Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and to address you on behalf of the Canadian Health Coalition.
I won't say very much about the coalition. It's national, largely voluntary, has a small staff, and is very active in several provinces, particularly Ontario and British Columbia, in addressing issues of public health in the broadest sense.
I've just been asked to fill in for Michael McBane, who is elsewhere today. I am an independent writer, author of half a dozen books on food, agriculture, genetic engineering, and corporate control. My wife and I have published for 30 years now The Ram's Horn, a monthly newsletter of food systems analysis.
Many issues concerning food safety have been in the news, of course, in recent years. I am sure you have considered and heard about many of them, from bovine spongiform encephalopathy--a still-unsettled controversy, I should say—to listeria, salmonella, bird flu, and the current so-called H1N1 swine flu pandemic.
It's very tempting to get drawn into a discussion of particular diseases and how they have been dealt with or not dealt with. I don't intend to do that, because I think they are all manifestations and consequences of the way we have allowed our food system to be organized and constructed. To look at particular diseases and public health issues one by one strikes me as kind of like that story about picking babies out of the water, out of the river, without ever asking who's throwing them in.
Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan summed up very simply the issue that I wish to focus on when he tried to explain why the government decided to shut down six prison farms: “...it's simply a fact that the type of agriculture practised on the prison farms is totally unrelated to modern, high-technology, capital intensive agriculture.”
While Mr. Van Loan's statement may be true, it is not modern, high-technology, capital-intensive agriculture that actually feeds most of the global population, either today or at any time. In fact, it is a growing diversity of foods for the local population that is actually how people feed themselves. The prison farm style of agriculture, which supplied the prison population and the community, is closer to this global practice than it is to the high-tech industrial agricultural system that Mr. Van Loan pointed out.
The CFIA was created in 1997. I remember the discussions about its creation and all the issues therein. I would say that it has remained true to its not explicitly stated mandate to serve modern, high-technology, capital-intensive agriculture. Therein lies the source of the problems of food safety and public health that are being investigated by this committee. It is the structures and practices of industrial agriculture and food processing and distribution that are the source and multipliers of the public health problems the CFIA attempts to address but is handicapped from doing because of its mandate, which is to promote and protect this industrial food system. Instead, it has sought to polish its public image by trying to clean up, through HACCP and other means, and more and less regulate out of existence, small-scale, local, and regional food production, processing, and distribution in favour of large-scale, centralized, export-oriented corporate agribusiness.
This is unequivocally illustrated by the CFIA's treatment of small-scale local abattoirs, or its outlawing of the sale of fresh eggs at farmers markets unless they have been through the grading process, which has been mandated for eggs produced in 60,000-bird layer factories. The same thing could be said of pork, beef, and everything else.
The fact is that diseases like avian influenza are the products of intensive, large-scale, industrial poultry production, whether in Malaysia or in Canada, and not backyard flocks anywhere in the world. Just ask the farmers of the Fraser Valley of British Columbia.
Bacteria and viruses, such as listeria, salmonella, BSE, avian flu, and swine flu, are all virtually inevitable products of large-scale factory production of meat, eggs, and even vegetables. Monocultures of any sort invite attack by opportunistic bugs. In addition to monocultures are the conditions of intensive production, as in poultry, swine, and feedlot beef, and the conditions are ripe for the spread of all kinds of unwelcome guests.
No amount of downstream sanitation and regulation is going to alter this condition. If public health, efficiency, and sound ecology were to be the mandate of an agency charged with protecting and enhancing the health of Canadian people and the food we eat, this agency would have to call for a radical deconstruction of our current industrial production system and its control by a handful of giant corporations.
In each and every sector of the food system, from seeds to supermarkets, there are essentially three corporations that rule the roost, and these corporations are required to serve the interests of their shareholders, not the public. That's their legal, fiduciary responsibility, after all. It is the interests of these giant corporations that are served and protected by Agriculture and Agri-food Canada and the CFIA. This is what modernization of the seed regulations, streamlining of the regulatory process, removing the obstacles to innovation, and self-regulation are all about: corporate wealth, not public health.
Farmers and gardeners growing food for themselves, their neighbours, and their local markets are not going to poison themselves and their customers. They are highly unlikely to be breeding diseases. They would quickly be identified and soon be out of business if they were. Trust, after all, is the foundation of any functioning economy.
Factory farms and giant meat factories can write off the millions of dollars lost as a result of a disease outbreak caused by its products and carry on as before, with only some modifications to its operations as requested by the CFIA--another inspection process or two--and the CFIA no longer has the capacity to ensure that its rules are being followed. The only question is, when and where will the next disease outbreak occur?
I suggest very strongly that it's time--well past time, in fact--for a radical deconstruction of the global industrial food system for the sake of public health and the environment around the world. It is time to create a public agency dedicated to ecological farming, including animal and plant biodiversity, healthy food, food production for local and regional markets--not export--and the assurance of adequate nutrition for all. A genuine food system, in other words, dedicated to public health.
l realize this is a big challenge, but it is time for Agriculture Canada and the CFIA to get out of the corporate bed. It is time to make healthy soils, clean water, and ecological farming the basis of our food and agricultural policies. The problems currently identified as issues of food safety would largely disappear, and rural communities and local economies would thrive as they provide healthy food for all of us. It's a big but essential challenge that l am presenting, I realize, but I think the times call for it.
I would be pleased to discuss this further with anyone, and I thank you for the opportunity to present this to you.