A new report on the challenges faced by the region’s agricultural sector will hopefully help change restrictive policies and enable local farmers to better distribute their products, one of the report’s authors said Tuesday.
The report, The Workforce Multiplier Effect of Local Farms and Food Processors in Northwestern Ontario, was completed by students in a Lakehead University class in natural resources economics. It looks at the economic impact of the sector, as well as the challenges those within it face.
The students gathered data via interviews with farmers in the Thunder Bay area, said Madelaine Kennedy, one of the students who worked on the report.
“We wanted to know the more personal troubles that they have,” she said after a presentation of the report’s findings Tuesday at the North Superior Workforce Planning Board (NSWPB) office.
“Not just general troubles, but more specific to the different types of farms, and the different situations that they encounter.”
Many of the farmers, she said, identified distribution troubles as a concern, as well as difficulty in attempting to sort through the policies governing distribution.
“In Thunder Bay, I think, distribution is a little easier,” Kennedy said.
“We had one farmer who can actually get into the big box stores like Walmart, and there’s also a farmers’ market. . . . It’s a really large one that’s well-known, that lots of people go to.”
Still, distribution and the policies governing it were an issue.
For example, the policy regarding federal inspection is problematic; it limits where farmers can distribute their products based on whether they can get the product federally inspected or not. Actually getting those inspections done, meanwhile, is a very expensive process, Kennedy said.
The hope, though, is that the findings in the report — which will be formally available in early December — will lead to changes in distribution policies, she said.
Frank Pullia, co-chairman for business with the NSWPB — which along with the Food Security Research Network commissioned the study — said the study will be a valuable tool in efforts to change the policies.
“This is an economy that is still stable, because it provides food supply to the region,” Pullia said.
“It has potential for further growth.
“We have found out that the challenges are based on policies and bureaucracy that are fairly restrictive, and that favour the large big-box stores.
“The local suppliers, the small farmers, are suffering because of that restrictive policy,” he said.
The full report will be available in early December at nswpb.ca.
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