Food, land and faith: the Canadian forum on religion and ecology

Catholic New Times, Dec 5, 2004 by Jim Profit, Heather Heaton, James Miller

A quiet revolution is taking place in the way Canadians consume their food. Not only is the $1 billion organic sector growing at 20 per cent a year, increasingly, consumers are demanding a relationship with the farmers who raise the animals, grow the vegetables and produce the dairy products that end up on our dining tables. The popularity of farmers' markets, and schemes for direct-to-door delivery of organic vegetables show that city folk are no longer content with mass-produced food distributed through impersonal supermarket chains. Are spiritual values influencing these consumer trends?

At a recent discussion organized in Guelph by the Canadian Forum on Religion and Ecology (www.cfore.ca), Ted Zettel, president of Organic Meadow, Inc., spoke of a spiritual conversion that brought him to farm in an organically sustainable way. He asked: "Is there a spiritual truth that opens us up to a holistic, ecological point of view?" Put like that, farming is not more than a business concerned with maximizing profit. It is a way of life with ethical and spiritual obligations to the land, the animals and to future generations.

For Jim Profit, the director of the Ignatius Jesuit Centre of Guelph, which includes an organic farm and is known for its recent campaign against the building of Wal-Mart, this trend towards sustainable agriculture is not just about the farmers. It also involves the choices that consumers make. Increasingly, Canadians are demanding an ethical and even spiritual relationship to the land and to the animals that are the sources of our food. But is this relationship a luxury that only the wealthy can afford?

Ann Clark, a professor of plant science at the University of Guelph, noted that conventional food at big-box retailers is often cheaper than locally produced organics. But this is only because industrial farming, often subsidized, externalizes many of the costs of farming, leaving governments and taxpayers to pick up the tab for subsequent environmental costs such cleaning up the phosphates in our water supply. Organic farming is more intelligent, she said, because it helps prevent these environmental problems from arising in the first place. Industrial farming tends foolishly to ignore the reality that "nature bats last."

All this comes down to the question of whether we truly respect the land. Sallie McFague, a well-known author and eco-feminist theologian, argued that we have much to learn from First Nations cultures about the value of the land: "Without good land, none of the other goods of human existence is possible."

Food production and farming

The global food system has undergone radical change in the last half century. Since World War II, there has been a coordinated effort by government and corporate interests to industrialize and rationalize the food production and delivery system. Proponents argue that such a system, which treats food as a commodity generating profit, is the best way to alleviate poverty in rural communities and developing, countries, to provide a variety of cheap food for urban dwellers and to feed the hungry. Food is now understood as a commodity, not a blessing.

Since the 1970s, food production in Canada has experienced one crisis after another. Small-scale agriculture is in crisis, creating stress for an aging farm population. The number of farmers has declined by 75 per cent over 50 years, and agribusiness (not the individual farmer) is the dominant player. The latest are the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy or mad cow disease), potato and hog farms, and grain crises. In addition, the farmer is often blamed for the problem, and considered slow to adapt to new technology, while being vulnerable to the interest of agribusiness and international markets.

Suggested solutions are more of the same: the encouragement of farmers to become more "efficient," to use stronger pesticides and biotechnology, to support free trade and to allow greater multinational corporate control. Meanwhile, the best agricultural land is paved, and the Ontario government faces opposition from developers who want to pave over the remaining farmland with more subdivisions and more roads. The urban consumer has cheap food, heavily subsidized, and is far removed from the source of her or his food, while billions of people go hungry daily. There is no relationship with the farmer, or with the land that produces it.

Land and faith

Only now are some recognizing the massive problems associated with this type of agriculture and food production. Modern agriculture, heavily dependent on fossil fuels and pesticides, is unsustainable. Surprisingly, religious values are often used to promote the industrialized system. For example, agricultural biotechnology is promoted as a social justice tool that will feed the hungry and decrease dependence on insecticides. While lasting solutions to food issues are complex, one viable but difficult direction is organic agriculture: viable because it supports local communities and pesticide-free, healthy food production; difficult because it take years of transformation to get there. Both Ted and Jim attested to the mainly financial problems in becoming certified organic, and there is no government support.