Agriculture This Week: How secure is our food supply?

YORKTON - When you live in Canada it’s difficult to envision grocery store shelves being empty.

Even at the height of the COVID crisis food was always there – albeit some brands and specific items missing or in limited supply.

Realistically, when you live in a country which has long been a major agricultural produce producer which has had to export massive amount of foodstuffs because we out produce domestic consumption, food supplies are not a concern.

Certainly we’ve embraced that reality as consumers.

Drive around your local community and notice how few backyard vegetable gardens exist today.

While no hard data on this one – I am quite confident that if you polled households most would not have a deep freeze filled with food.

Even on the farm food security has largely been left to the grocery store and the distribution system supplying the store.

Few farms bother with a few chickens for eggs, or a milk cow, or a few pigs. They may not have an apple tree or Saskatoon bushes, or even a vegetable garden.

It’s a time thing with ever larger acres of land to cover, and often off-farm careers as well.

It just seems easier to head the store for eggs and milk and lettuce.

But, then you hear from Brian Conn, LDC’s Country Manager speaking at a Brick Mill Dinner in Yorkton how Brazil accounts for about 85 per cent of the world’s orange juice.

Now no one is going to suggest orange juice is essential to our diets, so if suddenly that supply chain from South America was broken it would not be exactly a disaster, but it is a situation which reminds of the old adage of putting all ones eggs in a single basket being generally a bad idea.

When it comes to world trade a lot of things can have impacts that could disrupt things.

We see that currently as the Chinese are throwing up politically-motivated roadblocks to imports of Canadian canola oil.

There are always concerns in terms of politics. A change in who is in power, either by the ballot box or often at gunpoint, can change the parametres of trade.

Then there are weather disasters, crop issues such as disease and insects, employee strikes (we see that with port workers in Canada right now), and wars (Ukraine as an example at present).

So it’s not overly difficult to envision a disruption to something like orange juice when it largely comes from a singular source.

And, just maybe that is an indication we might all be better served to secure our own food when possible – because one never knows what tomorrow might bring.