Two interesting articles on food. One on the behind the scenes lobbying over new food regulations in Canada, the other on how morality has become part of what drives food purchases, but just for those who can afford it.
'As we wait for the promised Food Policy for Canada, the government must decide if it will implement some Big Ideas in the public interest, or if it will allow Big Food to hold the rest of us back.'
Almost three years ago today, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau outlined his priorities for his new health minister.
They included some big ideas to promote public health through healthy eating. They were, and are, urgent.
In Canada, an unhealthy diet is the single leading
risk factor for death. Millions of Canadians have diet-related disease,
costing the public purse about $26 billion in 2015. Food Secure Canada
and many other non-profit organizations working in the public interest
have been raising alarm bells and proposing some big ideas for a very
long time. But Big Food, despite consumer trends, appears to be
marching to a different drummer, slowing all of us down.
Two years ago, Health Canada announced its Healthy
Eating Strategy with a number of action areas “to improve the food
environment in Canada to make it easier for Canadians to make the
healthier choice,” which we support. Trans fat regulations were recently
announced, but we’re still waiting for the three other pillars:
mandatory front-of-package nutrition symbols; restricting marketing of
unhealthy food and beverages to kids; and revising Canada’s Food Guide.
So what’s the hold-up? Thanks to transparency policies
put in place by Health Canada, we can access public records of any
lobby efforts on the Healthy Eating Strategy. This includes about 130
meetings initiated by the food industry and correspondence with public
servants working on the strategy — more than a dozen by the Canadian
Beverage Association alone. Though a significant number of food-related
companies recognize that foods that are healthy, sustainable and local
are the future, a closer look at each area of delayed action paints a
portrait of old-school industry tactics meant to protect industry
interests by watering down and delaying health-promotion policies.
Let’s start with the front-of-package labelling.
In Canada, the approach is symbol-based, designed to
alert consumers when a food product contains more than 15 per cent of
the daily recommended amount of a nutrient of concern to public health,
such as sodium, sugars and saturated fat. A letter sent to the federal
agriculture minister and co-signed by the Food and Consumer Products of
Canada and the Canadian Federation of Agriculture argues the proposed
labels “will cause food shoppers to feel undue, ingredient-specific
anxiety,” and will “undermine public trust.” Public trust cannot be
gained by refusing to display the information consumers need to make
informed choices.
Next up: marketing to children. Research has shown
that food and beverage marketing to children affects the foods they
request and prefer. Not surprisingly, the food and beverage industry
spends billions of dollars on it. With a third of children in Canada
overweight or obese, and 70 per cent not meeting the minimum daily
requirement for fruit and vegetable consumption, one would think
protecting them from advertisements for unhealthy food would be an
urgent public health priority.
Bill S-228, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act
(prohibiting food and beverage marketing directed at children), was
first introduced to the Senate in 2016, and is still travelling through
the legislative process.
Canada’s Food Guide acts as a foundation for nutrition
education and meal planning in homes, school, hospitals, daycares and
more. It’s the second-most downloaded government document after
income-tax forms. Over the years, the guide’s credibility has been
questioned because of the undue influence of industry interest groups.
We commend Health Canada for building a firewall around the current
process: Bureaucrats developing the guide will not take meetings with
industry until after the policy’s release, to ensure it’s in the public
interest, informed only by the latest evidence.
This has not stopped lobbyists from getting their
message out through other government departments and processes,
including internal memos intended to influence Health Canada’s work on
the guide. One memo obtained by the Globe and Mail noted that “messages
that encourage a shift toward plant-based sources of protein would have
negative implications for the meat and dairy industries.” We think this
is missing the mark because, more than ever, Canadians want to make
healthy choices. This includes knowing where their food comes from, and
supporting local and sustainable producers and food businesses.
As we wait for the promised Food Policy for Canada,
the government must decide if it will implement some Big Ideas in the
public interest, or if it will allow Big Food to hold the rest of us
back.
Canadians need strong federal leadership to stand up
for the real public interest: healthy people, healthy communities and
healthy local economies. Consumers making better food choices will help
support a necessary transition to a food system that is healthier, more
sustainable, and more just. Forward-looking companies will bring those
products to market. But better food policy is about more than the
market. We need government to firmly act in the public interest and
implement some bold new ideas.
You aren’t what you eat: Why ethically ‘good’ food doesn’t make you a better person
Rebecca Tucker is the author of the forthcoming book A Matter of Taste: A Farmers' Market Devotee’s Semi-Reluctant Argument for Inviting Scientific Innovation to the Dinner Table, from which this essay is adapted.
In the television series The Good Place,
which frames the concepts of heaven and hell – or, more loosely, what
happens to you in the afterlife – as, well, a Good Place and a Bad
Place, each resident of Earth is assigned a point score based on their
deeds while they were alive. The greater the deed, in terms of its
virtuosity, the higher its score; the more abhorrent the deed, the more
it cuts that score down.
It’s one of many
concepts that the show, in its initial presentation, plays for
quirkiness and laughs. But, as with the fundamental narrative of The Good Place
– which is, like it or not, a deeply thoughtful, nuanced and at times
devastatingly incisive criticism of human morality – there’s much more
to the idea than immediately meets the eye.
For one thing, the good
that we, as individuals, are able to perform isn’t necessarily equal:
One person’s “high-ticket items,” good-points-wise, may be entirely
unavailable to another person; but how is it then fair that that person
would be granted a higher moral status, simply by virtue (no pun
intended) of factors beyond his or her control? In the TV series, the
character Tahani – a wealthy socialite during her life on Earth – notes
that some of her points were contingent on her elevated socioeconomic
standing. It’s a lot easier, in other words, to get ahead, in this life
and the theoretical next, if you’re already a member of the 1 per cent.
Doesn’t seem particularly fair, does it? It reminds me a lot of the way
we think about food.
In 2018, the discourse around what we should eat is a lot like the discourse around where the characters in The Good Place
should end up: Is it good, or is it bad? In the slightly literal sense,
in the context of food, you might think that this means is it
nutritious – is it good for me, for my body, for my health? – or the
opposite: Will it harm me, physically? Our idea of what constitutes good
food is just as deceptively surface-level as The Good Place; in actuality, it’s all about virtue and vice, on a slightly esoteric and often unattainable level.
These two types of good
and two types of bad – the healthful and the virtuous goods versus the
unhealthy and immoral bads – aren’t mutually exclusive: Often, food that
ticks off virtue is also good for our bodies. But in marketing, and in
the collective consciousness, it’s become more important to emphasize
morality than literal physical wholesomeness; good for you might be the
baseline, but virtue is the prevailing top note.
To understand this, we
need to go back a few years. In 2006, the writer Michael Pollan released
the defining tome of the modern foodie era: The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It sought to answer one (deceptively, beguilingly) simple question: “What should we have for dinner?” The Omnivore’s Dilemma
at once defined and catapulted into the zeitgeist the food-borne
anxieties that would come to frame the next decade for food activists
and concerned diners. In it, the American journalist scrutinizes
everything from factory farming to foraging to fast food, with the
stated goal of determining the best food to eat. His conclusion,
practically, is that the Perfect Meal, as he calls it, is one that is
partly foraged, partly hunted and allows him “to eat in full
consciousness.” Which is to say that, almost immediately, Mr. Pollan
gives up the idea that the “best” food means, purely, the healthiest
food. The best food, to him, is the food that allows for a pretty
significant helping of righteousness.
Mr.
Pollan notes that the question of what to eat, for humans, has
historically been almost strictly utilitarian: Evolutionarily, the
omnivore’s dilemma – that is, the human’s dilemma – centred on
determining first which of a plethora of foods available would not kill
us, and second, deciding which of these foods could serve as good
sources of the nutrients, vitamins and minerals we required to stay
alive. A lot of the time, we figured this out by tasting things, and
subconsciously associating biological responses with flavours: The
collagen in bone broth might have once helped your body recover from a
bad cold, for instance, which explains why you might crave chicken soup
the next time you have a flu. (In The Dorito Effect,
Mark Schatzker calls this “biological wisdom,” although he also
explains that we’re not as instinctively wise to the evolutionary
benefits of flavour as we used to be, on account of our prolonged
exposure to the artificial stuff).
Mr. Pollan addresses
some of this, too. “Many anthropologists believe that the reason we
evolved such big and intricate brains was precisely to help us deal with
the omnivore’s dilemma,” he writes. “Omnivory offers the pleasures of
variety … But the surfeit of choice brings with it a lot of stress and
leads to a kind of Manichean view of food, a division of nature into The
Good Things to Eat, and the Bad.” Mr. Pollan was joined in 2007 in the
pursuit of revolutionizing dinnertime by Canadian writers Alisa Smith
and J.B. MacKinnon, whose The 100-Mile Diet brought to the fore the very virtuous idea of “locavorism”; Barbara Kingsolver and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
followed shortly thereafter and doubled down on the assertion that the
best food is the stuff that comes from your own backyard. Mr. Pollan
returned in 2008 with In Defense of Food; firebrand New York Times columnist Mark Bittman released Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating that year.
In 2009, the moral quandary of what’s good to eat and what’s not hit the big screen with Food Inc., A documentary co-produced by Eric Schlosser (who, eight years earlier, eviscerated McDonalds and co. with his book Fast Food Nation). The film, based on The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
and narrated by Mr. Pollan, was called “literally gut-wrenching” by NPR
and “one of the year’s most important films” by The San Francisco
Chronicle. Food Inc. was nominated for an Academy
Award and succeeded in putting onscreen – and therefore making far more
widely accessible and discussed than it was in print – Mr. Pollan’s
message that eating right doesn’t just mean eating nutritiously – it
means eating morally. (Not coincidentally, that NPR review described Mr.
Pollan and Mr. Schlosser as “embodiments of conscience.”)
Fast forward to 2018,
when we’re stuck on the idea of food as a reflection of our conscience;
of good food as moral food, as virtuous food, as food that answers the
question not of “what does food do to my body?” but, rather, “what does
this food do for my soul?” Certainly, the core tenets of the sustainable
food movement of today, which Mr. Pollan, Mr. Bittman et al defined in
the early part of the aughts, have something to do with the health of
the planet and, almost by luck, individual, physical health. But the
terminology widely used by the sustainable-food movement (you know the
buzzwords: “all-natural,” “organic,” “free-run,” “nose-to-tail” and all
their friends and cousins) is more often meant to delineate a type of
eating that is steeped more thoroughly in a sense of moral superiority
than in the science of healthful eating – never mind the idea that, for
food to truly be good, shouldn’t it also be easy to access?
To understand one of the key reasons why this is the case, think back to Tahani, on The Good Place,
and to her point score. Her social standing allowed her access to
people, places and situations through which she was given the option to
perform acts of extreme moral good. She could have chosen to opt out, of
course, but even opting in part of the time allowed her a high moral
score with precious little effort – while, for another character, the
only option to increase one’s moral standing might be to hold open a
door, which is worth a paltry five points. In The Good Place as in life, advanced socioeconomic status comes with the luxury of access.
In terms of food, for
the most part, the stuff that we these days consider morally good is
also literally expensive. Take, for example, that all-Canadian staple:
Kraft Dinner. Having purchased both (for research, and for hunger!), I
know that Annie’s macaroni and cheese – an organic, boxed pasta option –
is a little different from Kraft Dinner in taste (less salty) and
caloric value (about a third lower). But the way both products are sold
is not altogether different: Annie’s uses a cute bunny as its mascot for
its entire product line, suggesting nostalgia, childhood and, again,
wholesomeness; a 2017 Kraft ad titled “Family greatly” has a number of
parents discuss how challenging it is to find time to be a perfect
parent (luckily, KD only takes about 10 minutes to make). Where these
two paths diverge in the woods is most evident when you dig into each
company’s mission statement: For Kraft, it’s “helping people around the
world eat and live better.” For Annie: bringing organic food to, ahem,
“everybunny.”
Annie's Macaroni & Cheese, shown on the shelf at a supermarket in Edina, Minn., in 2018.
On the surface, this
sort of seems like apples and, well, fancier apples. But the difference
between “better” food and “organic” food is significant. For one thing,
“better” – which we’ll take here to mean healthy, or healthier
– is subjective, and up for debate: One person’s healthy might be
another person’s sodium-rich. But organic is a set-in-stone concept,
enforced at a federal level in the United States and Canada, and
defended fiercely by its disciples as the best option for you, your
family and your planet. You can evangelize for Annie’s, because you can
evangelize for organics. And many do. It’s much more difficult to
evangelize for “better food,” even though that’s what we all really
want, because those terms aren’t as concrete. Annie’s has the advantage
of a clearly defined side.
But Kraft has the
advantage of price. A box of KD sets you back $1.47 at Walmart, and
Annie’s Organic Mac and Cheese costs about a dollar more. So it’s not
entirely clear whether, in this particular example – and many others –
the organic option is the better option for everyone, every time. Not
everybunny can stretch their grocery budget, but everybody deserves
better food.
Kelly Hodgins, an
academic at the University of Guelph, focuses on how the price of
“ethical” food choices affects consumers across tax brackets. Ms.
Hodgins, a British Columbia native, grew up farming. “I was very much
focused on the farming side of things, and supporting small farmers, and
trying to create a local, Canadian food system that supports small
farmers,” she says. “Doing that really neglected food access for
consumers.”
In researching her 2014
doctoral thesis, Ms. Hodgins looked not only at the high price margins
of alternative food-market spaces, such as farmers markets, but she also
conducted intensive interviews with the proprietors of such spaces –
vendors, and farmers themselves – to get a sense of what they believe to
be barriers to access. The responses were too varied to list here.
Among them was convenience: Specialty stores and farmers markets are
open infrequently, keep odd hours and are often simply not easy to get
to for low-income individuals. The convenience factor, respondents said,
also applied to the time it takes to cook food: One of Ms. Hodgins’s
interviewees remarked that one can “feed a family from scratch for three
days, if you wanna do it” (emphasis his).
The idea here, as Ms.
Hodgins notes, is the inaccurate assumption that shopping and cooking
habits are always typically framed as a matter of choosing to purchase
fresh, organic foods over packaged ones, or to prepare one’s own food
from scratch instead of eating out. It’s an especially egregious way of
thinking when applied to low-income households, an extension of the
age-old idea that if poor people would simply pull up their socks, work a
bit harder and maybe read a book or two, they’d be happier, healthier
and richer. Shaming the poor accomplishes nothing, and the
aforementioned idea – rooted as it is in a bourgeois definition of
financially anchored moral fortitude – is as wrong now as it ever was: A
2017 study by the University of Toronto think-tank PROOF found that
individuals living in food-insecure households reported the same cooking
abilities and menu-planning habits as those in higher income brackets.
Desire for the organic peach is universal; access to the organic peach
is not.
And that’s because, it
almost goes without saying, the organic peach – the farmers-market peach
– is just way, way pricier than its conventional counterpart. Last
summer, I passed up an $8 basket of juicy freestone peaches, on sale at a
farmers market located in one of Toronto’s wealthiest neighbourhoods,
for a $3.99 basket onsale at a convenience store nearby. I don’t know if
the half-price peaches were organic, or hand-picked, or how large the
farm on which they were grown actually is; I didn’t hand my cash
directly to their farmer or one of his or her friends, but a part-time
retail clerk. But, even on a decent income with few bills and no
dependants, I can’t always justify the moral superiority that comes with
forking out almost 10 bucks on stone fruit. And anyway, it’s no
coincidence that in Toronto, where I live, most farmers markets are
situated in wealthier enclaves, or near plenty of tourist and
white-collar foot traffic: Farmers need to make money, after all. So
they need to market to people who’ve got it.
The lower-price fruits
and vegetables available from chain grocery stores and big-box retailers
are often the products of a highly subsidized industrial agricultural
system that perpetrates (and perpetuates) serious environmental and
social ills. But they are fruits and vegetables all the same. And simply
suggesting that individual consumers choose to spend more money on food
– whether to invest in better farming practices, to demonstrate using
economic means that there ought to be a greater level of funding toward
alternative food-retail infrastructure, or both – assumes that such a
choice exists. “[Alternative food markets] are sometimes touted as the
silver bullet,” Ms. Hodgins says. “But they’re not. In fact, it’s not a
better food system than the conventional food system if it’s excluding
people.” Put another way: If a food system is not accessible, how can it
possibly be sustainable?
So what good does it do,
to inflict the idea of a moral good – and therefore, the attendant idea
that opting out of the moral good ought to result in a sense of
personal shame – on a way of living, shopping and eating that is
literally out of reach? A lot of the time, the language we use around
good food borrows terminology (and, indeed, sentiment) from religion:
It’s no coincidence that one of the most widely shared articles
responding to the recent lawsuit against hipster seltzer company
LaCroix, which claims the company overinflated its use of the term
“natural,” was written by Alan Levinovitz, an assistant professor of
religious study at James Madison University in Virginia. In fact, Prof.
Levinovitz writes often on the injection of morality into specific types
of food, and why this impulse is entirely useless – if not potentially
harmful.
“Seeking out natural products is about health, yes, but holistic
health: physical and spiritual, personal and planetary. Nature becomes a
secular stand-in for God, and the word ‘natural’ a synonym for ‘holy,’”
Prof. Levinovitz wrote in The Washington Post earlier this month,
commenting on the LaCroix lawsuit. “The appropriation of natural
goodness by corporate brands allows us to expiate our guilt for
participating in the system. As long as consumption is sacred, there’s
no such thing as overconsumption. … Buying ‘natural’ is the modern
equivalent of buying indulgences – deep down, we probably know that
holiness can’t be purchased, but the opportunity is just too tempting to
pass up. In this sense, both LaCroix and the people who buy it because
it’s ‘natural’ are guilty of reinforcing the false faith of consecrated
consumption and the false idol of nature to which it is dedicated.
Instead of confusing ‘natural’ with innocence and goodness, we should
think hard about who stands to benefit from the ritual practices that
result.”
So just as the church
demands penance of those who can’t afford to pay for forgiveness, so,
too, does our modern moral food system make participation more difficult
for those who simply can’t buy in. Certainly, it’s a net positive that
the conversation surrounding our food production and consumption habits
has veered strongly toward one that is critical of overprocessing,
environmental degradation and practices that are harmful to the humans
and animals who are participants (willing or not) in them. But we seem
to have come to a conclusion about the best way to eat without factoring
in the human experience. If good food is moral food, then morality
needs to exist on a sliding scale that factors for lived experience.
It’s not realistic to think that we’re all going to end up in a “good”
place, but it would be helpful to strive for a way of thinking that
doesn’t position anyone in a “bad” one. Let’s just try for a slightly
more egalitarian “better.”
I was very pleased to have been asked to give a speech at the MacPahil Homestead, part of what's called the McRobie lectures. George McRobie was E.F. Schmachers friend and right-hand person, carrying on the "Small is Beautiful" legacy. I talked about many of things I've written in this blog, essentially that it's not fair to short-change farmers in the marketplace, and then not expect them to short-change their farming practices, that getting the economics right is essential to the kind of environmental stewardship we all want. Put another way: there are costs to cheap food that affect us all.
I was very pleased to see a day later an article in the New York Times interviewing Wendell Berry. And what was he talking about? The need to get economics right on the farm to protect the environment.
I did want to thank all of the people who came to the lecture. Thoughtful, mindful consumers are essential to getting our food system right and fair for everyone, and there was a whole roomful of these wonderful people that night. Inspiring for me.
Agricultural
choices must be made by these inescapable standards: the ecological
health of the farm and the economic health of the farmer.
Ms. Olmstead is an Idaho native living and writing outside Washington, D.C.
"Wendell Berry"
How
we farm matters. For the past two centuries, America’s farms have
expanded and homogenized, and farming equipment and chemicals have
replaced personnel. Farmers have grown older and more isolated and are
retiring without successors.
Our
embrace of industrialization and “factory farming” has not resulted in
greater economic security for most American farmers. The nation has
suffered a historic slump in prices for corn, soybeans, milk, wheat and other commodities. It has lost half its dairy farmers in the past 18 years. And The Wall Street Journalwarned in early 2017 that “the next few years could bring the biggest wave of farm closures since the 1980s.”
The farmer, essayist and poet Wendell Berry
has long argued that today’s agricultural practices are detrimental to
ecology, community and the local economies that farms once served. A
native Kentuckian, Mr. Berry has written over 40 works of fiction,
nonfiction and poetry, and has received a Guggenheim fellowship, the
National Humanities Medal and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished
Achievement Award.
Mr. Berry argues
that healthy forms of agriculture require intentional cultivation on
the part of both consumers and farmers. Americans presume there will
always be enough — money, clean soil, healthy water — to fulfill our
desires. But our ravenous economic disposition goes against the very
nature of our world and its finite resources. Advocates for sustainable
agriculture argue that we ought to recognize the limits of our world
and, as Mr. Berry writes, “live in it on its terms, not ours.”
This
year’s proposed Farm Bill awards millions of dollars to wealthy
agribusiness and factory farms in the form of commodity subsidies and
crop insurance, while cutting funds for important conservation and
stewardship programs and offering little to beginning farmers and
ranchers or local farmers markets and local food promotion.
Mr. Berry, as an ally of Wes Jackson of the Land Institute and others, has long argued for a 50-year Farm Bill that would rejuvenate our nation’s ecosystems while fostering long-term food security in the United States.
Gracy Olmstead:
The Farm Bill usually promotes short-term economic gains over long-term
ecological health (something the 50-year Farm Bill seeks to fix). How
do we get Washington politicians to support more sustainable forms of
agriculture?
Wendell Berry:
The problem here is not so much that of the shortness of the term of
planning or of shortsightedness as it is of ecological and agricultural
ignorance and a sort of moral blindness. The problems we ought to be
dealing with are not problems because they are going to cause us trouble
in the future. They are problems because they are obviously and clearly
causing trouble right now. We ought to be doing our best to solve them
right now.
If
politicians and journalists want to know about the problems of
agriculture, they are not likely to go out into “rural America” to
observe the condition of the fields and the waterways or to talk to the
farmers and the ex-farmers, the ex-merchants of the small towns, or to
talk to the mayors and county judges of rural counties. Instead, they
are very likely to talk to academic and bureaucratic experts, who are
tightly bound within the industrial structure of agriculture,
agri-science and agribusiness.
Alan Guebert was right when he said
in one of his columns that this farm bill will be much like the last
one insofar as it will not address the real problems of agriculture.
Those problems, as you know, are soil erosion, soil degradation, the
pollution of waterways by sediment and toxic chemicals, various
ecological damages, the elimination of small farms, the destruction of
the cultures of husbandry and the ruin of country towns and communities.
And maybe we should add specifically the curse of overproduction, which
at present, as often before, is the major and the cruelest problem.
Those
problems could be summed up as the triumph of industrialism and
industrial values over the lives of living creatures, and over the life
of the living world. The preferences and choices of industrialism do not
imply a limit of any kind. They rest instead upon the premises of
limitless economic growth and limitless consumption, which of course
implies limitless waste, and finally exhaustion.
Nothing
can take form except within limits. No cure is possible, either in
policy or practice, except within understood limits, which is to say
within a correct diagnosis. This requires patience. A good solution has
to begin with a description of the problem that is full, clear, and
reliable.
Olmstead:The
Farm Bill addresses many issues, including “rural development” — and
rural communities desperately need help these days. Could the government
help combat these issues, in your community and elsewhere?
Berry:
A farm bill sincerely intending to help rural communities might begin
by proposing a program of production controls and price supports for
every product of farming and forestry. At present, for example, the
dairy “industry” is increasing milk production
by millions of gallons every year, thus reducing prices and driving
small dairies out of business. This of course serves the interests of
large dairies.
A bill
intending to help rural communities, furthermore, might forbid the large
chain stores to underprice their goods in order to destroy locally
owned small stores. I don’t see why the government should not enforce
honest prices for the same reason that it enforces honest weights and
measures. I am sure that a lot of conservatives would object loudly to
such “regulation.” But for small farms and small businesses, the “free
market” is not a “level playing field.”
Olmstead:
Many conservatives and libertarians see the Farm Bill’s handouts to
large agribusinesses as the opposite of a free market. If small farmers
are given a level playing field, they argue, more will succeed — and
industrial agribusiness will no longer have a government-provided
financial cushion.
Berry:
I distrust entirely the terms “free market” and “level playing field.”
Those phrases are intoned as if they were the names of gods, but what do
they mean? How exactly do the conservatives and the libertarians think
small farmers would be served by the free market and the level playing
field?
The problem
that has impoverished and destroyed farmers nearly always is that of low
prices resulting from surplus production. That is also, obviously, a
land-destroying problem. The only solution to that problem that can
sustain the small farmers is the combination of production control and
price supports as exemplified by the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association
as it was reorganized in my region under the New Deal in 1941. I
dislike recommending my own writing, but that organization and its work
are explained pretty fully in “The Art of Loading Brush.”
The conservative politicians and their friends in the Farm Bureau hated
that program because it protected the small farmers, and they finally
killed it. In its absence, our troubles have multiplied.
Recently, for example, 100 family dairy farms have been put out of business
in this region, two of them in my county, because Walmart is building
its own milk-bottling plant in Indiana. And so 100 self-employed,
self-supporting, self-respecting farm families are being severely
damaged or destroyed in order to increase the wealth of a family
already far too rich. I am unsure what the farmers themselves have
concluded, but I can conclude only what I already knew: They have no
friends among the conservatives and libertarians. And if the Democrats
and the liberals were to capture the government, those small farmers
would find no friends among them, as they now are.
Both
of the political sides, so far as I am concerned, have to accept
responsibility for the emergence of Donald Trump, the autonomous man,
the self-made man, economically “free” and sexually liberated,
responsible only to himself, starting from scratch and inventing his own
way of doing things. To get outside the trajectory that produced Trump,
we will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to
think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly
love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example
proves, and as proved by present failure.
Olmstead:
Our trade war with China has highlighted American farmers’ reliance on
the global market. Do you believe this reliance is a necessary risk in
today’s globalized economy? How can these farmers safeguard their own
self-sufficiency and well-being?
Berry:
I have been arguing for a long time, and I still argue, that an economy
worthy of the name should begin with proper care of its sources in the
natural world and in the local cultures of land use. Beyond that it
should be based upon the principle of a reasonable self-sufficiency,
from the household to the local community and on through the categories
of political organization.
Such
an economy, within the variables of weather and human capability, would
be formed within certain prescribed limits. To the extent that it would
be limited and formed or formal, we might assume that it would be
stable. Because such an economy has never been tried, we should not
think of it with too much confidence. But there is certainly nothing
limited or stable in our present casting about the “globe” for supplies
and demands. This, like our present society, is disorderly if not
chaotic.
The
so-called global economy, because it is predicated on the exhaustion of
natural sources and of the land-use economies, is far from a sure
thing. An interesting question, then, is whether we might intentionally
reform our economies upon the principle of self-sufficiency or be forced
to do so by the failure of the global economy. Farmers by themselves
can’t protect themselves in a “free market” economy whether it is
national or global. At present they have only the very limited
self-protection of supporting their own lives so far as possible from
their own land — that is, by producing their own food and fuel, and by
harvesting energy from their own sunlight.
Olmstead:
An Iowa farmer recently told me that industrial agriculture is
inevitable — the natural fruit of technological progress and
globalization. The farmer reminded me of others I have talked to who,
when asked about farming practices that are industrialized and
isolating, reply by saying “We must feed the world.”
Berry:
If you can persuade farmers that their hardships are “inevitable,” then
you have got them very securely trapped and they can be safely
forgotten by their political representatives and exploited by
agribusiness corporations. Inevitability and objectivity, like pessimism
and optimism, are the names of programs offering freedom from choice
and responsibility. If “technological progress” is the same as
technological determinism, then there are no remedies.
It
can pretty well be demonstrated, however, that technological progress
is the result of choices that have been made all the way from the
inventors and manufacturers of technologies to the people who buy and
use and pay for them. The important questions all have to do with the
standards by which these choices are made. If the standards were
different, different choices would be made.
And
in fact we have plenty of evidence that choices can be made that
evidently were not made by your Iowa farmer. That the alternative
choices often have to be made against powerful social pressures does not
mean that they cannot be made or that they are not valid choices. The
finally inescapable standards by which agricultural choices must be made
are the ecological health of the farm and the economic health of the
farmer.
The problem
of feeding the world should be addressed, first of all, by calculating
the waste — from farmland and topsoil to thrown-away food — in the
world’s “food systems.” Perhaps somebody has done this. If so, that is
the place to start. The people, fairly numerous and highly credentialed,
who argue that only industrial agriculture as we now have it can feed
the world are arguing in fact that we can feed the world only by an
agriculture that destroys both farmland and farmers. There is a point,
obviously, beyond which this kind of agriculture will not be able to
feed much of anybody.
Olmstead:
As farmers grow older, we seem unable to attract or keep young people
on the land. For some, this is because of the cost of procuring land and
starting a farm. But I have also talked to farmers who were told they
were “too smart” to farm by high school counselors and mentors. These
admonitions align with a larger cultural prejudice against manual labor
and blue-collar work. Considering the challenge to farming’s future
which this represents, how can we foster and renew a passion for
farming?
Berry:
That smart people are “too smart” to farm is one of the set of clichés
by which industrial agriculture has maintained itself. Another is that
farming is “drudgery” or “mind-numbing work.” Another is that ex-farmers
have been “liberated” from their hard, narrow, and depressing lives.
These
clichés are sustained by the “larger cultural prejudice against manual
labor,” which you mention. But there also are active prejudices against
farmers, country people, the country, small-town people and small towns.
This at least begins the description of a large cultural problem.
Because of such prejudices, and also because of economic adversity,
farmers encourage their children to leave farming. Their departing
children, so few of them as they now are, amount to an invaluable
cultural and economic resource, to which our present economy attaches no
value at all.
What
can we do about this? First, those of us who care must keep trying to
bring about improvements, which we can do, and are doing, locally —
where, in any event, the improvements will have to be made. Second, we
have got to be patient. That this is a cultural problem means that it
can’t be simply or quickly solved. What you speak of as a “passion for
farming” can grow only from an understanding of the intelligence and the
learning involved in the right kind of farming, and we should add an
understanding of the better cultures of husbandry and of the traditional
agrarian values. These things we must try to keep alive, not because of
their “potential value” but because they are now and forever right.
Gracy Olmstead is an Idaho native living and writing outside Washington.
I've written a lot over the years about my support for supply management. Canada cannot give up on it because of the mindless bullying of Donald Trump. But I think Canada must be willing to give up something. There's a complicated part of this story that I first wrote about back in June. It has to do with Canada exporting milk powder and competing with U.S. farmers. I think Canada should give this up, especially if it means retaining the basic integrity of the system. It gives Trump a win, and apparently it's the bottom line for U.S. agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue. Here's the background from a column in the Island Farmer.
Looking a Little Deeper
Canada’s national newspapers have been very consistent over the years in their condemnation of supply management. President Trump’s erroneous bombast on dairy has given them fresh material to work with. However there was one editorial in the Globe and Mail that revealed more about the newspaper’s biases than any problem with the regulated system itself.
Opponents of supply management get one thing right. Canadian consumers do pay more for dairy poultry and eggs than Americans, who enjoy the cheapest food in the world (underpinned of course by $25 Billion a year in taxpayer subsidies to farmers). Canadian dairy, poultry and egg farmers get no government support. What was revealing is how the Globe characterized the way the farm gate price is determined. Here’s what was written: “Canada’s agricultural supply management system is an outdated, protectionist racket that uses tariffs and quotas to limit the country’s supply of dairy, eggs and poultry, and sets prices for them based on production costs instead of demand.”
That last part is true. What’s shocking is that the Globe thinks there’s something wrong with this. Think about it for a second. Consider if there is any other industry where a smart editorial writer would argue that recovering the cost of producing a product shows there’s something wrong with the price. We’ve seen how taxpayers had to bail out the auto industry when it wasn’t recovering costs. We’ve seen giant retailers fail for the same reason. If the Globe had written that there’s excess profit because of protectionism (hello Canadian banks and airlines), fine, let’s argue about that. But this is saying when farmers can pay their bills it’s wrong.
Even Sonny Perdue, the U.S. agriculture secretary who travelled to Lawrence MacAulay’s farm in Midgell two weeks ago to do a little fence mending after the G7 fiasco, had smarter things to say. Defying his boss he said Canada can keep supply management. What he doesn’t like is a new pricing agreement between Canadian farmers and processors for what’s called “class 7” milk. In simplest terms: northern U.S. dairies had been exporting diafiltered milk (think of protein powder) to Canadian cheese producers. It was a product created after NAFTA was signed, so came into Canada duty free (think cheap). Canadian farmers have now agreed to produce milk at the same price, so the Americans lost the market. As well, international trade rules prevent Canadian dairies from exporting dairy products at prices below what farmers get in Canada (always higher than the world price until now). The new class 7 has created a cheaper domestic price for skim-milk powder. Combine that with the low Canadian dollar, and now small amounts of Canadian powder are competing in traditional American export markets. Perdue put it this way: “You just need to manage it and not overproduce to create a glut of milk solids on the world market that’s being dumped at unfair prices.” That’s not an unreasonable concern, although the amount of product Canada puts on export markets is tiny and hardly the cause of U.S. dairy farmers problems. We will probably see complaints to the U.S. International Trade Commission, and the World Trade Organization on this issue.
One more thought on milk. Maybe the U.S. dairy industry should stop using Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) to artificially increase milk production in cows (it’s outlawed in Canada). There are well documented health concerns for both consumers and cows from its use. Banning the product would cut farmers’ costs, decrease the over production of milk, and help with the bottom line. And the U.S. would join the many other countries who ban this product. I know this won’t happen.
When writing a column you do want feedback. The ones below gave me a little more blowback than usual, and from both sides of the issue (a good thing??). So I guess it's important to read both, and love to know what you think. These first appeared in the Island Farmer.
A Better Way to Find Justice
It was the retrial of Brookfield Gardens earlier this month on charges related to a fish kill in the North River 4 years ago that got me thinking about how the justice system deals with environmental infractions. Understandably we want those responsible for fish kills or other environmental violations held accountable, but these trials create enormous bitterness and cynicism amongst farmers, the very people we want using good sense and judgement in their day to day use of pesticides. Is there a better way?
Restorative justice is a legal concept that’s gaining support for dealing with certain kinds of crimes, where there has been loss of, or harm to, property not persons. It’s based on the idea that the person found culpable acknowledges and takes responsibility for the harm done in a way that satisfies the people who were harmed, and because of that understanding doesn’t re-offend. I know it sounds a little soft-headed, but let’s think about how these cases are handled now.
Investigations of fish kills aren’t easy. Soil samples, and water runoff are collected, dead fish are analysed. Finding a “smoking gun” only happens occasionally. Instead spraying records are collected from all farmers in the watershed. In some cases charges stem from this paperwork investigation that have no actual link to the fish kill. Alex Docherty, a high profile potato grower has never been shy about arguing he’s the victim of a witch hunt related to a fish kill in the Clyde River 2 years ago. There’s been no evidence presented so far that he had anything to do directly with the fish kill, but he was charged with administrative offences under the Pesticide Act related to spraying a neighbour’s field. To Docherty it feels like there was political pressure to lay some charges related to this fish kill, and he was a good catch. Emails Docherty has collected through an access to information request show a variety of government officials including in the premier’s office were informed once the charges were laid.
It’s the cynicism and lack of respect Docherty and many other farmers have developed for the enforcement system that worry me the most. Why? It’s the farmers themselves responsible for filling out the paperwork that is so important to these investigations: wind speed, air temperature and so on. I can’t help but think that if I had had to fill out paperwork every night about how fast I was driving commuting to Charlottetown I’d never admit to more than 10 clicks over the speed limit and probably not even that, even though I always drove much faster. Are farmers any different?
Then when farmers do end up in court smart and very expensive defence lawyers twist and turn words to try to get their clients off: What’s the definition of a waterway? What does cultivate mean? This just feels so unproductive.
Let’s think about Brookfield Gardens again. Anybody who knows them recognizes that the owners, the Dykermans, are good people, producing a variety of important vegetable crops, and transitioning over the last decade to an organic operation. They acknowledge that they made a bad mistake in the summer of 2014, producing a conventional carrot crop on sloping land. Some of the charges they faced were because they were trying to add forage to expand the buffer zone to prevent run-off. Chief justice Nancy Orr, who’s shown common sense in cases like this, found Brookfield not guilty in the original trial. However her decision was later overturned because other judges ruled she didn’t have enough evidence to support the verdict. I think she did, because she knew the most important thing: these farmers would never do this again. Had it been handled through restorative justice, the Dykermans could have acknowledged their mistake to the community, the local watershed group, and recommitted to the good farming practices they already use. That’s how you develop accountability.
One more example of the importance of farmers finding the right reason to farm responsibly, rather than just fear of the law. There is a lot of sloping land, and potato farming in and around Souris, but so far no fish kills over the years. Can this be linked to the long standing effort of the local watershed group to have farmers and others talk to each other and try to understand the challenges farmers face, and the need to preserve natural areas to support fishing and tourism? That’s very different from other rural communities where farmers can be regarded as troublemakers and even shunned.
I’m not suggesting we can all have a “kumbaya” moment and everything will be OK, or that regulations and an enforcement regime aren’t needed. I want responsible people handling pesticides, committed to protecting the health of their neighbours, local wildlife and waterways. I want caution and good judgement, not a tape measure used to determine the size of buffer zones. I’m not convinced that lots of red tape and paperwork, and the threat of the heavy hand of the justice system, gets us that.
I’ve Got Some Explaining To Do
I’ve had a fair bit of reaction to my last column, some positive, much more of it negative. I always appreciate the feedback. I’d argued that a legal concept called restorative justice might be a better way to handle some environmental infractions like fish kills. Anyone found responsible would have to answer to the community of people who were harmed rather than the courts. I’m going to dig the hole I’m in a little deeper.
My concern is that too many farmers, most who act very responsibly, feel cynicism and disrespect for environmental regulations and the people who enforce them. If they are charged it’s like the rest of us stopped for speeding, anger at getting caught, rather than any sense of guilt. At the same time many in the public have little confidence in the willingness and the ability of the province to properly manage farmers, especially in the use of pesticides. They feel that the system is too full of carrots and not enough sticks.
What makes environmental laws different from other criminal matters is that those charged are guilty until proven innocent (thanks to a course I’ve been taking at Holland College on water management for that). Something has happened, and the person responsible is considered guilty and liable for punishment. The only defense is “due diligence”, did the person take all the reasonable steps expected to prevent the damage from occurring. This can frustrate many because judges will issue “not guilty" verdicts even though the persons charged were clearly responsible.
It’s why record keeping is so important. It’s the only way someone can prove that he/she did practice “due diligence”. Unfortunately most farmers don’t see it that way, but simply more paperwork and red tape. And it gets worse. In the last column I raised questions about whether farmers (or anyone) would voluntarily record damning information. As some farmers have put it “Why would I provide evidence for my own prosecution?”
And we have to remember there’s another kind of “due diligence” farmers have to practice. Banks and other lenders, crop insurance agreements, contracted buyers and so on require farmers to manage their crop properly, including using pesticides to control disease and insect damage.
Most of the criticism I received (from people I respect) was that restorative justice doesn’t properly punish those who commit serious environmental crimes, that farmers who treat the legal system and the environment with contempt shouldn’t be given another “get out of jail free card”.
When I first read about restorative justice a decade ago I had much the same feeling, that the courts, crown attorneys and judges, were the best way to judge crimes, and meet out punishment. I began to think a little differently because of an idea that’s central to restorative justice: normally those charged feel they’re answering to “the state”, with all of the resources and power that entails. They feel every right to fight back, and resent the fact that, in their minds, it’s not a fair fight. With restorative justice they’re answering to the actual people who were harmed, made to understand the damage done. The people who were harmed get to agree on restitution, how to make things right. Restorative justice supporters say when people have a proper understanding of the harm they’ve done, rather than anger and resentment towards the legal system, there’s a much better chance at deterrence.
I’m not so dumb that I don’t recognize that there are cases where farmers are not prepared to meet with neighbours or local watershed groups, or even acknowledge they’ve done anything wrong. These cases can continue to go through the normal court system including, where appropriate, use of the much heavier fines under the federal Fisheries Act, for allowing a “deleterious substance” to enter a waterway.
I also think there are generational issues here. Most of todays older farmers started driving tractors, cultivating and spraying when they were teenagers or younger. They’re now being told they have to write tests, keep records, and many resent it. The next generation is probably more prepared to accept food safety protocols, traceability requirements, the need for certification, and so on. They don’t necessarily like it, but know this is what’s required to satisfy the demands of the marketplace. (I wish they could be properly compensated for the extra work.)
Technology is helping too. Newer sprayers can better calibrate application rates and use GPS to prevent spraying in environmentally sensitive areas. The sprayers don’t have surplus mixed pesticide at the end that has to be dumped. These sprayers are not cheap, but will better protect people including the applicator, and the environment.
I wrote about this because I’m concerned we’re becoming very tribal when it comes to pesticide use, unwilling to listen to or believe “the other”. With extreme weather becoming the norm, the day to day decisions of farmers are becoming that much more critical. PEI doesn’t have the resources or the political will to monitor every farmer (a drone over every field?) so we have to find other ways to have confidence that farmers are acting responsibly. Using fear of the justice system, layering on the paperwork, is one way to do this. Is there a better way?
For all the bombast of Donald Trump on the evils of Canada's supply management system, it was refreshing to hear U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue defy his boss and speak a little truth about what's going on. Perdue came to Lawrence MacAulay's farm in Midgell, PEI to do a little fence mending after the G7 fiasco a couple of weeks ago. Perdue said Canada can keep supply management, it's the pricing of a new class of milk in Canada (class 7) that has him worried. It's a cheaper product that allows Canadian farmers to compete with low cost U.S. diafiltered milk imports used to make cheese. In effect dairy farmers here makes it unnecessary for Canadian dairies to import the U.S. product because they can get it for the same price here in Canada. And today Saputo boss (a large Montreal based dairy with processing interests around the world) Lino Saputo Jr. essentially agreed with Perdue. Saputo has some history with this problem, and it's not surprising that he would break ranks, because his company started the problem in the first place.
I had first written about this almost 2 years ago, and you could sense it wouldn't end well.
December 2015
A Shortage of
Butter: Not Good News for Dairy Farmers
This is a classic
case of a loophole, big business capitalizing on any chance to improve the
bottom line, and serious unintended consequences. The impact of what appeared to be a minor
bureaucratic decisionis being felt in
Canadian kitchens, food processing plants,and disturbingly, could do serious economic damage to Canada’s dairy
farmers.
A few years ago
Federal officials were trying to decide where so called “protein isolates”
would fit into the stiff tariff schedule that limits imports of cheaper dairy
products like yogurt and cheese. These high tariffs maintain the integrity of
Canada’s supply management system that tailors milk supply to Canadian demand
using quotas, while assuring farmers a fair price.Protein isolates are essentially raw protein,
like the whey protein used as a dietary supplement. Think of whole milk with the
fat and minerals stripped out.The
bureaucrats decided the isolates are a protein “substitute”, not necessarily a dairy
product, so they come into Canada tariff-free.No one paid too much attention then,butslowly, over time, a trickle
of cheaper protein isolates, almost all from the United States,has become a tidal wave.Now Canada’s largest dairy processors like Parmalat, Saputo, and Agropur, are helping their bottom line by
using the cheaper protein in their cheeses and other dairy products. But there’s
a wrinkle, the processors still need the
fat from whole milk to mix with the raw imported protein to produce their
cheeses.This is happening at the same time that
dieticians and doctors are telling Canadians it’s OK to eat butter again. So over the last year butter, and butterfat, are again in big demand,
and for some, short supply.Farmers
nationally have stepped up production by more than 7% on a butterfat basis to
meet the shortfall, but because there’s no additional demand for the protein in
the whole milk(usually made into skim
milk powder), farmers aren’t paid the full cost of production price for this
additional milk, and a lot of the surplus skim milk is being dumped or fed to
livestock.
That’s
unfortunate, but the more serious impact I think is that it’s given the
business media a fresh opportunity to attack supply management. “Supply management falls butter-side
down”in the Globe and Mail,and“Supply management is expensive, irrational — and doomed” in i-Politics
amongst others.What especially
irritates me about these articles is that they blame dairy farmers (and always the
articles are accompanied by shots of
Holsteins) for lobbying to protect a “broken” system, when it’s large
multi-national dairy processors that have created the problem. There’s no
benefit flowing back to dairy farmers fromthe importation of this cheap protein (other than Quebec farmer-owned
Agropur, shame on it.Parmalat is owned
by a large Italian dairy, and Saputo by a Montreal family).
Here’s some better
news. As Islanders, we can celebrate the fact that PEI’s dairies, ADL and
Purity, do not use this imported protein.And let’s also enjoy the world recognition ADL cheeses have received
recently:ADL, using a recipe from Cows,
produces the Avonlea Clothbound Cheddar that won SuperGold at the World Cheese
Awards in Englandin late November. And
ADL’s own labeled cheddars won several awards at the British Empire Cheese Show
in Ontario in mid-November.I’m not an
expert, but maybe the fact that only PEI whole milk, rather than a tasteless
imported protein isolate, is used to make these cheeses had something to do
with these successes.
One more thing for
consumers to watch for. There is a symbol:
that says 100% Canadian
milk.That’s your guarantee too that
there’s no imported protein in the dairy products.
Unfortunately for
farmers the trade in protein isolates won’t
end quickly. The U.S. dairy industry would launch a trade investigation before
the ink was dry on any new government regulation trying to control it.The big multi-national dairies themselves are
playing a game of economic chicken saying they’ll stop only if the others
do.As well they’re getting ready for
more competition from cheaper European cheeses if the big EU trade agreement is
ever ratified.So consumers will have
to step up if there’s going to be any solution. On PEI at least that’s easily
done.
The Toronto Star, a generally progressive newspaper, has jumped on the anti supply management bandwagon. Here's their take and a recent column I wrote for the Island farmer. This is one fight I won't give up, and gives me another chance to take a swipe at Walmart.
Angry about bread prices? Save some for supply management
This costs the average Canadian consumer a lot. In 2014 the Conference Board of Canada estimated that higher prices for dairy products (milk, cheese, yogurt and so on) alone cost the average family $276 a year.
Another study in the journal Canadian Public Policy
put the cost of all supply management policies at an average of $444 per
family per year. That adds up to an awful lot. The OECD at one point
estimated that supply management cost Canadian consumers a staggering
$2.6 billion a year.
All these figures, of course, are sharply contested by
the dairy and poultry industries, which profit hugely from existing
policies. And it’s perfectly reasonable to defend supply management if
you value keeping dairy and poultry farmers prosperous and stable and
don’t mind putting the cost of that onto consumers.
Others argue that Canada should value “food security”
over having the lowest possible consumer prices. And, even with supply
management in place, food is cheaper in this country relative to average
earnings than almost anywhere else in the world.
What’s harder to argue is that collusion on the price
of some bread products on a scale that can be compensated for by a $25
gift card merits special public outrage while official policy dictates
that Canadian consumers must pay far, far more than they need to for
other basic foodstuffs.
To be clear, price-fixing on bread is illegal and
wrong. But anyone angered by those revelations should bottle that
feeling and direct it where it would count a lot more: against Canada’s
consumer-unfriendly policies that hike the prices families must pay for
milk, cheese, chicken and eggs.
From the Island Farmer
Unintended Consequences
We live in a time when most of us have easy access to endless amounts of information. We have to be smart about what to believe, but anyone with an even remote interest in economics and trade must remember the role our pals at Walmart played to shift production of consumer products from the United States to China during the 1980’s. I haven’t read one word in the media about this drive to ensure low prices for consumers being at the heart of the huge trade imbalance between the two countries, close to $350 Billion last year. President Trump says China outsmarted the U.S., and he’s going to change that. I’d argue the U.S. went into this relationship with its eyes wide open.
Walmart has done a lot of good work recently to upgrade its own environmental standards and those of its suppliers including companies in China. However that doesn’t take away from Walmart’s direct involvement in U.S. job losses over the last twenty years, jobs President Trump says he’s going to get back. Good luck with that.
This started with Sam Walton’s insistence on the lowest possible price for consumers, always. Even when the company went on a well publicized “Buy American” campaign in the 1990’s (and set-up a wholly owned buying agent to continue overseas purchases) it wanted U.S. producers to match Chinese prices, forcing even more out of business. Sam Walton himself wrote in 1992 "We're not interested in charity here, we don't believe in subsidizing substandard work or inefficiency…" Of course other big retailers followed suit, and the results are predictable. A recent report (http://www.epi.org/publication/the-wal-mart-effect/ ) pegs job losses caused by Walmart on its own at 400,000 between 2001-2013. Throw in other retailers and the numbers climb. According to the article: “The growing goods trade deficit with China displaced 3.2 million U.S. jobs in the United States between 2001 and 2013, and it has been a prime contributor to the crisis in manufacturing employment over the past 15 years.” These displaced workers were a big reason Trump was elected a year ago with his promise to “Make America Great Again.”
I’m not on an anti-globalization rant here. I accept that trade between countries with structural or climate differences can benefit buyers and sellers, and lift people out of poverty. I’m trying to get back to the origins of the unintended consequences of this particular trade mis-match: Sam Walton’s determination that nothing else matters but delivering the cheapest goods to consumers.
You can see where this is going. Did you see these recent headlines: “Supply Management is literally driving tens of thousands of Canadians into poverty” in the Financial Post, or “You’re Paying Too Much for Milk” in the Walrus, and there were many more. After calling for an end to supply management what follows is advice like this from the usually very smart journalist David Akin “… done right it would make dairy farmers even more prosperous because they could sell their wonderful product to the world.”
Well yes they could if there were markets in a world awash with surplus milk and dairy products, and more importantly willing to sell at the “world” price. What Akin and others refuse to understand, much like Sam Walton, are the unintended consequences of always chasing cheaper. When it comes to farming it goes beyond lost jobs to its severe impact on the environment. Just last week the Economist, hardly a radical publication, had this headline “Dairy Farming Polluting New Zealand Water.” It outlines what happens as dairy farmers there try to produce milk at the low price needed to keep New Zealand an export powerhouse, the competition Canada would run into at every turn. Intensive dairy farming has led to groundwater polluted with nitrates, and waterways full of algae and dangerous bacteria. From the article “In Canterbury, one of the most polluted areas, expectant mothers are told to test tap water to avoid “blue baby syndrome”, a potentially fatal ailment thought to be caused by nitrates. The poisonous blooms have killed dogs.”
I can remember doing a story on a dairy farm next to the Hillsborough River. The farmer worked with Ducks Unlimited to build a pond full of cattails to capture run-off from fields and the milk house before they get to the river. The farmer said the steady income he had from supply management allowed him to do this. It reminds me now of the importance of the old Oscar Wilde quote: “What is a cynic. Someone who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Let’s stop being cynical about supply management, and recognize its value.
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Annie's Macaroni & Cheese, shown on the shelf at a supermarket in Edina, Minn., in 2018.
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that says 100% Canadian
milk. That’s your guarantee too that
there’s no imported protein in the dairy products.