A war of attrition and punitive regulation

Thomas Pawlick's The War in the Country is an important book, despite its flaws. In fact, it's an inspiring book, and I find myself compelled to blog about it.

I also find myself wanting to follow his suggestion that more urbanites should join the National Farmers Union (if they're Canadians). Associate membership is only $50 per year.

The Globe and Mail's reviewer didn't much care for the book, and there's no doubt it's flawed - perhaps even deeply flawed. If I, as an editor, had seen this book as a draft, my advice to Pawlick would have been to come back to me with a second draft in which he extrapolated more from his Eastern Ontario rural base (Belleville to Ottawa, basically), paraphrased his conversations and actually told the story himself rather than quoting the individuals he interviewed at such great length, while providing some real figures on how the war in the country is going on everywhere rather than leave readers with the impression that it's happening primarily in Eastern Ontario. An appendix with that information would have been nice.

But essentially this is nitpicking. I heard Pawlick interviewed on CBC radio's The Current and was interested enough by what he said to look for The War in the Country. One of the reasons I recently relocated to Lethbridge, AB, was because of what a friend said to me about the city (pop. approx 85,000): "It's the centre of a farming community, not an oil and gas exploration and development community."

It's not that I don't think we need energy as well as food - it's just that, of the two, food is more important. The Inuit have survived without central heating for centuries, after all, and if we had to, us non-Inuit could too, with or without technical fibres.

In the last couple of years, the world's population balance has tipped from predominantly rural to predominantly urban, and much of the focus of Pawlick's book is the disconnect we experience with the food we eat. He points out that most people are now two generations removed from ancestors who actually tilled the fields or raised livestock. What's truly scary about this is that most urban dwellers don't have the faintest idea where - or how - the food they eat is produced.

There are, of course, exceptions. Local farmers' markets are in vogue, and some of them are huge. I used to love, in the early 90s, wandering through Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto during the summer and just browsing through the wondrous things on offer at the farmers' market there, returning at lunchtime or after work to make some purchases. The 100-mile diet and the (buy) and eat local movements have driven awareness of what we're putting on our plates and in our mouths. I'm encouraged to hear people in large cities like Calgary say things like, 'you know, I don't want to eat fresh peaches in January - I think that's wrong.'

There's lots of information in Pawlick's book that should make you stop and think: statistics on how the actual nutritional content of meat in particular has declined; an explanation that makes sense of the fact that when you eat an animal raised on corn, you are basically eating corn - whether you want to or not; an analysis of factory farming and the quota system, both of which represent serious barriers to the survival of small farmers - and the fact that invariably, smaller farms truly are more productive, more efficient, and far more eco-friendly than larger ones. That shouldn't really have been a surprise to me - when I visited a privately managed woodlot in Wisconsin a few years ago I realized that of course someone who has to make the income from the trees he's harvesting last at least his own lifetime is going to be a better steward of the forest than a multinational who can afford to move on to the next stand after clear cutting this one.

But perhaps the single most chilling feature of The War in the Country is Pawlick's description of the way the relentless drive to factory farming and the onerous regulations imposed on small farmers is driving not only them out of business, but is also killing small businesses in towns that have traditionally serviced rural areas. And he's right - it's hard not to believe it isn't the result of deliberate implementation of federal and provincial government policies concocted as a result of lobbying by agribusinesses. The question is - what are we going to do about it?