Editorial July 2009
Whig Community Editorial Board Submission
Why doesn’t broccoli cost $25/stalk? This will sound strange coming from me – it’s my job, after all, to secure better access to healthy food for people living in poverty. But I am writing this from Guatemala – a source of much of the super-cheap food that North Americans will consume next winter. As I travel around the highlands in the relative comfort of a tourist van, I am often mere inches away from the acres and acres of vegetable crops produced in this region. I can’t help but see up close the enormous amount of human labour not to mention environmental degradation that goes into producing cheap food.
This region of Guatemala is lucky (if any region of this country can be described that way). High in the cloud forests of the mountains, there is ample water for irrigation. Complicated plastic piping snakes over the mountainsides bringing water to the patchwork of fields that climb high up the slopes. The downside of this year-round access to water is that there is no dry season and so the fields rarely get a rest. Plus, the constant clearing of land on steeper and steeper slopes leads to significant soil erosion. But when broccoli – and I use broccoli as an example of a vegetable rarely consumed locally but grown in abundance in Guatemala for export – costs $1.49 on my grocery store shelves in far-off Kingston in the dead of winter, there is enormous incentive for these overworked people to wring as much production as possible out of this overworked soil. And thanks to the tentacles of multinational chemical fertilizer and seed companies, there is ample, if expensive, access to the chemical poisons that make it possible to grow food on land that has been stripped of it’s nutrients.
I’m not the first to notice that sometimes it takes traveling in the developing world to remind us of what is in our own backyard. Farmers in Canada are subject to the same economic pressures as farmers in Guatemala. Competing to sell food cheaply often means compromising the integrity of the food, the soil, and the stewardship of the land in our region as well. The true costs of producing food – social, labour, environmental and health costs – are not reflected in the prices that we pay. Our food is too cheap. So my question is this; how do we make healthy food more accessible to people living in poverty while ensuring that farmers are fairly paid for what they do?
