From here to there with Food Security in Saanich and the CRD

There is more and more need and desire to access local food sources to promote wellbeing, connect with the land and to “buy local” to help our local farmers as part of our economic development in this region.

Through the Regional Growth Strategy (RGS) process we pushed to have agriculture in the plan. The only existing policy in the RGS is to preserve the agricultural lands.

I was pleased to work on the Regional Food Charter that was initiated at the CRD Roundtable on the Environment, when I was chair of that committee. I had done a fair bit of work through BC Healthy Communities and it seemed like a natural fit.

I was pleased when a core group of people came together under the Community Social Planning Council, called the Capital Region Food & Agriculture Initiatives Roundtable (CR-FAIR).

I and CF-FAIR have been pushing that food security should be in the new Regional Sustainability Strategy (RSS). Some local politicians were not so keen, but what was interesting is that this last year as CRD did public engagement around the update to the RGS to the new transition document RSS, food security was the number one issue raised.

So, finally a place at the table, and a new Policy Direction #5 has been drafted within the RSS.

CRD staff are currently working on a draft RSS that will be ready for community engagement early in 2012 and my hope is that the new RSS should be adopted before the end of this next term.

There are some new goals:  protect the land base for food production by securing and expanding the region’s farmlands; increase the viability and diversification of food production while preventing non-farm use of agricultural land; build food processing and distribution capacity to exapand the local good supply; increase food self-sufficiency and community resilience; and work toward environmentally sustainable food system.

There are a couple of initiatives that I am very supportive of:

• conduct inventories of lands with capability for food production and prioritize inventoried lands with agricultural potential for protected status through land use designation;
• define edge planning areas adjacent to farmlands and develop policies on compatible uses to increase the long-term security of production agriculture and on-farm diversified uses;
• Consult with the Province and municipalities regarding property tax reforms and other measures to incent or require the farming of ALR lands and other designated agricultural land held by non-farm owners;
• Undertake a regional agricultural economic development plan, in conjunction with interested municipalities/electoral areas, to investigate opportunities for restoring and enhancing agriculture infrastructure (compost facilities, abattoir, processing, distribution hubs, cold storage, markets) and promote information sharing, including use of incentives, cooperatives, extension/outreach and preferential tax policy.

There are many reasons to act on food security initiatives, not the least of which include:

• Only 5% of the land in BC is suitable for agriculture and only 1% is considered high quality;
• The best farmland is heavily developed and the farmland that is left is surrounded by urban and suburban development;
• Land development speculation;
• The average age of farmers on the Island is approaching 65;
• Approximately 50% of the agricultural land in this region is not used for food production;
• Only 10% of the land base needed to grow food for the region’s residents is designated for agricultura;
• There is NO REQUIREMENT to farm the land within the Agricultural Land Reserve.

Finally, a recent report stated:

“If BC shifts just 1.5% of it’s overall consumption per year to local sources, the province would supply 80% of it’s food needs by 2030″.

We need to all be pushing governments to move ahead and create opportunities to increase food production in this region for our wellbeing.