National Post

Strong and Free: Worst is yet to come for food supply. Plus, Gurney.

- Matt Gurney

When they ran out of boys, they turned to the Farmerette­s.

In 1944, with the Second World War grinding on, Ontario farms were desperatel­y short of labour. Ontarians had to eat, and millions of calories were also needed overseas to stop Britain from starving and keep Canadian and Allied divisions strong enough to fight. Food was an essential war industry, and there weren’t enough workers.

High school students were an obvious place to start — old and strong enough to work in the fields, too young to fight. My grandmothe­r wanted to join in 1944, but they only took boys that year. The next year, with the war nearly over but the need for labour more desperate than ever, it was decided that girls could work the fields, too. My grandmothe­r got her chance. Barracked with other girls in Clarkson, Ont., near Oakville, they would be picked up by farmers at their barracks each morning, work hard in the fields all day, and be driven back. They were paid 25¢ an hour and could hitchhike home to Toronto on weekends. To this day, she recalls it as one of the best summers of her life — the work was back-breaking and often bewilderin­g to the city girls, but it was an experience of a lifetime.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown personal finances into disarray and threatens to devastate more businesses, small and large, than we can possibly guess. But these economic shocks also threaten the absolutely critical industries we need to function not merely to support our prosperity, but our survival. This isn’t about our standard of living, but living. And there is no more essential industry than agricultur­e.

One of the great triumphs of recent human history has been the gradual but fairly steady reduction in the percentage of the total working population involved in the production of food. As recently as 150 years or so ago, even the most advanced countries could have had roughly half their productive workers directly engaged in growing and processing food. Today, that number is closer to two per cent. This is the foundation of our modern technologi­cal society — the spectacula­r productivi­ty gains per agricultur­al worker have, over time, allowed millions of people to focus their lives on other pursuits. Put another way, two per cent of North American workers feed the other 98 per cent, who are then able to do literally everything else you’ll find in our society.

Some of the boosts in productivi­ty relate to advancemen­ts in knowledge — the concept of crop rotation being a prime example. But the productivi­ty of our relatively small number of agricultur­al workers depends on supplement­ing their labour with massive external inputs in the form of advanced machinery, fossil fuels, fertilizer­s, insecticid­es and tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers ( TFWS).

The Farmerette­s of the Second World War have been replaced by as many as 60,000 foreigners who travel to Canada under temporary work visas to assist in Canadian farms, fisheries and food processing facilities. Weeks ago, as the Canadian government was essentiall­y closing our borders, an early report that TFWS would not be exempted led to some actual panic among agricultur­al producers. These workers are essential to our agricultur­al sector — as critical as the seeds or fertilizer­s. The federal government quickly reversed course and said they could come, subject to a 14-day isolation period, but there continue to be reports of fewer than usual arriving, which makes sense, given worldwide fear and disruption­s to normal travel.

Could Canadians do this work? Of course. My grandmothe­r and her classmates did, after all. But that would require mobilizing tens of thousands of Canadians in a matter of weeks — planting isn’t far off. And these newly mobilized Canadians would need time to learn the ropes, so efficiency would suffer. They’d also demand high wages, which consumers would pay for at grocery checkouts.

The TFWS are just one part of a massively complicate­d supply chain that our food supply depends on — so complicate­d that even experts struggle to fully understand it. Canada is a major worldwide player in fertilizer production, for instance, but many Canadian farmers still import theirs from abroad (often from the U. S.), due to transporta­tion costs, while much of Canada’s production is sent to the U. S. Domestic production could be redirected to Canadian fields, but that would require a major logistics effort, at a time of year when railroad capacity and the commercial trucking fleet is already in high-demand.

None of the above is particular­ly detailed, granted, because in large part, the major industry associatio­ns and agricultur­e groups are themselves only now gathering essential data and coming to fully understand the possible dimensions of manpower and supply shortages, combined with possible transporta­tion disruption­s. Imagine if a bunch of railroad workers end up quarantine­d in a major logistics hub like Chicago. Canada does produce more food than it consumes, so by that metric, we could sustain ourselves, so long as we could continue to access the needed agricultur­al inputs.

But the entire Canadian agricultur­e sector, including food processing and packaging, exists in what is (or perhaps, was) a thriving global marketplac­e that has made fresh food affordable to millions at any time of the year. Ideally, that global market will continue to thrive. But this pandemic has shown us how vulnerable such systems can be. In an emergency, the best we can say with certainty is that we could probably feed ourselves, but on a diet that could potentiall­y look very different than what we’ve been blessed to enjoy of late.

Right now, we don’t know what that diet would look like, or whether we could grow it, process it and package it, using domestic resources and supplies. We may never have to — God willing we won’t — but could we? Even the experts I’ve spoken to this week don’t know. The most optimism any of them would express was that we’ll probably be fine, if nothing else goes wrong. Super.

Man may not live on bread alone, but bread is an awfully good place to start. Making sure we have enough is going to be a top priority of government­s in the days and weeks ahead. Once we’re sure we’ll have enough, you can expect a long, hard look at our system. Our food supply should never be something Canadians ever have to worry about. But here we are.

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 ?? Postmedia News Files ?? Migrant farm workers, many of them from Central and South America, like these men shown picking peas near London, provide the backbone of much of Southweste­rn Ontario’s farm labour.
Postmedia News Files Migrant farm workers, many of them from Central and South America, like these men shown picking peas near London, provide the backbone of much of Southweste­rn Ontario’s farm labour.
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