B.C. MUST BUILD ITS OWN RESILIENT FOOD SYSTEM

Agriculture and processing policies here are outdated, Evan Fraser says.

British Columbians face a major challenge: how to secure a year-round supply of fresh and affordable fruits and vegetables. This isn't trivial — fresh produce is the cornerstone of a healthy diet, but for many, healthy food is unaffordable.

What's worse, relying on California's endless summer is unsustainable and vulnerable. If climate change or supply-chain issues disrupt the Southwestern U.S.'s ability to ship fruits and vegetables north, we face a major problem.

Consumers already pay the price. Conflict in Ukraine, COVID-19 and the floods that cut off swaths of the province a couple of years ago have made it challenging to keep supply chains running and grocery stores full.

We must build a more resilient food system — one that is less vulnerable to bad weather and the vagaries of long-distance trade. B.C. must bring all parts of the food system, including production and processing, home and stop being as reliant on long-distance everything.

Many parts of the world are already taking heed. The Netherlands, Japan and Singapore are using advanced technologies such as controlled environment agriculture (also known as vertical farming), along with new forms of food processing, to localize food systems. B.C. should be winning on both production and processing, but lags. Unlike many parts of Canada, B.C. has an Agricultural Land Reserve, but only about 50 per cent of it is used to grow food. By comparison, the Netherlands manages to be the second-largest exporter of food by farm gate value in the world on far less land. And B.C.'s food-processing industry is small compared with historic trends or comparable regions.

The lack of processing in B.C. hurts everyone. If folks are wondering why chicken prices are rising, it's partly because some producers must ship chicken to Alberta, only to ship it back to B.C.'s grocery stores. Often, blueberries are sent south for value-added processing to avoid outdated regulations. French fries are processed elsewhere before being brought back to B.C.'s restaurants. It's essentially impossible to bring oats from the Prairies to make oat milk in B.C., even though this would help the climate and brings jobs.

Too many of B.C.'s policies related to agriculture and food processing were written before modern tools and approaches — such as growing plants indoors and without natural light — were possible. To be profitable, vertical farms, greenhouses and processors need produce on a year-round basis. This means regulations should be designed to encourage processors to acquire B.C. vegetables and fruits when they're available and be allowed to source from elsewhere at other times of the year. Clearer rules need to be developed to encourage food processing on low-quality soils, while preserving high-quality soil for traditional farming. And so B.C., like many parts of Canada, needs to modernize its regulatory environment.

Within Canada, private sector investment and government support for food processing and vertical farming are evident in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. A few years ago, 90 per cent of Quebec's leafy greens were trucked from the Southwestern U.S. Now it's 50 per cent. In Alberta, a burgeoning food processing and value-added sector provides a ready market for traditional farmers. But again, in B.C. there are headwinds. The province's own Vegetable Marketing Commission acknowledges that: “Declining numbers of processors within B.C. are making it difficult for producers to find value-added processing for their cover crops, thereby decreasing their sales opportunities.” Little wonder that farms that once produced peas, beans, corn and cauliflowers in B.C. have pretty well vanished. A recent report estimated that B.C. requires only about one per cent of its low soil quality ALR land to cure this problem and create a robust food processing and vertical farming sector.

Careful assessments of the environmental impact of such “high-tech food systems” suggest that, properly done, this should be a boon for sustainability. Vertical farms produce and process about 1,000 times as much food per hectare as do conventional farms and they do so with a fraction of the water and pesticides that conventional field farming needs. If a vertical farmer uses renewable electricity, their lettuce will have a smaller carbon footprint than the equivalent lettuce trucked in from California. And when production, processing and consumption all happen locally, very little rots and goes to waste.

Then there are the economic opportunities. In other parts of the world, these high-tech local production and processing systems not only build resiliency, but also generate economic prosperity: jobs building new facilities and jobs linked with running and operating the plants that grow, cut, wash and pack produce.

Of course, such high-tech food systems aren't a panacea, and they will never replace field-grown crops. For one, the number of crops that can be produced in vertical farms is limited and there are no scenarios where we will bring grains, cattle or oilseeds entirely indoors. And when field-grown crops and cattle are produced using climate-smart or regenerative farming practices, then those farmers — and the consumers that support them — should be proud that they're part of the solution to climate change and the biodiversity crisis. But having high-tech production and processing systems integrated alongside traditional field-grown crops makes sense and builds resilience.

This year, major climate catastrophes are decimating farms all over; the U.S., U.K. and even China are linking food security with national security and reforming policies to protect their citizens. As U.S. President Joe Biden has said, “If parents can't put food on the table for their kids, nothing else matters.”

Unseasonably warm weather followed by very cold conditions destroyed B.C.'s 2024 wine year and it seems unlikely that there will be many Okanagan cherries for sale any time soon. California is in the early throes of a mega drought that will likely last decades. Canada, and B.C., must adapt by changing regulations to allow us to grow and process more food, year-round closer to home.

In a world ravaged by climate change, we can no longer assume that others will feed us.