Agriculture committee  I think that absolutely matters. When we think about the kinds of layers to our food system, there are layers of local: local within your region, local within your province and local interprovincially. Reducing those barriers.... From the perspective of most people in our province, I think, it's better if we're eating Atlantic than if we're eating international, for example.

Agriculture committee  Sure. I can start. I think part of this for us is that for capital there are a couple of pieces. One is processing equipment. Physical pieces of equipment to process food are really important parts of the mix for community-driven food hubs. Most of them are never going to sustain themselves by just selling food to households.

Agriculture committee  That's a great question. I think you're right to name it that. We sometimes make these conversations about farming, and we drift into a conversation just about fruits and vegetables and crops, but local protein is a very important part of the mix. As an operator, I know that's one of the things that are most in demand.

Agriculture committee  I think I'm in the same boat as Lori is on this one. I don't know enough about the specific institutions to comment. Thanks.

Agriculture committee  Thank you for the question. It's a great question. I think there are a lot of challenges when it comes to particularly the early stages of building up local food distribution networks. It takes time to build up a network of producers to get to scale. There are moments at which these things become self-sustaining, but you have to get pretty big.

Agriculture committee  Sure. I'm happy to. I think there are a lot of them. For example, we've seen this on the institutional buying side. I was talking to a school food provider who spent a whole summer trying to figure out how to replace their imported carrot supply with local carrots. As you know, we don't grow a lot of things in our province, but we do grow plenty of those.

Agriculture committee  Storage facilities matter. I think it's important to have more investment in shared storage, but I think we're finding that the bigger gaps right now are processing and distribution. If you operate a small store on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, and you'd like to buy food from Cormack, which is a couple of hours down the road, it's remarkably difficult to do that.

Agriculture committee  Yes, we've seen it happen. I think the advantage of participating in things like food hubs is that you get a team on your side. You get someone whose job it is to promote what you're doing, to take care of the logistics and to let you get back to work on your farm. Farm gate sales are important, but they're also uncertain.

Agriculture committee  That's a great question. When you talk about defining food security, it's not just about calories, as I said. It's about access to sufficient, healthy and culturally appropriate foods for people. When you think about what that looks like in reality, it's being able to share a meal with your family, with your friends or with your community.

Agriculture committee  In Newfoundland and Labrador, we don't have calorie data, but I can tell you a few things. We know that the vast majority of the food eaten by folks in our province is brought in from outside. We don't have an exact read on it, but it's somewhere between 75% and 90%. However, I think what we miss when we use that number is that we also have the highest rate of wild food access of any province.

Agriculture committee  I think there are couple of pieces. There are joint federal-provincial programs that are important players in the funding space. Sustainable CAP, for instance, is a vital support for farmers and producers, with their equipment costs and things like that. There's a new policy framework being developed for SCAP right now.

Agriculture committee  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.