Worried about how climate change may affect our foods? Think outside the border
Canada’s new food guide was released on Jan 22 of this year. It recommends that half of our plate should consist of fruits and vegetables (see figure above). This recommendation is consistent across various food guides, for example that from the United States, or the World Health Organization which recommends at least 400 g (i.e. five portions) of fruit and vegetables per day. We just don’t eat enough fruits and vegetables. Indeed, studies have shown that we don’t even produce enough fruits and vegetables on this planet to meet a recommended diet.
But wait you say, the title of this blog says climate change, why are you going on about the new food guide? I will get to that in a second, just wanted to tell you first how excited I am about the new food guide asking us to eat more fruits and veggies, because that’s going to be an important part of this story.
Now let’s talk about climate change. If you live in Canada, and you think about climate change, it typically doesn’t sound so scary. Most parts of the country have very cold winters and warming feels like a good thing. And if you think about the food system, you have heard that Canada may be one of the few countries in the world that may actually benefit from climate change. As climate warms, farmers can plant earlier in the season, and harvest later. On the flipside, you may have read or heard about some nuances, that increasing temperature, especially if accompanied by decreasing rainfall, could lead to droughts that affect agricultural production. Or that climate warming is not as simple as gradual warming, but is in fact accompanied by increases in both the frequency and severity of extreme weather events (that some now like to call “global weirding”), that can be harmful to our crops and animals. But even if you include these nuances, there is a general sense that, overall, climate change will benefit Canadian agriculture. And in the worst case scenario, we are a sufficiently rich country that we can adapt to it.
All well and good. But, and this is the myth I want to dispel, what people seem to forget in this scenario is that we Canadians don’t produce all the foods we eat inside our country. In fact, 80% of our fruits and 50% of our vegetables are imported from other countries: a large portion from the United States, but also from Mexico and other Latin American countries. We get nearly all our bananas from Latin America and nearly all our potatoes from the United States. We get a large portion of our lemons, tomatoes, and peppers from Mexico. So shouldn’t we Canadians be worried about what climate change will do to fruit and vegetable production in the United States and Latin American countries? A cursory review of the literature suggests that there are few studies of climate impacts on fruits and vegetable production. But if we want to analyze the effects of climate change on food security in Canada, we need to think about climate impacts in all the places we get our food from, not just how climate change will affect Canadian agricultural production. I don’t see many Canadians worried about this.[1]
Here is a story about British Columbia (BC), where I currently live. But the story begins — as with most stories about our food system — in another part of the world, in this case California. There was a prolonged and severe drought in California during 2011–2017. California produces half of all fruits and vegetables grown in the United States. Turns out that BC gets a lot of their produce from California. So people in BC started worrying about what’s going on California. Vancity commissioned a report from the BC Food Systems Network in 2014. They reported that, “In 2010, 67% of B.C. vegetable imports came from the U.S., over half of which were produced in California, including 95% of all broccoli and 74% of all lettuce.” And that “Between July 2013 [sic] and 2014, produce prices in B.C. have increased between 5.7% and 9.6%”, and predicted further price increases related to the drought. That finally caught the attention of people in BC.
So the next time you eat a banana, think about where it comes from and what climate change might do to that source region. And back to the Canadian food guide, if Canadians increase their consumption of fruits and veggies in response (as they should to improve their health, while also helping the environment if accompanied by reduced red meat consumption), then Canadians need to take a broader (and outside the border) view of how climate change might affect their food system.
But also, beyond the self-interested perspective, we Canadians have to recognize that our per-capita carbon footprint is among the highest on this planet. We therefore have a moral obligation to consider how climate change may affect people, agriculture, and ecosystems in other parts of the world, often places that had little to do with creating the climate change problem in the first place.
[1] This also does not seem to occur to the Canadian federal funding agencies whose ‘relevance to Canada’ section stifles meaningful research that is of real relevance to Canada, but that’s for another blog post.
