So a pollster calls a consumer with a simple question: do you want to buy locally produced organic food and will you pay more for it?
Of course, they say.
Should you be able to trace the origin of the product you buy in the grocery store back to the farm where it was produced, perhaps with a picture of the farmer on the box?
Of course, they say.
What about the obligation of farmers to produce food sustainably and in an environmentally friendly fashion?
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Well of course, they say.
These answers, regularly cited by pollsters to indicate where farmers should be going, largely are fiction.
Many consumers say what they know they should say or what they believe their ethics dictate. Then they head to the bargain bins or the box stores where they can get the best prices.
How else to explain the fact that Walmart has become, in just a few years, a dominant player in Canada’s food retail sector?
Of course, there are many local food supporters — a growing number — who will go to farmers’ markets and seek out organic shelves at their grocery store.
But all the evidence points to most consumers saying one thing and doing another — supporting all the good things about Canadian food production in theory, but then heading to the cheap ice cream, the imported tomatoes or apples, the meat from wherever.
For farmers, this is an old problem. Society wants more but refuses to pay more. Organic and local are prime examples but the best one just now is the growing demand for traceability systems in food production.
Who would argue? Not farmers.
Who would pay? Not consumers.
“The marketplace at the moment is not paying a premium for pigs that are on traceability programs,” Manitoba Pork general manager Andrew Dickson said last week at a Senate committee hearing. “The thought among some people is this is just something you have to do. It is part of the normal cost of business.”
And it is expensive.
University of Guelph associate dean for research Sylvain Charlebois recently made the same point.
“I think we are at a crossroads in the food industry,” he said at a Toronto food conference. “At the moment, food safety doesn’t have any currency in the marketplace. They are not prepared to pay for something they think they are owed.”
That is not news to farm leaders like Canadian Federation of Agriculture president Ron Bonnett or Ontario Federation of Agriculture vice-president McCabe, not to mention Manitoba farm leaders, who have been pushing for years for some government recognition of farmers’ environmental contributions, so-called ecological goods and services.
So far, unlike in Europe, there have been no government takers on the EGS file.
So here’s what it comes down to:
- Consumers and customers of Canadian food production insist on safe, ecologically responsible production but generally aren’t prepared to pay more for it and consider it simply the cost of doing business.
- The vast majority of food producers want to do the right thing for ethical and market reasons but often can’t afford the additional cost.
Government support to fill the gap is the obvious answer, but does Growing Forward really bridge the gap?
