Region’s food self-reliance in decline, study reveals
Maintaining and improving southwest B.C.’s food self-reliance in the coming decades will require a radical overhaul of the way we farm and a rethink of our export-driven food economy, according to a report by Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
The alternative is a future almost entirely reliant on food imports from regions already being hammered by drought and climate uncertainty.
“Without big changes we will see the economic leakage from our food system double,” said lead author Kent Mullinix, director of the Institute for Sustainable Food Systems.
Most of the value added to local crops through processing, distribution, sales and marketing happens elsewhere, representing billions of dollars that could and should be enriching the local economy, he said.
“Those dollars are all going to a corporate headquarters somewhere because we let our crops leave the region unaltered,” he said. “The real money in the food system is not in (farming), it’s in everything else. Instead of getting paid for that, we are paying someone else to do it.”
The Future of Our Food System predicts that the current export-driven agricultural economy will reduce food self-reliance in the region from 40 per cent to just 28 per cent, assuming a 60-per-cent increase in population. The southwest bioregion runs from Powell River to Hope including Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley.
“The same mix of crops in the same acreage and the same market focus have a pretty predictable outcome,” he said. “No real economic gain and our reliance on imported foods increases substantially.”
“To maximize our food security, we will need a new policy environment and incentives for people to farm small parcels of land and to encourage the kinds of small businesses that will process and distribute what we grow.”