Editor, The Times:
The People’s Food Policy is a document that was pulled together around the Nation’s Kitchen Table’s and adopted this spring. The NT Food Coalition/Food Action group works in much the same way.
From informal discussions, the information shared is used to promote local initiatives, including the production and sale of locally raised food items, and the sharing of “how to” knowledge.
Each of us is a member – because we live in Canada and rely on food to live. You can become a more active member by reading about the People’s Food Policy at www.peoplesfoodpolicy.ca
Key recommendations include:
• Localizing the system so that food is eaten as close as possible to where it is produced.
• Supporting food providers in a widespread shift to ecological production, including programs to support new farmers getting on the land.
• Enacting federal poverty elimination and prevention programs to ensure Canadians can better afford healthy food.
• Creating a nationally funded children and food strategy.
• Ensuring that the public, is actively involved in decisions that affect the food system.
The industrial food system raises numerous challenges for the food sovereignty of rural communities. The cost of store-bought food is higher and the nutritional value lower, even though it is more convenient.
Pressures of centralization leave many rural communities without the required facilities to inspect or process food for local consumption. Food knowledge relevant to the local ecology is being lost.
By building the resilience of each community’s food system, we build a diverse, local, and resilient national food system. Proposed solutions include:
• Establishing community-based knowledge exchange networks to facilitate the exchange of food knowledge, information, and ideas across cultural and generational lines. We are developing a Food Action Website.
• Developing a national food/land protection system in which land-use planning prioritizes and protects food cultivation and is inclusive of all food sources, including those used for hunting, gathering, fishing, and agriculture.
• Identifying food as a priority area for small business development and employment training.
• Education is a key to ensuring broad public support for environmental sustainability; so formal and informal methods must be used to promote knowledge and understanding of the ecology of agriculture and the impacts of agriculture on the environment. As food becomes an ever more significant factor in worldwide social stability, the need for the population to have a fuller understanding of food production will be increasingly important. School curricula at every grade level need to incorporate both practical and academic lessons about sustainable agriculture.
I encourage you to engage in discussions about the food you eat with the members of your family. Educate yourself by reading the People’s Food Policy and committing to becoming more involved in the production of your own food.
Cheryl Thomas
Clearwater, B.C.
