Food Security Is National Security - You Can Say That Again!

At last, a Western politician is aware of the looming threat posed by poor food security planning. Britain’s David Cameron is apparently pressing for measures that would foster the local production of food. His reasoning, which is quite correct, is that with increasing demands on food due to consumption and some types of biofuel production countries which depend upon other regions to feed them might find their citizenry are a whole lot hungrier than before. This isn’t rocket science, it’s a simple numbers game - so why haven’t other leaders come to the same conclusion? 

In a country such as Canada with a limited growing season, one would think that we would have a thorough national food security policy. A plan that encourages Canadians to stockpile should something nasty like a flu pandemic hit in the dead of winter, shutting down borders and airports effectively cutting off our winter food supply. Such a plan might have supported the small family farm, a now nearly extinct mode of production, to generate produce and livestock purely for local consumption. Or it might have put limits on factory farming techniques which aren’t flexible enough to cope during emergencies and are thought to heavily pollute the environment (to say nothing of its impact on human health). Heck, maybe it would just have any old plan, something other than telling the people through commercials to be prepared for a 72-hour period? Alas, it’s the local grocery store or nothing.

Food Security, I am afraid, like Pandemic Preparedness is lost on most Westerners. Few in the West, if any, can remember a real tangible crisis which threatened their lives. A couple brushes with recessions, outbreaks of disease and water contamination do little to smarten the bureaucrats and political leaders up.  It’s all easily forgotten when in the next minute they are on to the latest issue for which none of them were prepared.

Until we step back and see the bigger picture, we will be doomed to run around after each event trying our best to cope in the aftermath. We have been fortunate in a country like Canada that none of these issues has ever really spiralled out of control, too much, at least not in living memory. How much longer can we rely on the resiliency of the international system to maintain the current status quo? 

I certainly hope we don’t find ourselves only just rethinking things at the point of starvation. 

This entry was posted on March 4 2008 at 23:06 and is filed under Food Security, North America, Europe, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.