Submitted by Sally Miller on 23 February 2010 - 12:12pm
In the late 1970’s, meetings took place in communities across Canada to discuss the food system and how to improve it. The process was an extraordinary set of hearings called the People’s Food Commission.
Modeled as a people-driven version of the Royal Commissions, the commissioners (mostly volunteers, many of whom continue today as Canada’s most effective activists and workers for change) held hearings everywhere, including people’s kitchens, school gymnasiums, churches, etc. The problems from over thirty years ago sound familiar today...
Submitted by Sally Miller on 10 February 2010 - 2:00am
Can We Not Can?
CanGro, the last tender fruit processor in Ontario, shut down in 2006. They removed many productive fruit trees as part of the closure agreement, reducing Ontario’s capacity to produce food. In 2007, Heinz significantly reduced contracts with local tomato growers when the farmers finally won a price increase. Small-scale meat producers struggle in 2010 to find abattoirs to process their product in a cost-effective way. Recently the only freezer facility in Ontario with capacity and segregation for organic closed as well.
Submitted by Sally Miller on 22 November 2009 - 9:32pm
There’s something in the air that smells like hope.
A timber corporation pulls out of a small town in British Columbia. A community forest co-op buys out the license. The forest and the right to cut it is now jointly owned by the municipal council, community members, the local First Nation and the union, who have a vested interest in keeping the harvest sustainable.
