but the need for labour more desperate than ever, it was
decided that girls could work the fields, too. My grandmother got her
chance. Barracked with other girls in Clarkson, Ont., near Oakville,
they would be picked up by farmers at their barracks each morning, work
hard in the fields all day, and be driven back. They were paid 25¢ an
hour and could hitchhike home to Toronto on weekends. To this day, she
recalls it as one of the best summers of her life — the work was
backbreaking and often bewildering to the city girls, but it was an
experience of a lifetime.
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown
personal finances into disarray and threatens to devastate more
businesses, small and large, than we can possibly guess. But these
economic shocks also threaten the absolutely critical industries we need
to function not merely to support our prosperity, but our survival.
This isn’t about our standard of living, but living. And there is no
more essential industry than agriculture.
One of the great
triumphs of recent human history has been the gradual but fairly steady
reduction in the percentage of the total working population involved in
the production of food. As recently as 150 years or so ago, even the
most advanced countries could have had roughly half their productive
workers directly engaged in growing and processing food. Today, that
number is closer to two per cent. This is the foundation of our modern
technological society — the spectacular productivity gains per
agricultural worker have, over time, allowed millions of people to focus
their lives on other pursuits. Put another way, two per cent of North
American workers feed the other 98 per cent, who are then able to do
literally everything else you’ll find in our society.
Some of the
boosts in productivity relate to advancements in knowledge — the concept
of crop rotation being a prime example. But the productivity of our
relatively small number of agricultural workers depends on supplementing
their labour with massive external inputs in the form of advanced
machinery, fossil fuels, fertilizers, insecticides and tens of thousands
of temporary foreign workers (TFWs).
Watermelon and asparagus farmer Mike Chromczak, who is waiting for
labourers to arrive and begin their mandatory quarantine against
coronavirus disease (COVID-19), poses at Chromczak Farms in Brownsville,
Ontario, Canada April 2, 2020.Carlos Osorio/ReutersThe Farmerettes of the Second World War have been replaced
by as many as 60,000 foreigners who travel to Canada under temporary
work visas to assist in Canadian farms, fisheries and food processing
facilities. Weeks ago, as the Canadian government was essentially
closing our borders, an early report that TFWs would not be exempted led
to some actual panic among agricultural producers. These workers are
essential to our agricultural sector — as critical as the seeds or
fertilizers. The federal government quickly reversed course and said
they could come, subject to a 14-day isolation period, but there
continue to be reports of fewer than usual arriving, which makes sense,
given worldwide fear and disruptions to normal travel.
Could
Canadians do this work? Of course. My grandmother and her classmates
did, after all. But that would require mobilizing tens of thousands of
Canadians in a matter of weeks — planting isn’t far off. And these newly
mobilized Canadians would need time to learn the ropes, so efficiency
would suffer. They’d also demand high wages, which consumers would end
up paying for at grocery checkouts.
The TFWs are just one part of a
massively complicated supply chain that our food supply depends on — so
complicated that even experts struggle to fully understand it. Canada
is a major worldwide player in fertilizer production, for instance, but
many Canadian farmers still import theirs from abroad (often from the
U.S.), due to transportation costs, while much of Canada’s production is
sent to the U.S. Domestic production could be redirected to Canadian
fields, but that would require a major logistics effort, at a time of
year when railroad capacity and the commercial trucking fleet is already
in high-demand.
Snow crab is unloaded in Dartmouth, N.S. on Monday, Feb. 14, 2000.Andrew Vaughan /
THE CANADIAN PRESSNone of the above is particularly detailed, granted, because
in large part, the major industry associations and agriculture groups
are themselves only now gathering essential data and coming to fully
understand the possible dimensions of manpower and supply shortages,
combined with possible transportation disruptions. Imagine if a bunch of
railroad workers end up quarantined in a major logistics hub like
Chicago. Canada does produce more food than it consumes, so by that
metric, we could sustain ourselves, so long as we could continue to
access the needed agricultural inputs.
But the entire Canadian
agriculture sector, including food processing and packaging, exists in
what is (or perhaps, was) a thriving global marketplace that has made
fresh food affordable to millions at any time of the year. Ideally, that
global market will continue to thrive. But this pandemic has shown us
how vulnerable such systems can be. In an emergency, the best we can say
with certainty is that we could probably feed ourselves, but on a diet
that could potentially look very different than what we’ve been blessed
to enjoy of late.
Right now, we don’t know what that diet would
look like, or whether we could grow it, process it and package it, using
domestic resources and supplies. We may never have to — God willing we
won’t — but could we? Even the experts I’ve spoken to this week don’t
know. The most optimism any of them would express was that we’ll
probably be fine, if nothing else goes wrong. Super.
Man may not
live on bread alone, but bread is an awfully good place to start. Making
sure we have enough is going to be a top priority of governments in the
days and weeks ahead. Once we’re sure we’ll have enough, you can expect
a long, hard look at our system. Our food supply should never be
something Canadians ever have to worry about. But here we are.
National Post magurney@postmedia.com Twitter.com/MattGurney
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