4 Truth in labelling Canada’s food and beverage processors contribute $28.5 billion to the


nation’s gross domestic product (GDP), making them the country’s single largest manufacturing sector. BC is also home to a vibrant food processing sector, with annual sales of $9.8 billion – more than triple farmgate revenues. “We’re seeing a greater diversity of made-in-BC foods and value-added


products that are clearly enjoyed both here in BC and around the world,” BC agriculture minister Lana Popham said last fall. “Each of them creates and supports additional, related jobs and boosts prosperity in our communities.” But how much better could things be? A revamped free trade agreement with the US and Mexico last September undermined a billion dollars worth of investments by dairy processors, including an innovative milk processing plant in Abbotsford. This edition of Country Life in BC reports on the competition many growers face from imports, which have driven a steady decline in Lower Mainland processing capacity.


While a new beef packing plant is under discussion for Prince George, the


current lack of slaughter capacity in the province means the majority of BC beef goes to Alberta and options for what remains are limited despite the province wanting to boost access to local meat products. And what is local, anyway? Throwing salt in the thousand cuts to processing capacity BC producers


have faced, the ambitious Feed BC initiative is starting to draw fire from farm groups because it considers items made entirely from imported raw ingredients local food. Sysco Canada supplies hamburger to the Interior Health Authority, which claims to source at least a third of its food from BC. The beef is ground at a new plant in Metro Vancouver, and therefore qualifies towards the total. But the meat has to come from a federally inspected plant – and the closest one is in Alberta. Similarly, vegetables count as a locally sourced product under Feed BC if


they’re distributed by a local packer, even if they’ve been grown elsewhere. So are locally roasted coffee beans. Consumers demanded truth in labelling from wineries selling wines


COUNTRY LIFE IN BC • MAY 2019


bottled in Canada that had little to no domestic juice. Similarly, beekeepers have won changes to grading standards so foreign honey isn’t “Canada No. 1.” The province owes it to consumers who want to Buy BC and the farmers


who work hard to Grow BC to make sure Feed BC really is delivering local product.


So you don’t believe in climate change On Sunday, April 14, 1935, a 1,000-mile-long storm front swept across the US


Great Plains. An estimated 300 million tons of topsoil blew away. The storm blacked out the sun for four hours and a newspaper reporter caught in the worst of it coined the phrase Dust Bowl. Some of the soil travelled 1,300 miles to Washington DC and some dusted ships in the Atlantic Ocean. The reality of the Great Plains drought and disaster came home


The Back Forty BOB COLLINS


to roost in the eyes and lungs of Washington politicians and spurred Congress to pass the Soil Conservation Act. Similar storms in Canada gave rise to the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act at the same time. Years of overgrazing and over-cultivation combined with years of drought


created one of the worst ecological disasters in human history and to the biggest mass migration in US history as an estimated 2.5 million people walked away from their farms. The decade-long Dust Bowl of the 1930s was European- styled agriculture’s first brush with a broad and persistent change of climate on this continent. Given our current reality we would be well advised to remember it.


Early in April, Environment and Climate Change Canada released a report that claims Canada is warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, up an average 1.7°C since 1948. The report goes on to make several concerning predictions about just what the climate has in store for us. Ross McKitrick, University of Guelph economics professor and Fraser Institute


senior fellow, takes the report to task in a column published in the Financial Post on April 10. McKitrick makes the point that people repeatedly exposed to claims about climate change begin to see evidence of it everywhere, even if they might never have noticed it on their own. And, while there have been changes since 1948,


most 80-year-olds would be hard pressed to give an accurate account of exactly what they were. McKitrick’s assessment is probably correct, but there are some things we do


know. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising steadily and is now over 400 parts per million. While CO2 levels have been much higher in the very distant past, they haven’t reached current levels in more than 800,000 years – well before the appearance of our species 200,000 years ago. I doubt if many of the 80-year-olds mentioned by Mr. McKitrick are farmers or ranchers who, having spent most, or all, of their lives in one place in daily intimacy with the climate and weather, know precisely how things have changed – that the hard frost that used to be a given in late September is now a rarity; that their grandchildren have never set foot on the frozen slough they skated on every winter when they were kids; that total precipitation may not have changed but it doesn’t come down when or how it used to; and the river that used to flood every 12 or 15 years now comes over the bank every other year, and erosion there is picking up speed alarmingly. Details will change from place to place but the same plot is unfolding all over


the province. Things are changing and change can be hard to deal with as many Prairie farmers found out 85 years ago when their farms dried up and blew away – or as many BC ranchers have experienced in the last two years as trees that were turned to kindling by beetles, spared by mild winters, burned them out. There is yet another bitter lesson lurking in the wings, when the changing


hydrology of excessively logged watersheds is exposed to a new rainfall template.


The Dust Bowl lesson of bare and overworked land was well learned and


heeded, but there are other hard lessons that changing climate has yet to teach. The report from Environment and Climate Change Canada suggests that climate change is “effectively irreversible.” McKitrick suggests that it is almost irrelevant. Pick your poison. Either way, we might be wise to err on the side of caution and support measures to put the brakes on CO2.


Publisher Cathy Glover


The agricultural news source in British Columbia since 1915 Vol.105 No.5 . MAY 2019


Published monthly by Country Life 2000 Ltd. www.countrylifeinbc.com


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