Misinformation about our Food System
2023 was a year to remember but for all the wrong reasons.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been more sensitized to both misinformation and disinformation than ever before.
Bouts of misinformation and false news existed prior to the pandemic, but they were less numerous and more easily debunked.
For example, in 1835 the New York Sun published a racy expose about a civilization living on the moon, complete with illustrations of the bat-like beings flitting about on the moon’s surface. It served its purpose which was to sell more of their newspapers.
In 1927, Dorothy Cochrane Logan, a British doctor, claimed to swim the English Channel for 13 hours straight. She was celebrated by European newspapers, which wrote about her accomplishment and gave her money as a reward. The story later broke that she had secretly completed most of the journey by boat.
More recently, who can forget the 1993 front page Weekly World News ‘official photo’ of Hillary Clinton cradling an extraterrestrial baby in her arms as proof of her adopting the child. Of course, she apparently did this after a UFO crashed in Arkansas. A classic case of disinformation that was then spread widely and became misinformation.
With the advent of social media, misinformation has found a powerful platform that helps its spread faster and farther than ever before.
During the pandemic, conspiracy theories of all kinds — including those related to injectable 5G chips, that the pandemic was ‘made up’ by pharmaceutical companies and doctors to ‘control’ the population through vaccines and public health control measures and that vaccines actually spread the disease rather than prevent it — led to rising anxiety of the population as well as rising distrust in our public health systems and officials.
Throughout all this, our food system was relatively immune from any elaborate online misinformation campaign.
But 2023 has proven that even our food system is not immune from misinformation, or even ignorance standing in for misinformation. It’s a worrisome trend because, if we cannot trust the information about how we produce, process and consume our food — which is fundamental to our survival — then we are in for a world of hurt in the coming years.
Let’s look as some concrete examples.
For about three years now, members of the food industry and Federal government have been negotiating the text of a Code of Conduct for the retail food industry in Canada.
A Code of Conduct, at its source, is designed to provide a predictable, transparent and fair framework to govern the relationship between food producers and food retailers. At its source, the Code of Conduct will prevent distortions in the market (such as experienced between Loblaws and Frito Lay in the past, and now being experienced by Carrefour in thirty countries with the same company) and also, allow small to medium food producers to garner fairer access to grocery retailer infrastructure. Through this, and based on experience in other countries with a Code in place, another goal is to ensure fair and transparent pricing for grocery items, and the establishment of an independent mechanism to resolve disputes.
The Code could’ve been finalized a year ago, but certain members of the industry have resisted. One of those is Loblaws, one of the largest food retailers in Canada, and one whose reputation — whether earned or not — has been tattered over the past few months.
The President of Loblaws — Galen Weston — told politicians in December, 2023 that implementing a Code of Conduct would actually increase food prices in Canada by $750 million, rather than stabilizing or reducing food prices as has been seen in other countries. He was basing his conclusion supposedly by what was happening in Australia, which has a Code in place, and where, he alleged, the third party arbitrator had sided with manufacturers 100% of the time in agreeing with their cost increases, which led to higher retail prices on grocer shelves.
This was a shocking statement by someone who was supposedly negotiating in good faith on finalizing a Code of Conduct for Canada, and supposed expert in the food retailing industry. So, when La Presse journalists checked with Australian authorities on Mr. Weston’s claims, those authorities contradicted Mr. Weston’s conclusions, stating that the Australian third party arbitrator had no mandate to rule on costs, and that it did not rule in favour of manufacturers 100% of the time. Loblaws issued a statement to the media a week or so later, confirming that Mr. Weston had erred in his representation of the Code.
Mr. Weston — wittingly or unwittingly — was engaging in a classic example of misinformation designed to put Canadians political decision makers on notice about the effect further regulation of the retail food sector would have on food prices. His preference: leave things as they are, as Loblaws is responsible enough, he claims, and has stabilized and reduced grocery pricing all by itself, and therefore doesn’t need a Code.
In another case that generated good headlines was the revelation that Canadian grocery chains would generate a record $6 billion in profits in 2023. This number was calculated by Jim Stanford, an economist who is Director of the Centre for Future Work, a progressive think tank that conducts economic research on a range of economic issues facing working people.
In testimony before the House of Commons permanent Committee on Agriculture and Agri-food — the same committee that Mr. Weston appeared before, and made his comments on the Code of Conduct — Stanford stated that claims that grocery retail chains were not profiting from food inflation was erroneous and that profits for the largest five retail chains in Canada would reach the record level of $6 billion in 2023 noted above.
The problem with this claim is that no one — not politicians, not industry observers, not journalists — challenged the $6 billion number. It fit right in with the heated rhetoric started by the Federal NDP early in 2023 that Canada’s grocery chains were taking advantage of food inflation and ‘gouging’ Canadian consumers. They even coined the term ‘greedflation’ to be the catchy social media term. It is a myth that has taken hold in the minds of Canadians, without a lot of data to back it up.
Sylvain Charlebois — Senior Director of the Agri-food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax — took Mr. Stanford to task. In his analysis, Mr. Charlebois noted that Mr. Stanford was taking his numbers from a particular data table from Statistics Canada, rather than from grocery retail chain annual reports. The Statistics Canada data includes financial returns not just from the major grocery retail chains, but also, corner stores, alcohol distributors and specialty food stores. As such, the numbers Stanford are using are over-stated.
When looking at the grocery retail chain annual reports, the gross profit of the chains over the past five years (food revenues minus food costs), has remained relatively stable: in the neighbourhood of 32% for Loblaws, 25% for Sobey’s and 20% for Metro. Net profit (which adds in labour costs, general and admin) will top out at about $3.8 billion over the past 12 months (based on actual results, and projections for the remaining 3 months of their fiscal years), and will not reach the $6 billion that Mr. Stanford is claiming.
The third case of misinformation that caught my eye this year was the claim by Pierre Poilievre that the carbon tax was responsible for higher food prices and should be ‘axed’ in order to make food more affordable in Canada. The slogan is catchy: Axe the Tax. This has been followed up by multiple social media posts claiming that, if only this egregious tax were eliminated, farmers and truckers would have lower costs and grocery pricing would decline. The logic is simple: if the farmer and the trucker have to pay the tax, their costs are higher, and those higher costs show up in higher retail pricing. So, eliminate the tax, and prices will go down.
But it’s just wrong.
Research by Statistics Canada, and related in a comprehensive article published by the Institute for Research on Public Policy, shows that carbon taxes have a very small (0.66%) effect on energy prices. The effect on food prices is even smaller — 0.33% of price increases. In fact, most households received more in rebates that the total amount of carbon tax they paid during the course of the year. Another analysis undertaken by university researchers in March, 2023 found that the carbon tax, set at a rate of $65 per tonne (the rate which took effect on April 1, 2023), netted a $2 increase in the monthly groceries for those living in Ontario, and $5 for those living in Alberta.
That’s all for individual homes and consumers. It doesn’t include the effect of the carbon tax on certain farmers, who rely on the burning of natural gas and diesel fuel for both drying grain and heating barns to raise livestock. Many concerns have been raised by farmers, particularly in the prairies, of the cost impact on their operations of having to pay the carbon tax without a corresponding rebate. While the individual cost amounts published by farmers look large, it isn’t known with any certainty what percentage it is of their total expenses, or how that flows into the pricing of their product.
We know, for example, that wheat is subject to a global commodity price. Individual farmers cannot simply tack on increased costs associated with the carbon tax — or any other input for that matter — to the price they sell their grain; they are price takers, not price setters. The price is the price, and any cost increases, unfortunately, are absorbed by the farmer.
Ditto any cost impact on trucking the product from the farm gate to a processor, or from processor to retail grocer. The trucker absorbs the cost impact of the carbon tax, and cannot pass along that increased cost to the price of the good they are transporting.
It might be just me, but my impression is that misinformation is, for the most part, directed at government institutions in general, and politicians in particular. As a result, it is a cancer that erodes confidence in many government institutions that are designed to be impartial and to provide neutral advice and information to citizens and government. But if people start dismissing information from government bodies because they no longer trust what those institutions are providing, then this puts at risk the health and well being of citizens across the country. What happens to food recall notices issued to stop the spread of E Coli bacteria outbreaks? Do people ignore them because they don’t trust the source any longer?
That said, government institutions and politicians have themselves blame. Institutions have become far more politicized than ever as they are directed by their political masters to toe a particular policy line. The ‘independence’ of certain government agencies is being undermined from without as politicians try to appease the population in their changing beliefs. What’s worse are politicians trying to look like they’re doing something, and then failing, which further undermines their credibility, and that of various government institutions for which they are affiliated.
Minister Champagne’s attempt to lower grocery prices through a series of high-profile meetings in Ottawa with grocery chain CEOs is a good example. It’s good theatre, but does nothing to help individual consumers in their quest for pricing relief at the grocery store because it does nothing to address the underlying issues that contribute to higher food pricing. Supply chain improvements, more domestic production of essential food, less food waste and the implementation of a Code of Conduct — these are all are complex issues that are immune from simplistic solutions, as well as from a 15-second sound bite and a photo-op.
Misinformation that attacks political personalities and government institutions is bad enough. But when the target becomes our food system — a system that provides something essential for our survival — then the consequences are far more grave. By undermining our food system — from farmer, to trucker, to retailer to consumer — we put at risk the integrity and safety of the entire food chain. Everyone — politicians, CEOs, citizens — have a responsibility and a duty to maintain and enhance the integrity of our food system. If we don’t, then we risk the safety for consumers, the livelihood of farmers and truckers, and the availability of essential food stuffs for us all.
