That April 3 letter to the Prime Minister and the Canadian Ministers of Agriculture, Fisheries, and the Environment urges “transformative” change to our food system.

Below, is an open letter initially signed by 158 food and environmental organizations, academics, farmers, and sustainable-food advocates from across the country. Since then the list has grown to 163 signatures as of the publishing of the letter.

As COVID-19 continues to batter the economy, an increasing number of sectors are sounding the alarm about Canada's food security.

We, the undersigned, call for immediate transformative change to Canada’s food, agriculture, and fisheries systems from an industrial to an agroecological model. Agroecology is farming with nature to improve soil health, biodiversity, and natural ecosystem function; to increase the capability of land to sequester carbon; and to provide local, seasonal, healthy food. Its basic principles can also be applied to fisheries.

The coronavirus pandemic underscores the emergency need for this transformative change in order to enable ecological resilience and food security across Canada in the months and years to come. Agroecology also provides the single greatest opportunity for a resilient economy, meaning one that is decentralized, ecological, meets local needs, and offers widespread employment.

The United Nations and many non-governmental organizations, including Canada’s National Farmers Union, have made clear that industrial food, agriculture, and fisheries systems are major contributors to the climate crisis, the global loss of biodiversity, and the imminent extinction of one million species world-wide. In Canada, we have lost one-third of bird populations since 1970, and now risk losing wild bees, salmon, caribou, and other species upon which our ecosystems and food systems depend.

Besides environmental impacts, the industrial food, agricultural, and fisheries systems have resulted in negative social, economic, and health impacts, including collapsed rural economies, massive farm debt, decreased food security, and physical and mental health issues in both rural and urban populations. Food systems that do not respect nature, we are now learning, also greatly increase the risk of pandemics; as David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic recently wrote, “We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it.”

"As with the rest of the world, Canada does not have time to spare. We cannot subject our lands, rivers, oceans, health, and economy to another year of the industrial food system."

The UN and NGOs see agroecology as the solution to these crises. The UN’s 2013 report Wake Up Before It’s Too Late states, “we need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach…which recognizes that a farmer is…a manager of an agro-ecological system.” Likewise, the NFU’s 2019 report Tackling the Farm Crisis and the Climate Crisis: A Transformative Strategy for Canadian Farmers and Food Systems notes, “agriculture must increasingly re-merge with nature and culture to create a much more integrated, life-sustaining, and community-sustaining agroecological model of human food provision, nutrition, and health.” And the International Commission on the Future of Food and Agriculture states in its 2019 report Food for Health that agroecology “combines quantity and quality and maximizes the benefits to the health and wellbeing of the planet and its people.”

Agroecology, while far more productive than industrial agriculture, focuses on long-term resiliency, not short-term profit, and therefore is part of an entirely different, but certainly not new, food system.

Agroecology is already well understood and projects around the world have proven its benefits. Such benefits are even possible over massive areas: John D. Liu’s documentary Hope in a Changing Climate depicts the large-scale ecosystem rehabilitation accomplished on the Loess Plateau in China, and the lessons from that project are now being applied to restoration projects in Jordan, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, and Spain.

As with the rest of the world, Canada does not have time to spare. We cannot subject our lands, rivers, oceans, health, and economy to another year of the industrial food system.

We call for the following shifts from an industrial model to an agroecological model to begin in spring 2020:

1. An immediate ban on the use of neonicotinoids, glyphosate, and other harmful pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides).