A piece I wrote six years ago in response to the PEI gov'ts release of the document promoting PEI as the Food Island:http://www.foodislandpei.ca/docs/Food-Island-Strategic-Plan.pdf
The Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan, stacked high with a poster worthy roster of industry leaders, has not taken a visionary view of how we grow and share food on PEI. Thanks to this fundamental lack of true vision, all Islanders should be deeply concerned. After all, it is our air, soil, waters and communities which could be further degraded in the pursuit of global markets for farm and fish products with our tax payer dollars funding the venture.
Although it contains all the important gloss and business lingo to seem progressive, the Strategic Plan has failed to be progressive in the critical arenas of true environmental stewardship and community building. The creators of the plan have grossly failed to acknowledge the current environmental and social realities which agri-business has wreaked upon our land and waters here. This is evidenced in their repeated presentation of PEI as a land of "pristine" environmental conditions perfect for basing an economy of food upon.
Throughout its history, PEI has been recognized for its distinctive food and agricultural advantages. Celebrated as a “million acre farm” for its red fertile soil, temperate climate, clean water, and pristine environment, its generations of farmers, fishers and food processors have secured a foundation in food production and manufacturing that has fundamentally shaped the provincial economy. This activity has transformed the Island landscape into a pastoral setting recognized by tourists all over the world.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
Concerning as well is the language utilized in the section on areas of concern regarding environmental restrictions and how they limit development:
Environmental concerns related to the food industry also have an impact. Environmental regulations in a province with the highest population density in Canada adds to the cost of production. For small companies, compliance requires time and considerable resources.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
Failure to acknowledge large scale agriculture's role in fish kills and soil degradation is not a forward thinking approach to industry renewal. Inherent in any re-configuring should be a long term plan for soil renewal, watershed improvement and a phasing out of all growing, producing and packaging practices which degrade the very resources which the Food Island plan hopes to promote and develop.
Prince Edward Island has enjoyed widespread recognition for its unique scenic landscapes, pristine waters and clean environment, promoted through years of tourism marketing.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
And just because the PEI Tourism Industry chooses to ignore the reality of the environmental crisis we are experiencing with our air, soil and waters here in order to promote the notion of unspoiled, purity of place that tourists desire, does not mean that this is the actual state of our environment.
Their strategic plan is designed to rely exclusively on competition within the global marketplace while acknowledging that globalization has limited the marketing and sales opportunities for small scale producers and packagers who do not or cannot play the game the way the global market and big business dictates.
Globalization is an asset and intricate factor. It creates vital opportunities to meet the evolving food demands of the world’s emerging economies and high-growth areas, including Asia, as incomes and protein consumption rise. Successful global supply chains are being forged with partners beyond national boundaries, enhancing value but also limiting options for smaller growers and food processors who fall outside the group.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
While paying lip service to climate change and the mass exodus of young Islanders elsewhere to find work as realities that need to be considered, the plan fails to fully recognize the driving force that globalization is in creating both of those concerns. Further, it demonstrates no real understanding of the complexities involved. It also does not consider the role large scale production of food has played in the disappearance of small family farms and the decline of rural communities.
A truly forward thinking society would know intuitively that creating an ideal based on competition is one which is bound to create a similar world as that in which we are currently living; a world entrenched in the inequitable sharing of resources and resource development driven by greed rather than by need.
"...too often, Island stakeholders see each other as competitors rather than partners, but partnership is what is needed to rise to the challenge of global trade.What is needed is a model of “co-opetition” or competitive collaboration"
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
Competitive collaboration is still rooted in competition and co-opetition is a strategy which relies heavily on the fundamental relationship of trust between players. Has the relationship between Island farmers and agri-business ever truly favoured the farmer? Not sure that large scale agri-business has ever proven itself trustworthy enough to make me want to shake on any deals. And who are the Island stakeholders referred to in the above quote? Are they even Islanders?
Is there room for sustainability, equality and sharing of resources in the industry proposed, government supported Food Island Partnership, or is it one which is dominated by a "cream of the crop" mentality?
“I love the story of the Island. You can’t find a more pristine environment to grow a potato or raise a steer. The Island is an isolated wonder of nature.”
-Chef Mark McEwan, Head Judge “Top Chef Canada,” The
Food Network, Toronto restaurateur and cookbook author.
I certainly do not see Islanders benefiting from taking a singular approach to product or resource development such as creating a best-of PEI services or product line. Just as seed potatoes and fox farming are not standards of excellence which Islanders should aspire to return to, neither should we aspire to create an Island economy that sees the best of what we grow and produce being shipped to foreign markets. As a small Island very dependent on imports we are the perfect place to create an economy of scale that sees us growing our food and teaching each other the most healthful and economic utilization of the food resources we produce. We could both employ and teach and feed each other in the process. Growing and preparing healthful foods could become part of our curriculum from grade school upwards. Already small scale producers here are reaping the benefit of the eat local movement. So are Island consumers. The Food Island Partnership doesn't see it this way. They think all Islanders should be brand ambassadors for an export product line that they both work to produce, and promote.
Other provinces have “buy local” programs. While successful in provinces with a large consumer base, the impact in a province with an internal marketplace of 145,000 people will be limited. What will have enormous impact occurs when 145,000 Islanders decide to become ambassadors for PEI food products. In the age of social media and the importance of credibility in marketing, it is crucial that a population demonstrate pride in, and knowledge of, its own products, in order to successfully export them.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
Instead of being progressive, this would set the stage for us to further become a banana republic by laying the groundwork for the development of underdevelopment of both our economy and culture, too much of which has already occurred and/or is still occurring.
"Underdevelopment is not lack of or insufficient development, as many people tend to think. It is a product or subproduct ofdevelopment. Underdevelopment derives inevitably from the colonial or neo-colonial forms of economical exploitation which still imposes itself in many regions of our planet." JosuedeCastro.com
We are living on a food insecure Island in a very hungry world. We simply cannot afford to create a "best of" Island products for export as the Food Island Strategic Plan would like to see happen.
"Still more deadly then severe and complete hunger is the phenomenon of chronic or partial hunger, because of its social and economical effects which silently undermine countless populations around the world." JosuedeCastro.com
Unless, of course, built into the Food Island schema, were policies to ensure better soil and water management and to see to it that a decent percentage of the food produced remain on the Island in order to feed hungry Islanders. But the overall tone of the document does not promote this.
One step in a new direction might be the implementation of a food surcharge as proposed by Island farmer Margie Loo.
The small surcharge could be levied on foods purchased which were not grown organically so as to to create a fund which could help encourage better soil management and reward those farmers on a sliding scale who are doing the expensive work of trying to improve soil quality while growing their crops. http://www.theguardian.pe.ca/News/Local/2015-03-07/article-4068555/Island-farmer-says-P.E.I.-needs-farm-surcharge-system/1
A change of consciousness is urgently needed. One that will bring about a new, more equitable reality--not a simple re-packaging of a way of being as the Food Island Partnership plan proposes. This way of farming has already contributed to the decrease in our ability to feed ourselves-- and to rural as well as environmental decline-- why continue supporting such a system?
Setting our sights or standards higher is another starting point, but not if it is simply to make us more desirable players on the global market. The global market is the problem--not the solution. It encourages a capitalist mindset and one which further ingrains the belief that natural resources exist to be developed and that nature is something over which humans should have domination. The global market place is why we have hunger in the world, is why our soils are depleted to the point of being almost barren on our Island, is why our well water is increasingly becoming less drinkable and is why there is decline in rural communities.
The set of beliefs which underlies our current economic system and upon which the proposed Food Island Partnership relies is the notion that once we create the best products, the bigger markets will want to do business with us and we will have a more secure economy. I don't see this as a food secure, job secure, or environmentally friendly way of doing business. This story line has been played out on the Island stage for far too many years and has served only to denude our land and rob our peoples of a way of life which once promoted a sense of community and caring. de Castro saw this same story being played out years ago in Brazil.
"One of the best regions to observe as test ground for our theories is the sugar-producing northeast of Brazil, with its typical natural environment. The life of its soil, water, plants and even its climate has changed because of the unbalancing and untimely action of colonizers gone blind by greed, always wanting to plant more sugar cane and produce more sugar. This is why underdeveloped countries are concerned with environmental problems and pollution. They worry because the underdevelopment they find themselves in is a consequence of a kind of development which was conceived with no respect for Nature and in which Man is merely an instrument for production." JosuedeCastro.com
Josue de Castro was a man ahead of his time. He coined the term underdevelopment based on what he was seeing happen in mid 20th century Brazil with their sugarcane plantations. He told of first realizing that hunger was a man made malady, born of economics and greed. The mangrove was where he saw men drawn like flies to dung in order to survive in a food system that was raping the land and de-culturing the peoples while it grew sugarcane to sweeten a global palate. The mangrove story is a powerful cautionary tale and one that all Islanders should pay heed to. We already are known producers of industrial potatoes for french fries for the global marketplace, and at what cost?
If you think that the Food Island Partnership is a wise investment for Island taxpayers, read this, and please, re-consider.
“In a mangrove everything is, was or will be crab, even men and mud. It was not at Sorbonne, or any other knowledgeable university, that I became aware of the phenomenon of hunger. It revealed itself before my eyes in the mangroves of Capibaribe, in the miserable neighborhoods of Recife - Afogados, Pina, Santo Amaro, Ilha do Leite. This was my university, my Sorbonne. The mud of the Recife mangroves, swarming with crabs and human beings made of crab meat, thinking and feeling like crabs.
These are amphibious creatures - living between land and water, half man, half beast. Fed in childhood with crab broth - this milk made of mud - they became foster brothers and sisters of crabs.
Soon I became aware of this curious mimicry: men resembling crabs. Crawling and flattening themselves like crabs in order to survive.
I had the impression that inhabitants of the mangrove - men and crabs born on the river banks - just sunk deeper in the mud as they grew.
This reality struck me from inside. That's how I discovered hunger.
At first I thought this was restricted to the area where I lived - the mangrove region. Then I realized that the mangroves were like a promised land in the starving scene of northeastern Brazil. They attracted men from other areas where hunger was even worse - regions of draught and sugarcane monoculture; where the sugar industry crushed men and sugarcane alike, turning everything into bagasse.
To see them act, talk, fight, live and die, was like seeing the tyrannical iron hands of hunger modeling the heroes of the greatest drama in earth - the drama of hunger.
Through the stories told by men and by following the river's course I came to know that hunger was not exclusive to mangroves. The mangroves just attracted hungry men from all over the northeast: those who came from the draught areas and those belonging to the sugar-producing zones alike. They all came to the promised land, to nestle in the mud nests built by both and witness the beautiful crab life-cycle. When I grew up and began travelling around the world I saw different landscapes and noticed that what I believed to be a unique phenomenon was actually an universal reality. That the human landscape in the mangroves repeated itself all over the world. Those characters from the mud in Recife were identical to others in countless areas plagued by hunger. That the human mud from Recife, as I had seen in my childhood, continues to tarnish our planet until today, like great black blotches of misery: the dark demographic spots of the geography of hunger. JosuedeCastro.com
The Food Island Partnership asks how will they measure their success?
How will success be measured? Success will be tied to the value of the food economy on Prince Edward Island: Employment and engagement in the sector, export sales of food products, economic impact of the sector and profitability and diversity of participating companies and individuals.
Food Island Partnership Strategic Plan
I encourage Islanders to consider what they truly want to see happen with food production on this Island. What could be our true measures of success on this Island?
What of an ideal that raises everyone up? What if our working efforts were aimed at taking better care of ourselves, our neighbours, and our Island environment out of a sense of caring? What if we grew the food we needed to become food secure and any extra food generated from a local grass roots economy is shared elsewhere? What of a culture of sharing, and an economy of sufficiency? What of minimal, sustainable and holistic resource development instead a culture of more, bigger and better? What of a propagating a culture which by its very nature facilitated a more peaceful, successful existence encouraging everyone to fulfill a moral obligation towards creating a more habitable society in which hunger is a forgotten word and the natural world is respected.
How many Islanders crawling on their bellies will it take before the governing elite recognize that we are not growing or sharing food equitably and sustainably?
Jill MacCormack
* As a 2018 addendum, I will happily admit there has been some good progress made in discussions surrounding improving food security on PEI, thanks in large part to the wonderful work of the PEI Food Security Network
https://peifoodsecurity.wordpress.com/. There has also been some improved creation and promotion of local food/ products in the three years since this essay was written (gladly think organic PEI oats https://heatherdale-wholesome-goods.myshopify.com/products/organic-fresh-cold-milled-oats)
yet the underlying thought process which brought the PEI strategic plan into being in the first place still urge a push towards production for a global market place as the best route for Islanders.
I still respectfully disagree.
Jill MacCormack
* And kudos as well to the Certified Organic Organic Producers Co-op http://organicpei.com/ for their continued excellent work.