4. Agriculture, Infrastructure and Livelihoods

Executive Summary

Canada’s farm sector is one of the world’s least profitable. Our food production system is one of the world’s most export-focused - Canada has quadrupled food exports since the late 1980s. Our food system is energy-inefficient and climate-destabilizing. It is increasingly corporate-controlled. And it often operates counter to Canadians’ health and wellness aspirations.
 
The Canadian food system’s multiple pathologies are interlinked and logically related, and the same is true of the solutions. There exists, in Food Sovereignty, a coherent set of effective alternatives to our current food policies, alternatives that can restore prosperity, sustainability, and healthfulness. Solutions include:

• Refocusing our departments of agriculture away from commodity-based, export-focused agriculture and toward community-based, sustainability-focused agriculture.
• Supporting family farms by:

1. measuring policy success by net farm income rather than export volume;
2. relocalizing markets—more closely linking farmers and food-buying citizens in order to maximize the dollars farmers receive;
3. implementing capped, targeted farm aid programs aimed at supporting family farms;
4. expanding Canada’s excellent supply management systems, currently in place for dairy, poultry, and egg producers; and
5. harnessing diversity, dispersal, self-supply, knowledge, and renewable input cycles to increase the resilience and sustainability of our farms.

• Creating programs to support small farms, new farmers, and young farmers.
• Curbing non-farmer land ownership and creating new land tenure, financing, and farmland protection mechanisms.
• Restoring sustainable, dispersed, family-farm-based animal husbandry.
• Implementing strategies to decentralize and proliferate food processing in Canada.
• Using public food procurement dollars to push forward the food system Canadians want.
• Funding a huge, multi-channel education effort on food and related issues—using education to accelerate our ongoing move from "consumers" to sovereign "food citizens."

Download Discussion Paper # 4: Agriculture Infrastructure and Livelihoods (449.63KB)