Here come the Election Promises!
But none of them have anything to do with the food you eat, or creating a resilient farming sector.
I wish I could be optimistic about this election.
I wish that our five main political parties in Quebec were angling that farms should look more like Apricot Lane Farms in California, a farm that highlights diversity, balance and letting nature burst out through the whole farm. A farm that is simultaneously certified as Organic, Biodynamic and Regenerative Organic. A farm that harmoniously integrates the production of fruit, vegetables and animal protein, in humane ways. La Ferme de Quatre Temps comes close to this vision, and there are others following in their footsteps throughout Quebec.
But we need more. After all, the danger signs to our existing food system are all there for anyone to see: creaky — or broken — food supply chains; climate change impacts such as drought, flooding and fire; a war in Eastern Europe; a ballooning health crisis that takes the form of rising levels of chronic disease; an inflation level not seen for decades.
There’s more than enough there for any responsible leader to sit back, take stock and use this adversity to propose something truly bold and transformative with out food system.
In a recent column in La Presse, a number of environmental organizations in Quebec proposed a series of muscular policy initiatives that would drive to counter some of these issues, long term, to put in place the Sustainable Agricultural Plan for Quebec. Their proposals include:
- hiring more agronomists (in decline for over a decade) to provide advice to farmers on how to make their farms more resistant to drought, flooding and other natural events;
- make the advice these agronomists are giving the most independent they can be, free from influence by the large global chemical firms that control our industrial farming infrastructure, from seed to crop;
- change the focus of agriculture to protect the health of the soil and soil biome by accelerating the transition of farming practices from current methods to more regenerative methods, and;
- diversify the crops being grown in the province to better protect those crops from disease that attack one particular crop.
This group does not talk about inflation, but we could add a fifth recommendation, recently championed by Dr. Sylvain Charlebois, to encourage grocery chains to freeze the pricing on certain essential items that consumers need.
Instead, we have to settle for anodyne bullet points, poses with cows and food system policy promises that lack ambition, imagination and, quite frankly, are a throwback to the 1990s.
The outgoing CAQ government of Francois Legault is sticking to their current strategy of pouring more money into helping farmers adopt more sustainable methods of farming, providing financing for younger farmers to purchase land, reducing the dues to be paid to the provincial farming organization for younger farmers and continuing to provide funding to finance initiatives to increase the production of food in the province that Quebeckers consume, as well as inciting government organizations to purchase more local products, at the expense of imported products. Continuons, indeed.
The provincial Liberal Party is gearing its agricultural policies around a number of measures to increase production within the province, namely, to find ways of exploiting marginal land for farming, implementing measures to encourage younger Quebeckers to take up farming and ensure succession of existing farms to the next generation, supporting farmers in their transition to more sustainable methods of farming and naming a provincial Minister of Fisheries, whose mandate it would be to find ways to better cultivate, exploit and protect aquatic resources.
Quebec Solidaire, left-leaning independence party, is making a number of proposals that are more ambitious. For example, they want to protect the biodiversity of the province by setting aside 30% of ‘Crown’ land by 2030. In addition, they want to better regulate the exploitation of water in the province, which is being sucked out of our aquifers with little to no compensation or concern for its sustainability, longer term. Further, they want to enhance the amount of food grown using organic methods in the province, generally, but also, more controversially, emphasize the purchase by the government of plant-based foods by increasing to 50% of all meals prepared in public institutions to be plant-based. Finally, they want to implement a number of other measures to support the sector, including a network of regional slaughterhouses, supporting the next generation of farmers with financial measures to help them acquire land and protect and manage better our marine resources.
The Parti Quebecois (PQ) is, of course, a party dedicated to the independence of Quebec. It’s logical that their platform revolves around autonomy for just about everything, including the production of food. This election is no different, as they are proposing to protect and enhance the amount of land available for farming in the province, to implement a target of 70% of all food purchased by government entities to be sourced from the province, and providing financial support for farmers to acquire the land they need. The PQ has also outlined some measures that affect agriculture in their plan to reduce greenhouse gases, but the measures are vague and aspirational, rather than specific.
Last, but not least, the Conservative Party of Quebec has finally released its policy about the sector. True to form, their policy is more geared to helping farmers navigate the bureaucracy to obtain the assistance the current number of programs offer, speeding up the deployment of temporary foreign workers into the fields in Quebec, killing a proposed law concerning the independence of agronomists so that more of them can be trained and hired, favouring programmes that encourage the production of local products and the distribution of local products via localized distribution channels, and finally, entering into a consultation with the public on how to better manage farm land and to put aside a further 200,000 acres of forest to enhance the production of maple syrup.
There are some common themes in all the party platforms: they all recognize that supporting our own farmers, and their successors, is important; they all want to increase the production of food consumed by Quebeckers in the province; they all want to ensure that existing farms survive and that additional land can be acquired for aspiring farmers.
At the same time, there are some glaring omissions: no measures designed to enhance the resilience of our farms to better prepare for wild swings in the climate (i.e., no focus on soil health at all); no focus on the food that is produced (with the exception of QS) in terms of diversity and availability; no specific measures to increase the number of agronomists that would be on the front line to assist farmers make the necessary transitions in using less chemical fertilizers and focusing more on regenerative and sustainable methods; and no link or action whatsoever around the food that average Quebeckers eat and how that contributes to the chronic disease boom that is crippling our healthcare system.
It leaves us with a series of promises that lack ambition and are disconnected from the issues facing farmers today. In fact, they are largely a continuation of existing policies that will see gradual change being introduced into the sector, despite the multiplication of the threats to the sector. We would need just one bad year of drought to reduce substantially amount of food we produce. And then we’ll be faced with the question of where we will get the shortfall. Imports from California, which is suffering its own drought and water shortages? Mexico? Peru? The further you go, the more expensive the food will be once it gets here. We all know that inflation is rampant in our food system today; this would just make it worse.
We have to stop the systemic ignorance of our food system. We’ve grown complacent on our abundance, fed by imports from areas where food is grown as an export crop, that we will always have enough, that we’ll get our food from somewhere. Well, ‘somewhere’ is experiencing the same climate change challenges as we are. We can’t rely on ‘somewhere’ to fill our grocery store shelves in the future. It’s up to us to take action with the tools, land and farmers we have, to protect and enhance our capacity to feed ourselves, and on our willingness to protect our farming infrastructure for the generations of climate change we will have to live through. If we don’t, there’s going to more food insecurity than ever before, and the politicians we vote into office will be taken to task for their lack of vision.
