There is an increasing desire among people to free themselves from global food supply and to procure their food from organic local sources. This is clearly so in the Greater Victoria area.
Farmers participate in spot markets or farmers markets. Urban residents develop contacts with local suppliers. More people than ever go to the spot markets. Initiatives sprout in Greater Victoria. There are area-wide distribution systems and academic conferences. Seminars and workshops are offered at UVic and elsewhere. Yet there is no wide-ranging, truly organic, competitive service available to us all in the Greater Victoria area.
This is why we, at the Networking for a Common Future in Sustainability (NetCFS), a non-governmental organization based in Saanich explored the topic and came to the following conclusions:
- We receive produce, fruit, meat, and other food items from around the world.
- The costs of production, processing, transport and distribution are extremely low, because of artificially lowered prices of oil and other subsidies.
- Yet there is a real, documented risk, that times of cheap oil are over. New finds are smaller, more costly to develop, an environmentally risky.
Might it then not be useful for people to ensure availability of locally produced and affordable organic food in the Greater Victoria area? We must ask ourselves,
1) what can we do to make local supply
- safely available,year round,
- complete and diverse,
- at competitive prices;
- free of petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides;
- at reasonable distances from place of use;
- uner conditions that are acceptable by provincial and other regulations,
- in ways that do not affect negatively the existing system of distribution and sales?
2) how to organize to make the above possible and inspire similar action elsewhere, smoothly and rapidly.
3) to what extent are producers, able to adjust their production to our needs
We still buy food coming from California, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, etc. What we buy, say on Moss Street or in backyards still does not compete in regularity, diversity and price.
It would be effective and pleasant to associate people, starting in our Camosun community, and go together through the process. This is quite possible and not difficult at all.
Interested and curious readers are invited to get in touch with us at netcfs@shaw.ca so that we can start the process with you, perhaps with a friendly meeting later this month or in December 2010, at a place to be chosen depending on number of responses and meeting room availability.
Yves Bajard, President, NetCFS and member of the Board, Camosun Community Association
