Taking Control of the "Feed the World" Meme

One of the techniques I used a fair bit to prepare students for a lesson when I was teaching was brainstorming. There are more or less intricate ways of setting up a brainstorming exercise, but I'm not going to get all fancy here. I'm just going to pose a question to you, one that was posed to the general public on a website I stumbled across the other day. I think it was meant to be rhetorical, but I also think it shouldn't be.

"How can we feed a growing global population in an era of climate instability without genetically modified crops?"

Here's some answers I came up with, off the top of my head:

• curtail waste in the food system (40% of food is wasted at the household level in Canada; postharvest losses in developing nations range from 15-50% of production)
• stop producing food for inefficient biofuels (ie, almost all biofuels)
•  maintain and perpetuate biodiversity in order to respond contextually and locally to climate changes
• support and develop greenhouse gas-reducing farming methods
• put money back into public research in agriculture because even the USDA admits that Monsanto's 'drought-tolerant' corn has yields only equal to that of corn conventionally bred

I'm pretty sure the answer is not "giant plantations of monocultures from one seed source that require massive amounts of chemical and fossil fuel-based inputs to produce". That sounds like a textbook definition of a vulnerable food system to me.

What can you add to this list?

You can't go home again.

My hometown's centennial is this summer, and there's a big reunion planned. I was a farm kid living half a mile from town during the 75th reunion. Hundreds of people attended. I remember a floor-shaking country dance, driving a John Deere 3020 in the parade down main street, and christening the pioneer memorial (mostly, I remember ringing the giant bell).

Today, the town has twelve residents. Those of you from rural areas probably know what happened.

Last weekend, I saw a presentation by geographer Christiane von Reichert at a conference in Missoula, Montana. She studied rural depopulation. Every area sees out-migration, she said, but rural areas don't see any in-migration in return. The people who are most likely to move to and stay in rural areas are returnees who grew up in that area.

Von Reichert and her team attended high school reunions in 21 counties and conducted 400 interviews with people who stayed, left, and came back to their town to find out what attracted people back to rural areas and what made them stay. She then made recommendations for rural areas attempting to maintain or increase their population.

The number one reason people returned was for their children. They wanted their kids to be close to nature, be safe, be close to their family and roots, and have personalized educational experiences in smaller schools. So the biggest attraction in small towns was child-friendly infrastructure - quality child care, education, activities, parks, libraries, etc.  A related point was to have senior-friendly infrastructure: often, families moved back so children could get to know their grandparents.

The biggest barrier, of course, was economic. There tends to be few job opportunities in small towns. To that end, the geographer recommended that towns stay connected with former residents, point out employment opportunities, and most importantly, rather than "chasing smokestacks" - enticing big footloose factories to locate only to have them pull up roots for more attractive places later - help returnees with local business start-ups.


I don't think I'll ever be able to go home again, but I hope that some small towns will be able to entice people back. Agroecologist John Vandermeer believes that re-ruralization is necessary for a sustainable food system. For my part, I just think a child-friendly, community-minded, vibrant small town sounds like a really nice place to live.

Fatalism

There were over 138,000 farms in Saskatchewan in 1941, and it's gone downhill from there - there were just over 44,000 farms in 2006. I don't have comparable stats on the population of rural towns, but of course it has largely decreased in lockstep as well. I've observed a lot of fatalism, and some arguments that increasing urbanization is the best route for Saskatchewan, but I have recently gotten to know a small town of about 120 people that's putting up a big struggle to stay viable.

Hazlet has a lot going on. They have a new wind turbine to power their recently renovated rink, an international students program at the high school, an affordable housing initiative to attract residents, and a project underway to bring back the old railway station for a tourism information centre. Their economic development officer (another sign that the town is serious) is a grant-getting machine. And the town thrives on its volunteers.

Now, this is oil and gas country; the revenues from the patch are keeping a lot of farmers on their farms and the local oilfield companies support the town's initiatives through donations in cash and in kind. The financial stability this offers for the time being has definitely contributed to the town's viability.

Still, it's fairly unique to find a can-do attitude in this era of rural depopulation. The school is an example: many rural schools have closed in the past few decades in Saskatchewan, despite heartfelt protests from parents and communities. Hazlet did more than protest; they created the international students program as a way to bring money into the school and keep it viable.

So, my question is - given the optimism and hard work of the community, why, when topics turn to farming, is the fatalism still evident there?