Around the time President Donald Trump started threatening to start a trade war, Cortes Currents reached out to Dr Kushank Bajaj from UBC’s Institute for Resource, Environment and Sustainability and Marc Doll, from Foot Forward Forest Farm on Quadra Island.
The topic was food security and Dr Bajaj is one of the developers of a website called Canada Food Flows, which traces the amount of fruits and vegetables coming into British Columbia from other provinces and nations.
“The data behind the project, behind the interface, comes from my PhD work. I looked at climate risks in our fruit and vegetable supply chains, but the tool was more of a side project to connect Canadians with where their produce comes from. We are extremely disconnected from our food systems. I don’t know how many people look at where their produce comes from, and they’re putting it in their grocery baskets,” he explained.
“The reason I chose to focus more deeply into fruits and vegetables was that when I moved from India in 2019, I couldn’t believe how expensive produce in Canada was. I’m used to a place where vegetables need to cost less than meat, which never happens if you order a salad or try to make a salad in BC. Fruits and vegetables are such an essential part of healthy diets that we’ve often ignored. I was at a policy consultation in Ottawa, two or three years ago, and the topic was how will Canada sustainably feed the world, but the whole conversation was focused on cereals, meat and dairy. There was zero mention of fruits and vegetables. So on one hand, we are net exporters of food but that’s mostly driven by these other commodities, like cereals and meat. We’re dependent on imports for 75% of all fruits and roughly 50% of all vegetables, excluding potatoes.”
Cortes Currents: When you mentioned the low cost in India, would that be comparable to wages as well?
Kushank Bajaj: “Somewhat, I think it would be compared to wages, but it’s more about what we decide to subsidize. For the longest time, we were subsidizing cereals and other things just so that you can have basic caloric intake and food security based on that. There was no mention of a nutritious diet or a very holistic food security. You need to take not just calories, but enough protein, enough micronutrients, enough fats.”
Marc Doll comes from what, at first glance, seems like a totally different perspective. Foot Forward Forest Farm sells locally grown pastured chickens, custom made sausages, grass-fed lamb, free-range goat, pastured pork and free range pastured eggs. Prior to moving to Quadra Island in 2018, he was a Junior High teacher for 12 years and then started up his own Real Estate business. Doll devotes much of his free time to the local community and is a prominent voice in several organizations.
“The grocery store is full of food, thousands of different choices and a feeling of abundance has been the culture. During COVID we had this little blip in the world and we’ve learned that the food chain can be easily broken. The further we are from major hubs, the more important that is. So Ucluelet got a very good initiation when they had the forest fire and then the slides. They got completely cut off.”
“Food security is along those same lines. If an area is relying exclusively from elsewhere, it’s not resilient and it’s actually quite susceptible to some major shocks. When you look at the climate models and our industrial food production system, there are some inevitable shocks that are going to be heading our way. California’s Central Valley, where a huge percentage of our food actually comes from, is on the verge of running out of water. The great plains aquifer is being drawn back to where it lowers by feet every single year.”
“Then we have other shocks around soil degradation and erosion. A lot of the places that we are getting our cheap industrial food from are on tipping points where they’re not going to be able to produce in the way that we’ve become accustomed to. Over the next period of time a local area’s ability to provide for itself is going to become increasingly more and more important.”
Cortes Currents: To what extent is Quadra Island self reliant in terms of food?
Marc Doll: “There is a fantastic culture of gardening both on Cortes and on Quadra. You have people that are growing incredible amounts of food in a very small amount of space. That said, I think if we were to take a broader average over the entire island, it would be quite small. At the turn of the century Vancouver Island produced well over half of the food that it consumed. In the last article I wrote, it’s down to less than 15% of the food consumed on the greater Vancouver Island. Quadra Island would maybe be a little bit better than that, but I wouldn’t say it would be significantly better.”
Cortes Currents: Are there many farms on Quadra Island?
Marc Doll: “Farms in the traditional sense, no. There are a lot of people who do some small scale food production. There’s a growing amount of farm stands. Local retailers are making good efforts to have local produce available, but look at the Fraser Valley where farming is on a larger scale. There are not a huge number of Quadra farms to any scale. People use the word ‘hobby farm’ which I have an issue with, but to see people who are focused on starting an agricultural system on Quadra, I would say that’s pretty rare.”
Cortes Currents: We’ve been talking about quantity. What about quality? Locally grown as opposed to food that is mass produced.
Marc Doll: “That’s a really important question and one of the areas where a lot of education needs to happen. What’s the difference between a locally produced pasture raised non-GMO egg that’s made on a Quadra farm, as opposed to an industrial egg. Are they the same thing? The answer is no, they’re not the same product at all.”
“Just this morning I was having a conversation related to one of the boards that I’m on. She’s a client of ours, and says she can’t even eat industrial chicken anymore after having tasted what we produce.”
“They’re very different products. I call industrial chicken pablum on a bone because once you have real chicken, you know that chicken actually can have a flavuor if it’s grown in a way where it’s eating grass and bugs and able to move and develop some muscle texture. It is a different animal than the confined, high grain input, no movement, all kept awake 20-hours-a-day chicken that you’re going to buy at Costco or Superstore. Quality is incredibly important and generally a locally produced product is going to be of a higher quality, both to the palate and also in terms of its nutritional context. Our agro-industrial system has become largely based on three nutrients, NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) and that production through the soil, whether it be of animals or of fruits and veg means that you are ignoring a whole variety of micronutrients, which are essential to the development of the human body.”
Dr Bajaj pointed out the need for trade with other growing areas, “Our climate just does not allow us to grow everything. We can’t grow citrus fruits. We can’t grow avocados or bananas. You have to be dependent on other regions. There’s a reason why globalization has worked till now, before we started getting all these tariffs or threats of tariffs.”
“We can’t grow all year round. There was a time when people used to eat more seasonal stuff, which is not our reality anymore. People want strawberries in November and December for their desserts. We just cannot do that. We could do something with greenhouses and vertical farming, some commodity fruits and vegetables, but it’s not the complete solution. A lot of greenhouse and vertical farm production is extremely energy intensive and costly.”
Cortes Currents: What about the cost of transportation?
Kushank Bajaj: “The cost of transportation is built into the prices that we have. I don’t know exactly how much, transportation is part of the whole food bill. In Canada and the US, we have some estimates on it. Certain commodities are cheaper to transport and some are not. Bananas cost nothing, but they come all the way from Central America in ships.”
Cortes Currents: I’ve heard that they’re lower quality bananas and the more tasty varieties don’t ship well.
Kushank Bajaj: “I don’t want to start on bananas. If you eat bananas in Central America or in India or Southeast Asia, they taste so different. In India, we have hundreds of varieties of bananas. What we get here is almost raw, they haven’t been ripened properly. There’s only one variety, which works, I guess. They are transported well, have more yields and weigh more, but they do not taste like bananas to me.”
“We’ve moved to a more industrial way of producing food and grow certain varieties which are high yielding rather than nutritional or tasty. I’ll give you an example. I came back from India six months ago and I brought some nuts with me, some almonds, pistachios and cashews. I made my partner try it and she was like, “Wow, these taste way better than the California nuts that we get in Canada!’
“Most people, with food inflation happening, tend to go for the cheapest foods. Sometimes it might not be what’s grown locally. Garlic produced in BC is way more expensive than the variety coming from China or other parts. I would still buy BC garlic because of the nutrition and taste, but not everybody does that.”
“The way food is produced across most places now, it’s more using an industrial agriculture perspective. So you just want to increase yields. A lot of those more nutritious or better tasting foods are more expensive because they’re not produced in industrial style farming systems.”
Cortes Currents: None of the farmers that I know of on Cortes Island appear to be making much money. I know of one farm, for example, where they’re making about $3 an hour, but they love farming.
Kushank Bajaj: “It’s a major problem and little of what the food is sold for at the grocery stores goes to the farmer. We need a bigger policy change. We need bigger regulations and ideation in terms of how do we increase the profits of farmers if we want them to keep working and producing food.”
Marc Doll: “I can only really talk about my experience. We run a small farm on Quadra Island. We have 40 acres of which I’m hoping to eventually get about 25 of it into the system. In some way, we are a regenerative farm. Everything that we do, every gram of animal protein that we produce or fruits and veg that we produce for ourselves, the end result is the soil has to be better than when we started. So everything is about improving the system and improving the soil quality. That puts certain limits on how much production we can do. When I started with sheep, this land couldn’t support five sheep. I’ve now increased that number significantly and the land is thriving more with a higher headcount.”
“At the end of the day, could I make a living off of this farm? The answer is no, not in a regenerative way based on the parameters that I impose on myself. The reason why we can survive here is because we have invested our entire life into this. We don’t have a mortgage over our head, for example. So we’re able to make enough income to consistently tread water. There is income from our farm through a variety of systems. Some lose money. Our goat system probably loses money. For the first year ever, we had a profit on sheep. I’m a licensed slaughter facility and I’m a permitted sausage maker. When you put that ‘value added’ into the products, then there can be enough profit in there to actually say you are making a profit.”
“How we determine our prices on our farm, I think, is different from a lot of farms. We determine our price. What is the cost of the inputs? What is an hourly wage averaged out over all the systems at minimum wage, and then a 25% profit for the farm. That’s how all our prices are set.”
“Using that model, we charge considerably more for our product. When I brought our chickens onto the market here, the average ticket was selling for about $5 a pound. We didn’t try to compete. We said that it’s not worth us doing the work for $5 a pound and basically everybody that was doing it for $5 a pound when we got here has just stopped producing chickens. Last year, I think we’re charging $8.25 a pound because that’s what the model says the chicken is worth.”
“We have a waiting list for our chickens every year. There were enough people on Quadra and I have several clients from Cortes who purchase our products because they value the quality and they’re willing to pay the price based on that model. This is a culture that we’re trying to build because I believe that, as a farmer, if you’re trying to undercut your neighbor’s price, and you’re not actually charging a price that supports basic agriculture, you’re doing yourself and your community a disservice. I want more people on this island to be producing chickens, sheep, goats and vegetables.”
Cortes Currents: What do you say to people who say they can’t afford to buy nutritious food?
Marc Doll: “That’s a difficult scenario. There’s two ways of looking at it. We saw that increase of price during the pandemic in the commercial sector. When you go to Tru-Value here on the island, or you go to a Superstore where there were some significant price increases and people have struggled.”
“I would argue that food isn’t overpriced. Even at the grocery store, food is still underpriced because we don’t have a sustainable food system. The United States biggest food export is its topsoil. For every one pound of corn that it produces, it loses two pounds of topsoil. For every one calorie of food energy it produces, it requires 10 calories of oil. So to produce the system that we’re currently in with very historically cheap food prices, which are still too much for a lot of people, it’s not sustainable. It won’t continue like this. We’re going to see some significant increases in industrial food prices over the next 10 to 20 years.”
Cortes Currents: Most Canadians are purchasing their food through grocery stores and food chains. What has the Global Food Flows website discovered about where we’re getting our food?
Kushank Bajaj: “There were two new things that we did in this data product. We looked at how much food is coming to each Canadian province, and also estimated any interprovincial flows between the provinces. This wasn’t done before. We also looked at every US state and every other country, so we have a more nuanced understanding of where exactly the food is coming from. The other thing which was innovative was that we looked across 13 years.”
“If you look at our avocado supply in BC, for example, in 2010 roughly 30 to 35% used to come from California. Fast forwarding to 2022, we have 97% of all our avocados coming from Mexico.”
“The other interesting thing is that we see very different supply chains for Western and Eastern provinces. Just to give you an example of watermelons, BC sources a significant proportion of its watermelons from California and Mexico. When you look at Eastern provinces, their watermelon supply is more diversified so if there’s a shock in one region, they can hopefully more easily switch between supplying regions. For Western provinces, our options are limited unless new sources start coming in, but those are harder to set up. It doesn’t happen overnight.”
Cortes Currents: Tell me the stories of some other fruits and vegetables, like potatoes, tomatoes, peas, and carrots.
Kushank Bajaj: “Potatoes are interesting, they’re mostly carbs. Don’t get me wrong, I love potatoes, but from a nutrition perspective, it’s not an extremely healthy vegetable. Canada’s a net exporter of potatoes. We produce a lot of potatoes and potatoes grown across the provinces. It’s not just restricted to BC or Ontario. Potatoes are exported to the US a lot, where they’ve been made into foods like potato chips.”
“BC is dependent on the US for roughly 80% of its spinach and lettuce supply, roughly 70% for its onion supply as well. These are very big numbers. We cannot grow these things year round. We’ll have to source it from somewhere else.
Cortes Currents: What is BC a big producer of?
Kushank Bajaj: “It produces a lot of blueberries but, again, this is seasonal. We import blueberries from Mexico and other parts, including Peru, during the winter season. We produce apples, not enough to meet our own domestic supply, but there’s also varieties of apples.”
Cortes Currents: During COVID we had a breakdown of the supply chain and of course, people have been talking about food security for quite some time. Can you talk a little bit about potential threats from breakdowns and how vulnerable we are?
Kushank Bajaj: “We are definitely exposed just because of how dependent we are on international sourcing. The major thing we’re exposed to is climate change related weather extremes. We are seeing more of them right now. We’re going to see more of them in the future.”
“From another part of my PHD work, we looked at droughts across the supply chain, or heat stress. We found that on average, every time there is a drought the wholesale prices of lettuce increased by 35% and cauliflower by roughly 30% in Canadian cities.”
“The other thing I would like to add, in terms of risks, are tariffs.”
Cortes Currents: What kind of impact do you expect from Trump’s proposed 25% tariff?
Kushank Bajaj: “We don’t know if (A) it’s going to be implemented or (B) if it’s going to include fruits and vegetables or not. So there are some uncertainties.”
“Putting tariffs on Canadian products would hurt some of the farmers in Canada, but it’s also going to hurt US consumers. If he puts tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, the US depends on these regions for a lot of its food so they will experience price shocks as well . More importantly, if Canada were to put some tariffs on the US as a response to Trump, we’re going to see Canadians paying more for their produce (like lettuce, cauliflower, spinach and onions) in the short term.”
“In the longer term, we might see some changes in the supply chain where products produced in Mexico, Peru and other places are going to become more price competitive than the US. Canada may also start supporting more of its smallholder farmers or increase investments in vertical farming and greenhouses. So we’re going to see a slight increase in production possibly.”
Cortes Currents: What about the transportation issue and the emissions from all the transportation going around the world?
Kushank Bajaj: “There’s no easy solution to transportation of food. For some, like, certain things you do need to have transportation, but it is a significant proportion of the emissions as well.”
“We need to source produce from internationally, which is okay because we can’t produce everything, but can we eat more regionally? Food doesn’t have to come all the way from across the Atlantic, for example.”
Cortes Currents: Do you have any last thoughts?
Kushank Bajaj: “I think we need to be hopeful and think more about transformative change in our food systems. Food systems are one fourth of our total carbon emissions, are the major source of groundwater depletion, have all kinds of massive environmental sustainability issues and at the same time we’re not feeding enough people. There’s high levels of food insecurity in the world. I think we need to think about our food systems and from a more transformative approach and come up with solutions that work, not just in one place, but across the world.”
Marc Doll: “Food is arguably still really cheap. When you look at this historically, before the First World War 50 % of every penny earned by a person went to their food. Before the pandemic, it was down to about 13% to 17% in Canada. Even though we think it’s expensive, over time it’s actually still cheap.
“The reason why food seems expensive is because we’ve lost control over a few things. One, housing prices have exponentially changed, and people need housing, so it’s taking up a larger percentage of people’s income just to have a roof over their head. Clothing, as well, is significantly more expensive now than it was say 20 years ago, but maybe not compared to a pre World War scenario. What we deem as necessary for life in a Western society – where we have to have our cell phone subscriptions to Netflix, Prime, Disney and all these other costs – wouldn’t have been a draw on people’s paychecks back a hundred years ago. Our lifestyle has changed, which has made everything more expensive. The only thing that is actually cheaper now than it was a hundred years ago is food.”
Links of Interest:
- Tracing Canada’s Food – Canada’s Food Flows
- Foot Forward Forest Farm
- Food Security of Quadra Island
- Food Security on Cortes Island
All undesignated photos courtesy Foot Forward Forest Farml all maps and charts courtesy Canada Food Flows.
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