In the crop year 2011-12, Canada exported 32.1 million tonnes of grain and wheat flour. That鈥檚 pretty close to one tonne for every man, woman and child in the country.
What will your family do with its tonne of grain per member once these exports get blocked? How big is your family and how big is your garage?
We export this annual Gibraltar of vegetable matter to a large number of countries. (The top six 鈥� Mexico, Japan, Iraq, the U.S. and Colombia 鈥� take 37 per cent of the total). But if the 鈥渁gricultural self-sufficiency鈥� and 鈥渆at local鈥� movements become as popular everywhere else as they are here, other countries are certain to stop importing our grain and start eating foodstuffs they themselves produce locally.
Which leaves the problem of what we do with all that grain.
Will these movements take hold? They鈥檙e all the rage with trendy thinkers in the richer parts of the world and, partly as a result, are gaining currency with governments. Quebec鈥檚 government, which admittedly is more xenophobic than most, though in agricultural matters not really by that much, has just set a target of 50 per cent self-sufficiency in food, which would double the importance of local produce in Quebecers鈥� diets.
On the face of it, the idea that a jurisdiction that鈥檚 covered in snow for six months of the year and has one of the shortest growing seasons in the world should aspire to produce all its own food is bizarre.
It鈥檚 the kind of thing you鈥檇 do if you were expecting global shipping lanes to be closed down, as they were from 1939 to 1945.
But is anyone really expecting global submarine warfare soon? Does Quebec鈥檚 government know something about geopolitics the rest of us don鈥檛?
I don鈥檛 actually know how much of your living space your tonne per family member of grain or flour will consume. The Australian state of Queensland鈥檚 handy online conversion table suggests a tonne of wheat should take up 1.5 cubic metres of granary space.
Of course, grow-localers don鈥檛 actually want us to store the 32 million tonnes a year of grain and flour we have been exporting or, even worse, try to eat it all ourselves. Rather, they want Canada鈥檚 grain farmers to shift from grain to other foodstuffs that we import but that we 鈥渟hould鈥� be producing at home.
Coffee, say. Or oranges. Or maybe bananas (of which we import more than $350 million worth a year).
The obvious difficulty is that the Prairies are great for grain and not so great for lots of other foodstuffs. At the same time, other countries aren鈥檛 so good at grain but do an excellent job at foodstuffs and other products we don鈥檛 do so well.
In fact, our biggest agri-food import by value is red wine. Do we really want grain farmers to plow under their wheat and plant vines? Chateau Moose Jaw? Chateau Medicine Hat? Chateau Flin Flon?
I do realize my tone will be offensive to those, assuming they鈥檝e read this far, who think eating local is a sacred obligation to Gaia because of the contribution agricultural transport makes to global warming. A first response to this concern is that, in fact, ocean transport is much more energy-efficient than land transport.
But, more importantly, if you really are concerned about excessive production of carbon dioxide, probably the least effective thing you could do is micromanage production in a single industry, albeit an important one. What you need to do instead is establish a price for carbon (and for all other greenhouse gases) either by taxing it or with a cap-and-trade system and then sit back and let the market work. Things whose production is carbon-intensive will shut down. Things whose production doesn鈥檛 use much carbon will expand.
Price greenhouse gases and then let the chips (and fritters and rutabagas) be produced where they may. But don鈥檛 create still more reasons to bias your people against foreigners and their goods.
William Watson teaches economics at McGill University.
