Good afternoon, Mr. Chair and members of the committee. Good morning, in fact. I'm still on Atlantic time, I think.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee about this important topic today, and thanks for taking it up.
My name is Joshua Smee. I'm the CEO of Food First NL. We are a non-profit organization with staff across both Newfoundland and Labrador. At Food First NL, our vision is of a Newfoundland and Labrador where everyone can eat with joy and dignity. That vision reminds us that food security isn't just about how many calories you eat. It's about where those calories come from, how you eat them, and whom you eat them with.
In these unstable times, every part of that picture is under pressure. Your committee has heard this repeatedly. You've had some great speakers in, including folks from our own province.
When our organization looks around at the state of our local food system in Newfoundland and Labrador, too often we see a landscape of missed opportunities. We see an aging population of farmers at the same time as we see young people struggling to find a foothold in the food system. We see stores full of imported food that's been sitting on trucks and in warehouses for weeks, while local producers struggle to access local markets. We see the vast majority of our province's institutional buyers, places like hospitals and schools, sending their food budgets out of province, not because they don't want to invest locally but because they don't have a mechanism to do so.
What could some solutions look like?
We think that, at least in part, it looks like a thriving network of food hubs across the country. We're really excited to hear the details of the announcement that's coming this afternoon, because I think that lines up pretty closely with some of what I'm going to say. I think I can preview Justin's remarks a little here.
We operate two non-profit food hubs in Newfoundland and Labrador right now, one in western Newfoundland and one in the Avalon Peninsula. I'll tell you a bit about how they work.
We operate an online store that producers in each region sign up for. Each week, they post what they have, and then customers can make a single order that includes products from as many producers as they want. Food First NL goes out, gathers things in bulk from all the producers, divides them into customer orders and ships those back to pickup points in people's own communities all over the province. You go down to your local store to gas up your car, and there's a box waiting for you with your name on it, with products from 40 different farmers in it.
That's the kind of community-based solution we're seeing emerge all across the country. To be clear, we did not invent this model. We are riding a wave that is spreading across Canada, and for a very good reason. Food hubs provide huge benefits, both to producers and to purchasers.
The biggest impact here is on small farmers and other small producers, many of whom can't gain access into grocery stores or can't afford to, and on new entrants, especially new Canadians entering the food system. These folks gain immediate access to an enthusiastic market with thousands of customers and dedicated promotional and marketing support. They have to spend less time off their farm or outside of their operation trying to sell and more time doing their work.
On the consumer side, people are able to access local food more reliably, particularly people who don't have access to a car or don't have a farmer's market nearby. MP Connors is here from Newfoundland and Labrador. We know how it works. We have the highest percentage of farm gate sales in the country. That's all well and good if you can drive from farm gate to farm gate, but lots of us can't.
We also see that restaurants and institutional buyers whose orders are too big for a single producer to meet can use a food hub to aggregate products from multiple producers. As an operator, we've seen a lot of success with this, but we've also seen the challenges these models face.
For a food hub to stand on its own two feet financially, it needs time to build up its market and its customer base. That is a hard thing for a non-profit organization to come by. Our funding systems are overwhelmingly focused on supporting capital costs, when what a lot of these local initiatives actually need are operating dollars. They need some runway.
We do, though, see some really great things coming. We see a powerful alignment emerging now with the national school food program. A core principle of Canada's school food policy is that food be locally sourced where possible, and reflective of local and regional circumstances. We've seen recent research showing that a national school food program could contribute $4.8 billion to local economies through domestic food purchasing over the next 10 years and create hundreds of thousands of jobs in the food system. In our conversations with stakeholders across Newfoundland and Labrador, we have heard over and over that food hubs are going to play a critical role in making this happen.
“What can government do?” is a question that always comes to mind.
We would hope to see a dedicated funding stream emerge that can make both capital and operating investments in this kind of infrastructure, multi-year investments that give these kinds of infrastructure projects the runway they need to get off the ground and sustain themselves.
We also really hope to see continued work to embed conversations about local procurement into the conversations between the federal government and the provincial governments as the next round of school food agreements is updated. It's really important to have the federal government play that role in setting targets and keeping the provinces ambitious about local procurement.
Thank you very much.