Export-oriented agriculture in the north and food insecurity
Food is very expensive in Winnipeg (though it's worse in Northern Manitoba). The region is more or less, for most of the year, a big, flat, low-lying ice shelf. Otherwise, it's a swamp. Food for such a big, not-so-affluent population comes from a long way away, for the most part. Some would call that kind of food insecurity inherently unsustainable (in other words, risky), given the size of the population.
In the summer through fall (July-September), you can shop for local foods around Winnipeg. But, from a regional food security vantage point,
too much of the agricultural land around Winnipeg is dedicated to massive-scale, commercial, export-oriented staple crops that make money for chemical, genetic, and commodities trading firms, by which it contributes to GDP, and a very few farming families (and okay, there are multiplier effects. There always are, which is my point).
"If you control the oil, you control the country. If you
control the food, you control the population" Henry Kissinger (seated left).
Environmental scientists and militaries around the world are planning for global warming and the demise of oil (the backbone of the "green revolution") to produce
food security crises. How can we get a foreward-thinking,
democratic jump on what so many leaders plan on letting devolve into a traumatic, reactionary conflagration (and then exploiting for despotic purposes)? How can we create an infrastructure that reduces food security risks and democracy, rather than undermining it?
Changing the urban infrastructure to enhance food culture and food security I:
Finding arable space in gardens, roads & parking garages
To improve food security, you need to improve food culture and food culture supports. Some researchers are finding out that where we thought urban people had broken relationships to nature, in secret there is (at least in the warmer US)
a widespread below-the-radar urban subsista-culture. There's a lot more that public policy and the food movement could do to nurture those urban subsista-culture relationships, starting with combatting toxic chemical applications and dumping in the city.
People--perhaps especially policy makers--can stand to better understand land as arable, even in the Great White. For example, land could be reclaimed from residential streets and on school land for food production. Urban farming would involve neighborhoods agreeing to narrow non-artery residential streets by building large planters along them, or replacing front streets with common gardens, bike paths, and unburied streams and their riparian services.
For many neighborhoods, this infrastructural improvement would require provincial and federal grants to neighborhoods so that they could provide parking garages for apartment and condo dwellers (a subsidy to landlords and condo flippers). Such parking garages need to be built
behind buildings to facilitate walkability, and with
living (vertical garden) walls in order to preserve or improve air quality and reduce noise. If pavement is reclaimed for cultivation, we recongize that Winnipeg's apartment-dwellers will need parking because Winnipeg is an unremittingly sprawly city that does not currently have infrastructure or a culture for adequate, ecologically-superior public transit. Winter is far too cold and icy for far too long for people to be able to bicycle during the six months after October and before May--although the human-powered recreation & transit advocacy organization
Bike to the Future, and Natural Cycle Courier Co-op are sagely pushing the envelope there. Still, even though the town has one big natural asset for mass bike transit--
X-treme flatness, Winnipeg's equally X-treme weather makes it more dependent on motorized vehicles--and thus motorized vehicle infrastructure--than most other cities. But having a long, harsh winter doesn't mean Winnipeg needs to be anywhere near as dependent on cars as it is, especially since dwindling oil supplies, pollution, and the health effects of pollution--eg. asthma, diabetes, even obesity, are major emergent economic, social and environmental problems. Winnipeg needs a long-term campaign championing a solidaristic, universalistic, Scandinavian-style affordable (state subsidized) transit-upgrade.
Arable land consumed for transportation: Cars v. buses v. bicycles
Reclaiming Urban Space for Food Production and Security II:
Passive solar greenhouses, urban homesteading, and border farms
Another long-term solution to food security for Winnipeg is for governments to allocate incentives for people to start building
greenhouses onto their houses, or collective greenhouses in their neighborhoods.
Passive solar, wind generators, and geothermal energy on residential and neighborhood scales could alleviate some of the energy costs that would have to go into such local-scale, urban food production.
Municipal laws for a food-secure Winnipeg have to facilitate
urban homesteading; and for efficiency's sake, incentives should be developed to encourage neighborhood collective homesteading and social enterprise networks. The town should be zoned so that households could keep small farm animals; and municipal zoning rules should encourage citizens to plant edibles during the very short growing season, in boulevards, the sprawling front yards, and in public spaces, whether for personal or neighborhood use, or for local market sale. There are important opportunities here for social enterprises, co-operatives and other
Community Economic Development initiatives.
Applying government facilitation, not just to reclaiming urban land pockets for food security, but to cultivating local-needs-serving perimeter border farm land (eg. around
La Barriere Park and
Trappistes, and the overly-private Fort Whyte) could be better used to incorporate and expand area expertise and region-appropriate food production.
The city could work with organic ag scientists at UM and MB farms, such as
Harvest Moon in Clearwater, who have been pioneering the development of appropriate, local, short-growing-season, lower-fossil fuel energy-consuming food production technologies, crops, animals, and human-environment relations and infrastructure.
We can use a city-border farmland development campaign to supplant parasitic, city-damaging post-perimeter residential sprawl (although
here's a growth machine-compromise, combining sprawl with local food security).
Since the conservatives are killing off the Wheat Board, that should put the smaller wheat export farms in Manitoba out of business. (It's very likely as well that we will see the rich farmers rake in the surplus profits in the good-weather years, and, once a bad-weather year or two hits, be forced to sell off their lands to Monsanto and devolve into Monsanto's unholy army of tenant farmhands. Happened in Iowa. Will probably happen here. But I guess they're betting that they'll end up like the North Dakota Norwegian businessgentry farmers instead, living half the year in their Cayman Islands estates. We'll see. If the death of the Wheat Board results in Monsanto feudalism, it will be very difficult for the province to negotiate with the powerful multinational for the province's economic, social and environmental well-being.)
With innovation subsidies and partnership with Danish wind energy companies, the province could help the smaller farms near Winnipeg and along major transport routes proactively transform into producing healthy foods for the local market, as well as farming wind.
A key to making small farms and family farming viable in North America is to provide incentives for their geographic restructuring. The homesteading model was sociologically damaging, structuring farming family isolation, and sacrificing healthy agriculture practices so that First Nations people could be most efficiently deposed from the land. Such isolated colonial farm habitation practices are obsolete and, with the rise of motorized vehicles, more unhealthy than ever. Viable, healthy family farming is created by structuring farmlands in a divided-pie shape, so that families' farm houses form a neighborhood at the center of the pie, and the farms span out in wedges behind the houses. This was the historic pattern in Sweden, for example. Farm home centralization enables farmers to have more efficient, accessible communication, and community and social services, as well as better cultural and work sharing opportunities, and, with reduced dependence on motor vehicles in home life, improved physical activity and health.
~ An illustration of a Swedish farm village ~
Oh okay, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement. On the upside, it reduces farmers' privacy to run a S&M gimp chamber in the basement.
We need to remember, farming healthily over time is not compatible with capitalism, an alienation and exploitation system that both induces value creation and draws wealth (control over value) up into a ruling financial-military elite. (There's a theoretical claim that pricing, which allows capitalists to have control over and allocate all of society's resources, will automatically satsify everyone's needs; but that claim is a lot more marketing than reality. Think about it this way: The market responds to effective demand. Monopoly capitalism is about concentrating wealth. Therefore, the market (and then politics and ideology) can only respond to the needs of the 1%--not the health needs of the 99% and our environment, which has no market demand.) If we want healthy food, healthy farm families, healthy land, water and air, then we have to recognize that these values exist within
the "core" economy that is prior to (and exploited by) the dependent profit-driven market, and we have to do some hard work to recognize and support that essential core against predatory capitalist incentives.
Reforming and building Policy infrastructure: One key to Smart Development
Smart development often requires
simultaneous efforts to reform and build the local or regional policy infrastructure. Check out
Portland, Oregon or
Malmo, Sverige or
Curitiba, Brasil for advanced, ecological, democratic
and city development models. Additional ideas and models can be found at the the
Ritchie-based genius of the
IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, in Minneapolis).
A vexing political obstacle to moving toward food security is that developers, like all capitalists, feel entitled to as much exclusive control over public investments (facilitating sprawl) as they can get. This is their wealth. It's a preference that should not be indulged. Developers can make an opulent living without choreographing their windfalls by micromanaging public life. That is corruption. Winnipeggers need to drastically reconsider their old-school penchant for voting the growth machine good ole boy agenda into public office.
Other policy models that could help Winnipeg transition to greater food security include democratic devolution, as pioneered in
Kerala, which Indian state prioritized and honed mechanisms for weaning towns off corruption and entrenched, parasitic, clientelistic political practices and institutions, while democratizing planning and implementing democratized planning.
Minneapolis and
Sweden offer further examples of democratic and effective decision-making infrastructure. CEDLF (The Community Environmental Defense Fund) disseminates information on how to use Anglo-American law to enable citizenship and environmental stewardship to develop in the face of growth machine opposition.
The University of Manitoba houses a growing number of food security experts, including at
MAFRA and the
NRI, and it is famous for its top-notch, innovative
urban design and planning program. The
University of Winnipeg and
progressive Mennonite traditions are famous for their social-development expertise. Yet to a large extent the city simply
wastes these superlative local resources. City planners, farmed out of the local universities, should have decent budgets, autonomy from the Mayor's office and City Council, and a high-priority mandate to work intensively with the public to develop a sociologically-sophisticated, environmental, regionally-appropriate approach to smart, food- and energy-secure southern Manitoba development. To get there, Winnipeg needs its own
Jaime Lerner.
The State: Reduce the MLCC, Expand and Free the Planning Department
In which I advocate for replacing Prohibition bureaucracy with an expanded, funded, and independent Planning Department
More educated people working in public infrastructure development, fewer people clocking in on the MLCC's (Manitoba Liquor Control Commission) byzantine, prohibitionist wedding-monitoring force. (And while we're at it, why not aim for a legislature and a judiciary that won't allow insurance companies to transfer accident costs to individual bartenders and party hosts?) Such a reorientation--
not a diminishment--of the public sector would pave way for people to understand government as a democratic resource, rather than parasitism--producing a robust workforce, rather than a public sector vulnerable to conservative
crisis opportunism. And if you actually want less drunk driving, then you invest in
convenient, efficient public transport.
(FMM)
NRI at U Manitoba
