The Sunshine Coast Food Policy Council (FPC) expects to launch this June in an effort to tackle food security issues on the Coast.
The launch date was announced to an overflow crowd of citizens gathered at the Sunshine Coast Regional District (SCRD) board room on April 22 for the announcement and discussion.
The establishment of an FPC on the Coast has been a topic of discussion since 2013 when a Food for Thought forum organized by the SCRD and Vancouver Coastal Health brought many different individuals and groups together to start talking. In November of that year, the One Straw Society set up a steering committee with the goal of establishing an FPC.
Now the FPC is ready to become reality, One Straw Society coordinator Kym Chi told the crowd at the April 22 meeting.
“I personally have been excited about coming and sitting on the Food Policy Council [steering committee] meetings over the last few months and seeing ways that we can figure out how needs are not being met and how we can work to have that accomplished,” Chi said.
The aim of an FPC is to create a single place for all issues surrounding local food to be discussed, from growing edibles to processing farm waste.
The council would tackle things like advocacy and policy development related to local food production.
Currently the Coast produces less than three per cent of the food it consumes, which was highlighted as a problem by SCRD planner Greg Gebka, who also noted one per cent of all land on the Coast is in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) where farms are permitted.
“Of that one per cent, about 60 per cent is forested and uninhabited. Thirteen per cent of that ALR is actually cleared and used or intended to be used as farmland, but if we consider how much land is actually in crops or can be used for raising livestock, it’s considerably less than that,” Gebka said, noting it’s difficult to make a living as a farmer these days.
“It’s not a particularly optimistic set of circumstances, and many people might say, ‘so what? We’re living in a global market economy, the global market will take care of our needs.’ But it’s coming up more and more in conversation that we’re really stretching ourselves in relying on that global food system.”
Seeing the issue as an important one, the Rotary Club of Sechelt has decided to make food security and setting up the Sunshine Coast FPC their number one priority this year, according to president-elect Norm Blair.
“Earlier this year we put a letter of intent into the Sunshine Coast Community Foundation on the desire to establish the Food Policy Council,” Blair said. “Our letter of intent was accepted by the community foundation and they have asked us to put in for a grant application. We’re in the process of doing that now with a deadline at the end of the month.”
The seed funding expected from the community foundation will help officially launch the new FPC in June, which will likely be set up as a cooperative.
The council will be made up of a variety of individuals from different backgrounds who are all passionate about food security, including representatives from community groups, government organizations and non-profit societies.
Find out more about the FPC at www.sechelt
rotary.ca. Follow the “local food” link.
