Concerned about food security?

If so — and there are good reasons to be — the smart thing for Canada to do is adopt policies to foster more international food trade, says a new study from the Conference Board of Canada’s Centre for Food in Canada.

This under-reported analysis, published late last month while I was on vacation, is a welcome and overdue counter-balance to some of the nonsense that’s stated or implied in discussions about those trendy 100-mile diets and eat-local campaigns.

There’s nothing wrong with local food — it can be healthy and tasty, though it’s by no means as inherently virtuous as its fans might have you believe. But to promote over-reliance on homegrown edibles, especially in densely populated areas, is to invite serious unintended consequences.

A big issue — the one this analysis focuses on — is economic.

“Trade in food provides significant benefits,” writes Kristelle Audet, a Conference Board economist who wrote this report.

“Without it, Canadian production of things like canola, wheat, lentils, soybeans, and red meat would be much lower; our access to fresh fruits and vegetables year-round would be limited; and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to find things like coffee and sugar in our supermarkets.”

The cost of such production losses would be huge. Wheat exports alone brought in more than $4.5 billion in 2010, and canola and canola oil added up to $5.5 billion. Canada’s top 10 farm exports totalled nearly $20 billion.

Of course, producing a lot more local food would also boost the economy. But it would be far less efficient to try to do some of everything rather than specializing in the things our climate and our workforce do best. So the inevitable result would be either higher prices, or less to eat, or both. Not to mention vastly less variety.

The environmental impact of every part of Canada trying to feed itself locally would also be huge. Many localities — including much of B.C. — wouldn’t have enough good land available. The consequence would be putting marginal land under the plow, then sub-marginal land.

Even keeping good land in production, as B.C. knows from its experience with the Agricultural Land Reserve, comes at the cost of creating more and more urban sprawl, and all the adverse environmental impacts that it creates.

Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, authors of the Locavore’s Dilemma, reckon that if the whole world went this route, additional land equal to the size of South America would have to be pressed into service as the global population races inexorably toward nine billion human beings.

And, without diverse, secure, and well-established global trade links, our little corner would be vulnerable to droughts and other disasters that plague many countries and could strike ours. This would be much more serious than a loss of production in one or a handful of the many places that supply food in a diverse trading environment.

But let’s get back to economics.

Audet notes that the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement and then NAFTA hugely boosted Canada’s food exports to the U.S., and since 2002 our markets have diversified greatly thanks to other trade deals. She sees immense potential if future deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Canada-Europe Trade Agreement are eventually concluded.