Food Security, Cultural Landscapes, Communities and Sustainable Farming

(photo of agricultural land in Scotland south of Stonehaven)
Another dimension to the whole business of food sovereignty and local food self-sufficiency is of course land, and support for farming economy, and farming communities as well as agroecology. Today at Athabasca University, where I teach, my colleague Ella Haley talked about issues of ethical investment and "land grabs". Her talk title was "Pension funds, farmland grab, human rights violations and divestment campaigns - how are your pension funds being invested?" This struck home with many of our colleagues, as ethical investment is a goal, but difficult to realize. Even our Canada Pension Plan funds are apparently implicated in conversion of vast tracts of farmland in the prairie provinces to investment income generating commodity.....
I think of my late Mother in law, from a marginal north Saskatchewan farm, with five generations on the land. I also think of the now deserted small farming communities between Shell Lake and Saskatoon, emblematic of the great depopulation of the Saskatchewan landscape. About a century since the fields were proved up, and families settled on the land to make their livings and grow food for the country and the world. My partner's uncle was an organic farmer, growing wheat a bit north of the optimal zone for number one red wheat; fall rains in the northern fringe of agricultural production spoil the perfect colour. The value added of organic farming helped make up the difference. He's retired now, though some of his younger relatives still farm or grow specialty fruit crops (saskatoons and the like).
The realization that, as global population grows, and some other forms of investment have become unstable, farmland makes an attractive investment for income generation was new to me. Similarly, the realization that international investors take diverse agroecologies and convert them to depauperate monocultures was familiar to me, but I had never linked the consequences of human ecologies, communities and economies with global investments and commodity production for global trade so explicitly. Similarly, Ella discussed the leap-frogging of pressure to sell out farms for potential development, or as investment property over the Toronto region green belt. Having grown up (in part) in suburban southern California, I was familiar with the leveling of lemon groves for subdivisions, the division of ranch lands and crop lands to accommodate urban sprawl. These days the pressures to give "options" on farms, to convert large swaths of formerly diverse family farms to depopulated properties for income purposes seems to have shifted in scale and quality. The greenbelts of southern Ontario were intended to preserve ecological and environmental diversity, and peri-urban rural amenities around cities like Toronto and Hamilton. This has succeeded, but the geographic scale of economic pressure has simply lept over the protected lands. Certain large scale developers apparently are buying up land in Alberta, in rural Ontario, and in diverse other parts of the globe, like Africa, where diverse swidden agricultural areas and managed diverse forest are converted to vast sterile monocultures of crops like oil palm. The more I learn about that crop, the more I try to stay away from purchasing anything with palm oil in it– but it is virtually impossible to avoid.
On the local scale, the rich Saskatchewan River valley farmlands of northeast Edmonton are also at risk from large investors. The Greater Edmonton Alliance has called attention to the risks of urban sprawl eliminating our local food production capacity. Some of the vendors I patronize at the Farmers Market have thriving market gardens and farms within the city limits.

When my daughter was small, we had a tape recording of Woody Guthrie singing this song:

When the farmer comes to town
With his wagon broken down,
Oh the farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you'll only look and see,
I'm sure you will agree,
That the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand
And they lead him from the land,
And the middleman's the man who gets it all.

Oh the lawyer hangs around
While the butcher cuts a pound,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all;
And the preacher and the cook
Go a-strolling by the brook,
But the farmer is the man who feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
With the interest rate so high,
It's a wonder he don't die,
For the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.

When the banker says he broke
And the merchant's up in smoke,
They forget that it's the farmer feeds them all.
It would put them to the test
If the farmer took a rest,
Then they'd know that it's the farmer feeds them all.

The farmer is the man,
The Farmer is the man
Lives on credit till the fall;
His pants are wearing thin,
His condition, it's a sin,
He's forgot that he's the man who feeds them all.

I think it summarizes many of the issues of the conversion of farming and farmland into corporate investment opportunities with no concerns for the integrity of either communities nor land. It interests me, as I've commented earlier in this blog, that the traits of the cultural landscape of the Salt Steppe (Hortobágy) in Hungary could not be maintained without maintaining the cultural practices of land management realized by traditional herders. Similarly, the health of the agricultural landscape, and its human communities I would argue is necessary for food sovereignty and a healthy social-ecological system here in Canada, let alone where foreign corporate interests dispossess subsistence farming communities in many regions of the global south.