Food Sovereignty Values Food Providers

Food Sovereignty Values Food Providers

for the pamphlet in full-colour PDF to download and print, click here.

FOOD SOVEREIGNTY:

• Supports sustainable livelihoods
•  Respects the work of all food providers

Food Sovereignty requires regulations appropriate to small-scale, locally-focused food production and processing.

Pearl Ward, Perth, Ontario

Pearl Ward has been selling eggs at the Perth Farmers Market since 1995, not many, only about 10-15 dozen cartons a week. One day the local health unit visited the market and she was told that her eggs need to be graded. Well not all the eggs, she sells duck, goose, turkey, bantam, and quail eggs, just the chicken eggs, and only if she sells them at the market. If she sold them at her farm no grading is needed. Graded eggs are no safer than ungraded eggs, according to some, making the Public Health Department enforcement of the grading regulation questionable (they do this on behalf of the Egg Farmers of Ontario, in this case, who have the power to regulate the production and marketing of chicken eggs in the province). Pearl, and other food providers like her should be supported by our food policy not penalized.

• Not all egg grading facilities are open to the public, forcing small producers to travel unnecessarily far if they want to access the market.

• Farmers and other food producers are dedicated to producing a safe and healthy product and understand the value of regulations to ensure public safety.  While health regulations should be based on sound science, they should be fair – and not tilted in favour of large corporations.

Food sovereignty supports livelihoods that are sustainable.

Terry Farnsworth, Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia

A ‘handliner’ fishes for a living using a hook and line, usually one person in one small boat. Only ten years ago hundreds of fishermen in the Bay of Fundy region made a good living handlining.

In 1996 local hook and line fishermen in the Bay of Fundy fishermen had received a community quota, and were well on their way to managing the fishery themselves. They were also exploring local and niche markets for their high quality fresh fish. Today all the handliners from the Bay of Fundy– in fact in all of Nova Scotia – are gone. There are no groundfish left in the Bay of Fundy. Throughout Atlantic Canada, most of the groundfish have been wiped out by the destructive gear of corporate industrial fishing fleets, which are promoted by the Federal Government’s fisheries policy.

The Kirby Report on the future of the Atlantic fishery, written in the 1980s, lays plans to industrialize the fishery with large off-shore trawlers. It calls the inshore fishery “a make-work project.” Though Kirby assumed the Cod would last forever, in little more than ten years of the full-scale use of trawlers, the Cod had disappeared. The example of the fishery is a stark example of what government policy has been doing in agriculture. It just takes longer to destroy the land than it did the fish.

• Federal and provincial policies have consistently support subsidies for large scale industrial export development, while entirely neglecting the development of local and direct market development

• Canada was one of two countries at the recent meeting of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) fisheries committee in Feb 2009, to refuse to make the protection of small-scale fisheries a FAO priority.