The provincial government published a press release on August 17th, the day the election was called, advertising a new project to improve New Brunswick’s food system.
Details of the plan have not yet been shared with the public.
AAF Minister Ross Wetmore describes the province as having a “thriving food-producing sector,” but aims to expand it to feed more New Brunswickers.
Green MP and Agriculture, Aquaculture, and Fisheries critic Kevin Arseneau is deeply unsatisfied with the government’s lack of focus.
In a press release from the Green party published the same day, Arseneau called for “genuine action” from the government to improve the province’s food sovereignty.
CHMA’s Meg Cunningham called Arseneau to ask exactly what he would like to see happen.
M: So I’m interviewing you today about the press release sent out on August 17. And in that press release, it said that you proposed a bill back in May that had to do with food security. Are you able to talk about that a little bit more?
K: Absolutely. Well it was the second time we bring [brought] in a bill in the legislature, I think David Coon had brought one in 2015. And then we reworked it and resubmitted a newer version of that bill, just I guess, before a summer hit just before COVID, actually. And so in that bill, there’s many, many aspects to it. I guess one of the first one is import substitution. And we need to be looking at how our government institutions can help support small, medium farms in the province by giving itself some targets and try to hit those targets for buying local produce or local products, I guess. It’d be schools, hospitals, senior homes, these are all public institutions, or at least semi public for the nursing homes. That could be injecting lots of money into a circular economy here in New Brunswick and helping farms grow their markets. And so that was one aspect of it then another one is definitely agriculture. One of the big challenges in agriculture is finding new farmers, and so we need to be talking about farming in schools as a viable option, and so one aspect in there was integrating agriculture into the school curriculum. And then another one, which I find very important that was added on to it after my provincial tour that I did. What I heard from farmers all around the province was really questions of different regulations that there is in the agricultural sector, and they’re very hard to reach those regulations at because they’re not they’re not thought out on a scale basis. So they’re all basically made for big industrial Ag. models, and so small medium farms are having a lot of trouble being able to meet those regulations and small medium family farms in New Brunswick are not necessarily exporting so regulations don’t have to be international regulations, they could be local regulations. It’s a lot easier for the local markets to be able to know where product came from. When we talk about food security or I guess, la salubrité alimentaire [wholesome, healthy diet]… but when we look at if there was a salmonella outbreak, and so this all this tracking, and then and so it’s a lot easier for small farms, to be the… if ever there was a public health problem, because people buy directly from the farmer and so, that would be pretty. So, there has to be scale… our regulation has to be thought out thinking and keeping in mind the scale of the farm the scale also of the market, the reach of the market of that farm.
M: Okay, thank you. I assume you chose salmonella as an example just because recently New Brunswick had the issue with onions having salmonella. And would that be an example of what happens when you import the majority of your produce from one area in terms of like a public health outbreak?
K: Yeah, so obviously there’s a lot more risk of cross contamination. When you’re importing produce because these big industrial factories are receiving products from many, many farms, sometimes hundreds or thousands of farms. And that’s just not the reality in small medium scale agriculture. If we take the meat for example when you think of meat are small scale abbatoirs they’ll be maybe processing the chicken of one or two farms per day. So the risk of cross contamination is way less than a big industrial farm that’s processing thousands and thousands and thousands of animals per day that are coming from different farms and that are being packed together and sent out and exported. We have to think of regulation on a scale level. And we have to make, you know, small scale, local market driven, viable. We can’t expect small farms to have the same kind of equipment that big industrial farms have because the risks are just not the same. One thing that a farmer told me in my tour was giving the example of right now the regulation is all on what you need in your facility. So you need these… some kind of stainless steel tables, and you need stainless steel equipment everywhere and so a lot of the regulation is put on the equipment that you have, but instead if we would put… test the product at the end, it actually has a better effect and is a lot easier. So you let the facility figure out appropriate scale model and then you test the product at the end and usually when you do test it, you realize that there’s even less risk looking at the end product and then looking at the equipment used to process it.
M: Okay, thank you. Onto my next question. In the press release released by I believe it was the Green Party, you were quoted as saying there is too much talk and not enough action from this government. What action would you like to see from the government to improve for food security in your riding and in the province?
K: I think first of all, having worked with the department and having meetings and then talking with the minister on several occasions during the past two years, just having a focus on food would be the first step, I think. Right now, our Agricultural, Fisheries, and Aquaculture department is really an extension to economic development. And that’s the only way we see it, we see it as economic development and export development. So one of the first things I’d like to see is really simple but in the end would give that kind of vision and philosophy to the department and see “Food” added in the name of the department. So instead of being DAF, which means Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries, it will become, it would still be DAFF, but it would be the Department of Agriculture, Aquaculture, Fisheries and Food. And so by giving that vision to the department and saying someone, somewhere in government is thinking about food sovereignty and food security in New Brunswick. And I think that just that even as small as it is could have a long term effect. Then when we talk about action while we need to see the department give as much attention to food security and local food production as they do exportation. I’m not saying we have to stop exporting. What I’m saying is that if we could just look at local food on a balanced level, so 50-50. Let’s say the department instead of doing, right now it’s doing 95% exportation 5%, local market, but if we just give it a 50-50, kind of thought that would do a huge difference for that. And then we need, as I said, we need to have targets we need to set targets. It’s really nice saying that we believe in food sovereignty and we believe in food security, and I think we need to continue to plan. Well, if we don’t have any targets, then what are we going to measure this on? So I think the department needs to give itself some targets. And again, like I said, has to be looking at, you know, appropriate scale regulation. We need to….I often say the term agrarian reform, I think we would be ready for an agrarian reform here in New Brunswick, looking at the way that our agriculture sector has evolved, and trying to readapt it to the realities of today and have a kind of circular economy lens on our food production. That would definitely have some positive effects on our rural areas where the web of our rural areas has been diminished so much in the past 50 years, because of losses of farm. So on the East coast of New Brunswick, we’re seeing less and less farms. We’re seeing actually a lot of land going back to wooded lots and we’re losing fields. My wife’s grandfather who was a farmer before he died, I did an interview with him because I was working on a documentary, and I asked him, what’s the saddest thing that you find with the state of agriculture today. And he says, The saddest thing for me is seeing a field grow back into wood. Because I think of myself and my father and my grandfather that worked so hard to make that a field that produces food for your community. So that has to be thought also in terms of revitalizing our rural areas and encouraging young people into going into farming. I think that farming right now, the median age of farmers in New Brunswick is around 58 years old. It’s between 55 and 58 years old and just it’s going up all the time. We need to get young people back in agriculture, and to do that we need to look at agriculture in what I call the food sovereignty lens. So food sovereignty goes a lot further than food security. Food security is just making sure that New Brunswick has enough food to sustain itself and that everyone’s eating food. Now when you look at food sovereignty, then there’s a lens of you know, the quality of that food and the impact on the environment and also the social impacts on farmers. So our farmers living on sustainable wages and are able to make ends meet and are not working off farm to subsidize themselves, their farming, and their contribution, I guess to New Brunswick food security. So we need to be looking at that in a multi lens level. And another important aspect of food sovereignty is making sure that it’s culturally appropriate food. So especially with export driven food, we tend to look at monocultures, and try to do as much as we can to bring down the price as much as we can so that we could compete on international markets. Now when we think of appropriate, culturally appropriate food that takes into account what does the local population want to eat? And are we producing that food so they’re able to put that on their plate, and they don’t have to go buy some imported products.
M: Okay, thank you. Agriculture, Aquaculture and Fisheries is quoted as saying “work so far has confirmed that New Brunswick supply chain is resilient, and that demand for most food products can be met.” Do you agree with that statement?
K: Not at all. I mean, we produce some of our food. But if I take the example of potatoes, I mean we’re producing a thousand percent of the potatoes that we need, we’re way over on what we need in potatoes, but we’re still importing 80% of the potatoes we eat in New Brunswick. So we produce potatoes, we process them, we export them, and we’re importing potatoes for people for New Brunswickers to eat from Quebec from Prince Edward Island. And so when you think of food sovereignty, you need to be thinking also about, like I said, the social environmental economical impact on our communities and how far is this food traveling to get on New Brunswickers plates? So I mean, I think we do have….maybe given the small population that we do have the potential of land to feed New Brunswickers but where we’re lacking is infrastructure, is the age of farmers, is the number of farms, is the diversity of product. So New Brunswick is very, very concentrated in a few sectors. We take potatoes, blueberries, cranberries, and maple syrup, and then I guess fisheries like lobsters or farmed salmon. Then for those products, they’re all 1000% of what we eat. But when we look at beef, pork and then we look at vegetables. I mean, in New Brunswick, we’re only producing 8% of the vegetables that we eat in New Brunswick. So there is a big, big lack in some sectors, that’s, that’s very important and that can be changed just by saying, how about you guys just switch your culture? You have to make markets available, you have to create opportunities for people to buy local. Some communities do have farmers’ markets, but there has to be a diversity of ways to buy products from local farmers so that it becomes readily available to the people who want to buy it. One of the things I hear the most often from consumers is I really want to eat local as much as possible, but getting the product is just so hard. It’s a full time job in itself. And so that’s one thing that we have to be working on in New Brunswick.
M: So food accessibility is equally as important in that case.
K: Absolutely. I mean, we have food deserts everywhere in New Brunswick. And there’s not many places that are viable for farmers. If we look at the farmers markets, we maybe have four farmers’ markets where farms can make a worthwhile trip. If not a lot of the farmers markets and I’m the first one to lift my hat to them and encourage them to continue. Even I mean, me as a farmer, we’ve taken decisions to go to farmers’ markets where we weren’t even covering our costs. Because you know, we believe in the cause and we believe in building the community around us to be able to make it viable, but after a few years of not making your costs you just…you have to take decisions because in the end, you think it’s either I continue doing this by pure believing in it, or seeing my farm have to close down because I’m just I’m not making any money to be able to survive.
M: Okay, great. Is there anything you feel I have missed or haven’t given you the opportunity to talk about yet that you think it’s important for the public to know?
K: I mean, I could talk with you about agriculture for three days, no problem, but no, I think we’ve touched a lot of the subjects. Agriculture is a very complex sector, and it’s tied into so many things. It’s tied into the essence of what rural regions are. It’s tied into infrastructure, into economic development, into rural development, into health, into social development, it’s one of those sectors that’s really tied in. And I think the lack of vision of our agriculture in New Brunswick comes from the fact that we just see it as export development. And that’s one of the major errors that we’ve been doing for the past 50 years and New Brunswick is just looking at it like that. It is an opportunity it is, like I said, I do not think we could stop exporting tomorrow morning, and I don’t think that would be good for the agricultural sector. But we do need to start looking at diversifying, and that’s the word, and diversifying the products that we’re producing here in New Brunswick and helping make that possible. Give the opportunities also to the farms, through cooperative models, and to be able to control as much as possible the sale of the product because as soon as you get into monocultures and you start putting buyers in there, the farmers are always the people who make less money. That means less money coming into our communities. That means kids that play on the same hockey teams as kids in their community are playing on soccer teams or playing bands or you know, all that kind of community aspect to it.
Arseneau will continue to push the provincial government for details of the plan, and encourage attainable goals.
CHMA will revisit the subject next week with Sackville’s own Laura Reinsborough.
