I want to thank you for inviting me here. I'm talking to you from Hay River, Northwest Territories. I'm the founder of the Northern Farm Training Institute. I'm a Métis person. I'm married with three children. I've seen that we need to build and contribute to the solutions to address northern food insecurity.
The deficit that is aggravating this is that we don't have domestic skills in domestic food production, which we need to complement the wild harvest systems for our indigenous and isolated communities. Right now, we have a functioning 260-acre farm campus in Hay River, which is the largest land-based farm in the Northwest Territories. We have successfully trained 250 first nations people and other people from 33 different communities.
Our students have already gone on to build gardens in their communities, build small farms and teach other people to produce domestic food.
Our program has been successful because of its unique structure and our genuine experience in teaching and producing food in an isolated place. We know how to produce sustainable, domestic vegetables that are appropriate in the northern setting and domestic meats in the north and we understand how to empower northern people, indigenous people. It helps build confidence. Hands-on experiential education is what we're doing. People need to learn the entire spectrum for growing food and how to build a business, how to access appropriate funds.
Our campus is scaled and has systems in place to feed 200 people in a northern, remote community setting. It's a full-spectrum operation. What does that look like?
We do have a deficit of skilled food producers and teachers in our isolated communities, but there's a fast way to turn this situation around. We need to empower local people to restore their food systems according to what they want, through direct capacity building, and have local indigenous people running newly created training and support centres that are around the theme of food. It can be domestic food and wild food. We need these two systems to complement each other.
In Canada we have over 600 indigenous-type communities that are often managed by bands. Our focus has been on the most vulnerable, most isolated extremities, but we do have a national vision. We believe there's a system that we can deliver.
We figured that we could build 50 training centres that would also be food-producing centres, and we would call them “from the land” learning hubs. Each centre would need to have a core of four to six people to run the centre, teach and produce the food. These small centres could service 10 to 15 regional communities around them.
From our experience, because of the isolation, with low-mechanized systems on bio-intensive garden farms one person can feed 10 people. We've already worked this out. In Canada, with a population of 1.6 million indigenous people, if our goal is to reach 10% of the population and strengthen their food skills—wild food skills and domestic food skills—we need to focus on this. In five years, we could empower 30,000 people throughout the most vulnerable communities.
The program is not like a traditional academic one. We could do it faster because the programs can be shorter, and run on weekends. We can have young, old, men, families, women, and an array of topics: gardening, animal husbandry, fishing, wild harvest skills. Once established, these training centres can even contribute to their own financial stability because they will be able to produce products to sell. There are a lot of options here.
We've calculated the financial scenarios that would be needed to implement this. We have some suggestions for even accessing nutrition north funding to invest in the critical infrastructure that needs to be built for domestic food systems. We know we have a serious crisis in Canada. I'm calling you from the north. I travel to remote communities. This is a serious problem. We need to address it immediately. We need to have federal funding directly supporting the solutions here.
Sadly, there's a dilution and an inefficiency that has been happening for decades because of the way administration goes through regional government. I'm sure we can correct this problem.
We have a 10-year plan for restoring food stability and independence in indigenous communities across Canada. We know we can do this, but we just need your help. We're already doing it. We're confident we can build whole food systems that will have lasting and profound impacts on indigenous wellness, health and economy. We need to foster independently managed food systems at the local level. It's already working. I'm here to tell you. I'm here because it's working.
Thank you.
