Conference Board’s food strategy summit missing important voices

By: Catherine Porter Toronto Star Apr 09 2013

Our food system is broken.

Farmers are now making less money off their farms than they did during the Great Depression. Our national food guide tells us to load up on fruit and vegetables, but we don’t grow them any more — 80 per cent of produce is imported. Just four companies control more than 70 per cent of food sales in the country! Around 2.5 million Canadians are constantly hungry, and a quarter of us are obese. Canada is the only G8 country without a nationally funded school meal plan ….

These are big problems. So I’m glad the Conference Board of Canada is hosting its second Food Summit at the Metro Convention Centre this Tuesday and Wednesday to hammer out a national food strategy.

But I have concerns. The tickets are around $1,000 a person. And most of the speakers represent Big Industry: Nestle, Cargill, Maple Leaf Foods.

Shouldn’t a national food strategy include all voices, including the majority who can’t afford a $1,000 ticket to the table?

Here are three voices you won’t hear at the conference, three who should be part of the conversation. They all spoke Monday night at an alternative summit in Regent Park.

Diana Bronson is the executive director of Food Secure Canada, which bills itself as the “voice of the food movement in Canada.” Two years ago her non-profit organization released its own national food policy. Volunteer animators criss-crossed the country, talking to 3500 people — often around kitchen tables — to develop the plan, which they call the “People’s Food Policy of Canada.”

The people, Bronson says, want a completely revamped food system, one that puts health and livelihoods over shareholder returns. That means an emphasis on local, ecologically grown agriculture, as well as a living wage so people across the country can afford to eat regularly.

“We have food system that is unfair, unhealthy and unsustainable. We need to turn those three things around together,” she says. “Industry can’t see food in any other perspective than a commodity. In our view, it’s also profoundly cultural, social and certainly sacred. It’s a public good.”

Don Mills is the president of Local Food Plus, a non-profit organization that certifies sustainable farmers and food processors and links them to buyers, including the University of Toronto. Mills is also a farmer. He grows cash crops and raises pigs and cattle.

In the late 1990s, he bought a 100-acre farm from his parents for about $200,000. About six years ago, a similarly sized farm across the road sold for $460,000. Last spring, a neighbouring farm sold for just under $1 million. Farm prices are skyrocketing, much like house prices in Toronto, as investors — many foreign — snap them up.

“It’s hard to envision how young farmers who want to supply local markets will get access to land,” he says. “We should all be interested in the increasing foreign ownership of farmland.”

Tzazna Miranda Leal is a community organizer with Justicia/Justice for Migrant Workers, which works for the rights of the more than 60,000 migrant workers arriving each year in Ontario to plant our food, weed it, harvest it and process it. She calls them “indentured labour.”

In theory, these workers are covered by benefit like workers’ compensation. But they rarely make claims.

“There is no appeal or review process to repatriation. If they stand up for their rights, they can be sent home and nobody ever finds out,” Leal says.

She gives examples of workers going blind, having fingers crushed in machines, putting their backs out over years of repetitive strain but never getting compensated for it.

“Assuming food grows ethically because it grows locally is irresponsible,” she says. “We have to look at labour standards for the growing of our food.”