Inflation occupies all the forums, and especially the pocketbooks of the citizens. This inflation crisis has a real impact on the cost of housing, but also on food for marginalized consumers. The Table on Hunger and Social Development of Metropolitan Montreal offers a “nuanced solution”. The state must intervene in the face of overheated food prices. To do this, we are proposing to control the prices of some staple foods that we produce in Quebec.
At the same time, a cry from the heart emerges from nearby farms. “Across Quebec, the Cooperative for ecological proximity agriculture (CAPE) maintains that the number of registrations for organic baskets has dropped by 11.65% compared to 2021”, we read in The right. The reason for this fall is simple: inflation. “Many people have told us that due to the rising cost of living, they are no longer able to afford our basket,” reported the To have to June 15th.
To respond to this crisis, which is likely to lead to the closure of several organic farms, the government is being urged to act through the “Resilience Manifesto”. In short, the inflation crisis leads to other crises, including that of food insecurity. However, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), of which Canada and Quebec are signatories, stipulates that having access to adequate food is a right for everyone.
The crises within the crisis
The crises in which we are plunged will multiply in the coming years. They will take on different colors and perspectives, but they will continue. These crises affecting poor producers or consumers who cannot afford the organic basket would have a very different scale and meaning if they were experienced outside of the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity it underlies, etc. . But, as the ecological crisis will not go away and there will be other inflationary crises, the question that arises is the following: how to reconcile the inflationary crises with the great crisis of the Earth?
Filmmaker Carole Poliquin, in her recent documentary Humus, invites us to first take the proper measure of the state of the situation as outlined by the many IPCC reports. She enjoins us to do it with all the seriousness that the exercise requires. And for good reason: “there are 60 years of arable land left” if we do nothing, she insists.
We must therefore reconcile the major climate crisis with the “small” crises of the moment. It is above all necessary to mobilize all the players, producers and consumers alike, to act in concert. Because here, each in their corner, all ask for the intervention of the State. The result is fragmented demands that are far from scaring a government that can hope to secure a large majority for the next four years.
This government will of course be able to turn a deaf ear to all those who are concerned about food security and climate change. The objective of a government is first to keep power, then to make changes according to its interests, according to what is profitable economically and politically, in short. However, as François D’Aoust pointed out in The duty : “Sorry for the climate, it was not profitable. The same could be said of the poor: sorry, you are not profitable!
Now, it seems to me that there are too many fragments lying around. How to intervene in the short term to solve medium and long term problems? How and on what basis can a government be moved, away from all these concerns, to nurture the hope of structural changes? How can everyone win at the same time in a context where everyone wants their lion’s share, as La Fontaine would say?
An integrated vision of solutions
Faced with the enormous challenges facing us, it takes much more than small gestures. It takes a federative vision of producers and consumers and alternatives to quickly embody this vision.
Full professor in the Department of Anthropology at Université Laval Manon Boulianne, for example, has developed a place-based approach to the food system that could be used to develop large-scale alternatives. This approach is based on reality, on small solutions that need to be consolidated and integrated into a whole. Without denying the power relations between the small and the big. In a territorialized and sustainable system, everyone could be a winner.
However, for there to be mobilization, more than a vision is needed. In recent decades, among the major projects implemented by the State, those that have most affected people in their daily lives have in common an important affective aspect as well as strong support. This is how concern for the development and well-being of children contributed to the establishment of CPEs and the parental insurance program.
Can we draw inspiration from what we have already done on this front, as a distinct society, to offer food security and sovereignty to all, and particularly to our children? Many will say: not yet another tax! However, who would be ready today to eliminate contributions to the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP)? Few people, to tell the truth, because the majority supports the maintenance of this social tax.
One could think of a Quebec Food Insurance Plan (RQAA) using the same rates as the QPIP. We would thus have about 2.6 billion each year to support territorialised agriculture. Half of this fund could be used to help approximately 1.3 million households with children in Quebec. All children could have access to vegetables through a food insurance system. Families could pay 10% of the total bill for their purchases from a producer or regional market. The RQAA would pay the difference (90%). For unemployed families, the scheme could foot the entire bill.
The other half of the fund could be invested in loans for the purchase of land and equipment for organic farming, in support of distribution networks, such as public markets. Part of this fund should also be used for education. The population has lost the skills needed to make quality home-cooked meals. She also has a hard time not wasting. It is a culture change (in both senses of the word) that can be learned.
Obviously, limits will have to be set, so as not to see a new generation of industrial farms claim the monopoly of certain food products or sectors. We are still in a capitalist system that produces monopolies. The experience of mega-farms in Quebec has killed agricultural diversification. We need to create a more flexible and sustainable model, a supervised model where everyone could have an economically viable place.
The economic, social, ecological and cultural benefits of a massive investment of a few billion to guarantee food security would be enormous. Above all, they are far from being inaccessible. Quebec has already made possible ideas that previously seemed impossible. He knows the formula and could still reproduce it to better reinvent himself.