In the crop year 2011-12, Canada exported 32.1 million tonnes of grain and wheat flour. That’s pretty close to one tonne for every man, woman and child in the country.
What will your family do with its tonne of grain per member once these exports get blocked? How big is your family and how big is your garage?
We export this annual Gibraltar of vegetable matter to a large number of countries. (The top six — Mexico, Japan, Iraq, the U.S. and Colombia — take 37 per cent of the total). But if the “agricultural self-sufficiency” and “eat local” movements become as popular everywhere else as they are here, other countries are certain to stop importing our grain and start eating foodstuffs they themselves produce locally.
Which leaves the problem of what we do with all that grain.
Will these movements take hold? They’re all the rage with trendy thinkers in the richer parts of the world and, partly as a result, are gaining currency with governments. Quebec’s government, which admittedly is more xenophobic than most, though in agricultural matters not really by that much, has just set a target of 50 per cent self-sufficiency in food, which would double the importance of local produce in Quebecers’ diets.
On the face of it, the idea that a jurisdiction that’s covered in snow for six months of the year and has one of the shortest growing seasons in the world should aspire to produce all its own food is bizarre.
It’s the kind of thing you’d do if you were expecting global shipping lanes to be closed down, as they were from 1939 to 1945.
But is anyone really expecting global submarine warfare soon? Does Quebec’s government know something about geopolitics the rest of us don’t?
I don’t actually know how much of your living space your tonne per family member of grain or flour will consume. The Australian state of Queensland’s handy online conversion table suggests a tonne of wheat should take up 1.5 cubic metres of granary space.
Of course, grow-localers don’t actually want us to store the 32 million tonnes a year of grain and flour we have been exporting or, even worse, try to eat it all ourselves. Rather, they want Canada’s grain farmers to shift from grain to other foodstuffs that we import but that we “should” be producing at home.
Coffee, say. Or oranges. Or maybe bananas (of which we import more than $350 million worth a year).
The obvious difficulty is that the Prairies are great for grain and not so great for lots of other foodstuffs. At the same time, other countries aren’t so good at grain but do an excellent job at foodstuffs and other products we don’t do so well.
In fact, our biggest agri-food import by value is red wine. Do we really want grain farmers to plow under their wheat and plant vines? Chateau Moose Jaw? Chateau Medicine Hat? Chateau Flin Flon?
I do realize my tone will be offensive to those, assuming they’ve read this far, who think eating local is a sacred obligation to Gaia because of the contribution agricultural transport makes to global warming. A first response to this concern is that, in fact, ocean transport is much more energy-efficient than land transport.
But, more importantly, if you really are concerned about excessive production of carbon dioxide, probably the least effective thing you could do is micromanage production in a single industry, albeit an important one. What you need to do instead is establish a price for carbon (and for all other greenhouse gases) either by taxing it or with a cap-and-trade system and then sit back and let the market work. Things whose production is carbon-intensive will shut down. Things whose production doesn’t use much carbon will expand.
Price greenhouse gases and then let the chips (and fritters and rutabagas) be produced where they may. But don’t create still more reasons to bias your people against foreigners and their goods.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.
