Some Rays of Sunshine in a Bleak Food Policy Landscape

Our approach has us galloping off in all directions. To the detriment of us all.

Troubling headlines about food continue to bedevil us these days.

Inflation is rampant, particularly for groceries.

Ukraine has 20 million tonnes of grain sitting in silos that it cannot move to world markets, markets that are now threatened with famine. And it now appears the Russia is helping to orchestrate a famine, to force the West to make concessions to it.

In Canada, our Dairy Commission has proceeded with another increase in the price of milk, the second this inflationary year, and again with little advance notice, little information sharing or justification and little opportunity to comment on the impacts.

Politicians are reacting with predictable solutions to help Canadians: checks (or tax credits) for individuals below a certain income line or a temporary suspension of taxes on fuel. The Federal Government is taking a different approach, by introducing a series of measures — in addition to central bank interest rate increases — that are aimed at providing more money for certain targeted groups in society, such as seniors, workers and renters as well as introducing programmes that will leave more money in the pockets of Canadians over time, such as daycare and dental care.

As these programmes take hold, some Canadians will be better equipped to deal with rising prices, as they’ll have more cash to help mitigate the price increases. But not all of us.

And this is where the lack of leadership on food policy shows its true colours: no targeted programmes to help consumers with acquiring basic foodstuffs, an indifference to a pending price increase for milk products that is under the Government’s direct influence and a moribund Food Policy that speaks to none of this.

To my surprise, the unwieldly Food Policy Advisory Council seems to have woken up and started meeting again. After a long hiatus that I wrote about here, additional meetings have been held throughout 2021 and into 2022. The Council has focused on the following issues: School Nutrition, reducing food insecurity, reducing food loss and waste, supporting sustainable agriculture and how to strengthen indigenous food systems.

As of April, 2022, the Council was essentially winding down its work, having prepared four reports in the four of the five key areas they were mandated to provide advice, and was looking at ways to keep up the engagement with relevant Federal departments. Of course, the reports written by the Council are not public, so we have no idea on what the Government will do with them, and how it could influence their thinly conceived Food Policy. We can hope for improvements.

But that activity is for the future. The Government seems to be frozen with inactivity as there’s nothing announced out of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada that shows they intend to do anything around securing Canada’s food supply, increasing food security, diversifying crop production or anything else that really matters to consumers’ pocketbooks or to the future of what food we’ll have in this unstable world. When you see the pronouncements of Minister Bibeau, its as if the war in Ukraine isn’t happening, supply chains are fine and the effects of climate change on crops worldwide are fantastical.

But all is not bad.

For the first time ever, the Minister Bibeau published the mandate letter for the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC), the Federal body that sets the base price for liquid milk products for Canada under our Supply Management System (SMS).

The very first item on the list of priorities for the CDC: conduct a review of their process to set dairy pricing, and revisit their communications procedures to ensure they are clearer and more transparent when communicating their decisions to the public and to diary stakeholders.

This is a welcome directive, as the CDC has been criticized for being opaque, to say the least, in how it arrives at its decisions, and how it communicates with the public about them. Particularly this year, when food inflation is the highest its been in at least a decade, simply deciding that two price hikes in a year are necessary — without much supporting material or justification — looks like a money grab for producers, producers that, under the SMS, are guaranteed to get paid, no matter what. It’ll be a challenge for the CDC though, as they are down two members of their 3-member Governing Board. Given how long the Federal Government moves on appointments, this could endure for some time before they get any relief.

Also at the Federal level, Health Canada appears to be finally ready to publish its new labelling guidelines for foods that are high in salt, sugar and saturated fats. In the works since 2016, the intent of the new labelling guidelines is to make it clearer for consumers that foods with greater than 15% of the recommended daily allowance of any of the three categories are clearly labelled as such on the front of the package. This should help consumers better identify those products that contain too much of any of the three categories, and make healthier choices of the foods they buy. These new guidelines replicate what’s in place in other countries like Chile, and have had corresponding positive effects of decreasing the consumption of highly processed foods and helped consumers make healthier choices. At the core of such guidelines: combat the rise of chronic diseases like obesity.

Meanwhile, the Government of Quebec seems to have listened to some critics on the issue of health prevention and its links to food. While Christian Dube has been laser focused on reforming the mammoth that is our Health Care system in Quebec — getting rid of fax machines, hiring more nurses and digitizing the information flow, as well as dealing with COVID-19 and Monkeypox — he’s found the time to address the issue of health prevention. Earlier this month, he announced a cross-governmental plan to address questions around our sedentary lifestyle, encouraging youth to be more physically active and improving how communities are designed to encourage healthier lifestyle habits. He’s doubled the funding in the Health ministry’s budget for this exercise over the next three years, and further, has asked Quebeckers to pay attention to five different factors in their daily lives: their consumption of alcohol, their consumption of tobacco products, what they eat on a daily basis, their weight and their level of physical activity. He stated that additional tools would be provided on the Health Ministry’s web site in the coming weeks to assist citizens in developing healthier lifestyle habits.

These initiatives are all welcome developments. Making any pricing increase decision more transparent for such a basic staple as milk is more than welcome; its a requirement. And the CDC improved things by releasing a price increase of 2.5%, and providing reasons & rationale for how they arrived at their decision. It’s an improvement.

Similarly, simplifying labelling requirements for highly processed foods based on scientific research that demonstrates their harmful effects to human health will make it easier for consumers to shift their spending dollar to healthier options. Dedicating money and resources to educating citizens on how to improve their health is the least we can do to ensure that we don’t end up in the hospitals and clinics of the ‘Ministry of Illness’.

These are all important pieces of a proper Food Policy.

And that’s the problem. They’re just pieces.

Clearer labelling on the health effects of highly processed foods, plus more education on healthy lifestyle habits, plus more emphasis on the consumption of real food, plus encouraging the consumption of real food that’s grown close to where you live, plus encouraging farmers to implement better land management practices, plus providing support for low income consumers to make the shift from cheap, highly processed foods to real foods — all with the goal of improving the overall health and wellbeing of citizens — that’s what a linked and connected Food Policy should be about.

Instead, we get policy by piecemeal. The Federal government seems fixated on mitigation of climate change on farms (a good thing) while ignoring structural issues that are more immediate, such as dealing with drought, high priced commodity crops, rampant food inflation and skyrocketing chronic diseases.

Quebec is doing better, investing money into augmenting our local production of fruits, vegetables and proteins, the elaboration of a comprehensive 10-year agricultural plan to change farming practices to meet a more climate challenged world, and implementing the health program changes noted above.

But governments need to work together, particularly on agricultural issues. We only have so much land and food production is something that we all rely on to survive. It wouldn’t seem that hard for both levels of government to work in a concerted manner, while still respecting their areas of jurisdiction. Instead, we get one approach at the Federal level, and 10 others at the Provincial level, and no one seems ready to take the leadership and set a common direction that we can all live with.

We can do better. What we eat, how much we’re able to harvest or import, and how it effects our environment depend on it.