Canada: The post-pandemic future: We’ll turn city lands and golf courses into massive urban farms
We can build agricultural land trusts in our city’s suburbs.
By Paul M. Taylor
Toronto Life
August 19, 2020
Excerpt:
We have so much land at our disposal. For example, Toronto owns five golf courses that are losing money every year, which provide no benefit to their surrounding communities. We could establish permanent community-led urban farms and produce markets in these spaces. It’s been done before: in 2005, Seattle integrated a racial and food justice lens into all their municipal departments and provided huge tracts of public land for urban agriculture activities. They launched markets for immigrant farmers from Southeast Asia and East Africa who were residing in public housing to sell their food to other residents and to stores and restaurants. It’s been hugely successful.
By allowing people to control the distribution of their own food, we could provide Torontonians with the resources to meet their own needs. The majority of our food flows into the city from large-scale industrial farms, and the majority of profits flow out. We don’t need to settle for a food system that’s dependent on workers earning poverty wages in exploitative environments. Now that Covid’s keeping us inside, we could change city bylaws to make it easier for cooks to sell food prepared in their own homes. We could create government-subsidized produce markets and support the launch of community food hubs in every neighbourhood. And we could build on CERB and provide every Canadian with a monthly benefit redeemable for food that’s grown or prepared in the surrounding area.
