Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser: In the face of California’s climate chaos, B.C. must act to secure our domestic food supply

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California is experiencing an unprecedented drought, with dire implications for Canada’s fruit and vegetable supply. We must build year-round capacity for fruit and vegetable production if we are to maintain our food security. The situation is urgent; California has declared a state of emergency as temperatures have crested into the upper 40s and low 50s, temperatures far above the point at which even well irrigated crops begin to die.

With unimaginable heat comes drought. The Colorado River and the reservoir behind the Hoover Dam are at record lows. Much of the last 10 years has seen the region in near continuous drought, and the long-term projections suggest that things are going to get worse. Some experts conclude that the southwest of the United States is heading toward what is ominously described as a “mega-drought.” Wildfires are raging out of control, and 2021 is almost certain to be yet another worst year on record.

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California is often called America’s garden state. Their $50-billion-a-year agriculture industry supplies much of North America with fruit and vegetables. Canada is a major customer, and for much of the year we are completely dependent on California for the fruits and vegetables that make up a healthy diet. California produces 84 per cent of our broccoli and cauliflower, 76 per cent of our strawberries, 90 per cent of our almonds, and almost 70 per cent of our lettuce and carrots. British Columbia alone imports $2 billion worth of produce annually from California, and that food is about to get much more expensive. In 2015, during another bad Californian drought, Canada’s inflation rate was 2.1 per cent. But because of the dryness in California (along with a weak Canadian dollar), our fruit prices rose 3.5 per cent and vegetables a whopping 8.4 per cent.

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Our reliance on California’s bounty is also part of the larger environmental problem. Every time we buy a head of lettuce from the Golden State, we are diverting precious water. Lettuce is 95 per cent water by weight and a strawberry is 91 per cent water. Emerging as one of the world’s fruit and vegetable powerhouses in the mid-20th century, Californian farmers are in effect operating a water export business. For all their ingenuity and hard work, they have managed to seriously deplete the state’s reservoirs. As we look forward into the 21st century, we need to find a different system. If our country wants to be food secure and maintain any food sovereignty, if we want to control the price and availability of a healthy diet, and if we want to make the environmentally sound choice, we need to fix this problem. We need to reduce our dependency on California.

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British Columbia could be a powerhouse of indoor growing. Recent advances in automation, hardier varieties of fruits and vegetables, new LED lighting systems, and better-quality sensors that measure temperature and moisture in farms provide important tools to fruit and vegetable producers in our country. In Ontario, greenhouses are churning out high quality strawberries 11 months of the year. On the West Coast, vertical farming companies are proving to be a reliable supplier for quality salad greens and other leafy vegetables. We have a wealth of renewable energy, abundant water, and technical expertise. These technologies represent a continuum of approaches that give producers immeasurably better ability to control environmental variables. From low-tech solutions such as covering seedlings with mulch to protect them from the frost to greenhouses that combine sunlight with LEDs in the winter, through to fully-fledged vertical farms where produce is tended by autonomous systems year-round, we are on the cusp of a transformation of fruit and vegetable production.

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But despite this potential, we are being left behind. Other parts of the world are having remarkable success deploying local indoor agriculture. Singapore has set the ambitious target of being 30 per cent food self-sufficient by the year 2030 and is doing this almost entirely through such technologically sophisticated systems. Japan’s “plant factory” leads the world in terms of vertical farming. The Netherlands, which has only a fraction of our land, nevertheless generates far more value in terms of agri-food production. But Canada doesn’t rank globally in terms of embracing these agri-technology solutions.

Recent policy visions — such as the report by the B.C. premier’s task force on food security and the Senate of Canada’s report on growing Canada’s value-added food sector — are so important. These documents lay out a roadmap for how our country can and should embrace agricultural technology, not only as a source of economic growth, and as a strategy to be a global leader in an exciting and emerging sector of the economy, but also because weening ourselves off California fruits and vegetables is a matter of national security. These visions must be implemented to be effective.

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Potential indoor farmers are mired in outdated zoning rules, struggling to find appropriately trained talent, and missing out on government support geared to last century’s farming techniques. We need to immediately revise our definitions of agriculture to include new technology, increase training in this critical sector, and support the companies building tomorrow’s food system. California might turn off the tap, but that won’t prevent us from building a greener, healthier food system right here at home.

Dr. Lenore Newman is the director of the Food and Agriculture Institute at the University of the Fraser Valley. Dr. Evan Fraser is the director of the Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph.

Letters to the editor should be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.The editorial pages editor is Hardip Johal, who can be reached at hjohal@postmedia.com.

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