It is urgent to support our agriculture so that it is more resilient in the face of the climate crisis.
Posted yesterday at 11:00 a.m.
Heat waves, droughts, floods and other extreme events affect agricultural production all over the planet, thus weakening our food supply and risking aggravating the galloping inflation of foodstuffs which affects everyone, in particular the poorest. According to a recent analysis, the multiplication of heat waves could, by 2045, put the agricultural sector in a situation of “extreme risk” in some sixty countries which alone are responsible for 71% of world food production.
Agriculture on the front line
Europe and the American West are facing unprecedented droughts in 500 and 1000 years respectively, China and India are being hit hard by water shortages never seen before, and the list is constantly growing. Quebec is not spared. Droughts have also increased there in recent years, thus quintupling, in five years, the annual compensation paid to farms by the Financière agricole du Québec (FADQ).
And to compound this already alarming situation, extreme heat is affecting the health and well-being of farmers, farm workers and even animals.
Who wants to work in the fields if they have to endure temperatures of 35°C? Agriculture, the one that feeds us, is on the front line of the impacts of climate change.
Soil health has deteriorated with the intensification of certain agricultural practices, including the cultivation of a very limited number of crops – grain corn and soybeans – on the same plot year after year, thus making agricultural businesses even more vulnerable to the effects of climate change. In some regions, such as the black lands south of Montreal, an important market gardening area, experts estimate that two centimeters of this precious soil are blown away by wind erosion each year. If nothing is done to reduce the loss of these soils, they will have completely disappeared within 50 years.
If our agriculture is a house, our soils are its foundations… and these are crumbling.
Where to start ?
Many agricultural practices, proven to improve soil health, promote business resilience. They allow them to better resist droughts and increasingly extreme and frequent storms. When their implementation is well thought out, these practices have also demonstrated their economic viability. Consequently, we must equip ourselves with the means to achieve the ambitious objectives of the Quebec Sustainable Agriculture Plan.
In order to help our agricultural businesses make this transition, we must support them by transferring knowledge, bringing the expertise of agronomy professionals to the field.
This transfer makes it possible to popularize and transfer research results in a form that can be used by the front line, that is to say the agronomists who advise agricultural companies in the field. However, the resources enabling this support to be provided have declined significantly over the past 30 years. In 1990, there were approximately 300 agronomists at the Quebec Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAPAQ), while in 2021, there were around 130, a reduction of more than 50%. In addition to the reduction in agronomic staff, the number of hours devoted by agronomists to the transfer has also been significantly reduced to the benefit of the administrative management of financial assistance programs, which are increasingly numerous and complex. .
To accelerate the transition to more ecological and resilient agriculture, it is necessary to increase the agronomic resources devoted to knowledge transfer.
At the same time, we must ensure that the advisory service for agricultural businesses is as independent as possible from the pesticide and fertilizer sales industry. In this sense, it is essential that Bill 41 amending the Agronomists Actfiled on 1er last June at the end of the parliamentary session, go ahead. This proposes to separate the sale of pesticides and fertilizers from the advisory service to agricultural businesses.
Putting agriculture at the heart of the electoral campaign
In response to these environmental issues, the Vire au vert coalition presents citizens and elected officials with two proposals1including better support for the implementation of agri-environmental practices promoting soil health and the diversification of crops for human food purposes.
The next four years will be crucial for us to put in place the means to ensure the resilience of our agriculture and our food supply. Quebec has demonstrated this with the pandemic: when there is a will, it is possible to quickly change our practices on a large scale. With the scale of the impacts that the climate crisis is having on our agriculture and our ability to feed ourselves, there is no reason to do less with regard to the very foundations of our agriculture.
* Co-signatories: Martin Vaillancourt, Director General of the National Grouping of Regional Environmental Councils of Quebec; Patricia Clermont, coordinator of the Quebec Association of Physicians for the Environment; Catherine Hallmich, scientific projects manager at the David Suzuki Foundation; Rachel Charbonneau, agronomist, agriculture project manager at Nature Québec; Rébecca Pétrin, Executive Director of Eau Secours; André Bélanger, Executive Director of the Rivières Foundation; Diego Creimer, Nature Solutions and Government Relations Manager at the Society for Nature and Parks-SNAP Quebec; Thibault Rehn, coordinator of Vigilance OGM; Karel Ménard, Director General of the Quebec Common Front for Ecological Waste Management