C3-How can we balance Fair Trade/Income for farmers with Fair access to local food for poor urban people in Kingston?

Faciliated by Susan Belyea, Loving Spoonful Kingston 

Attending are:

• Margaret Lesage
• Kim 
• Garry Kelly
• Tara
• Susan
• Phillipe
• others

Susan raised the issue of access to good nutritious food for all.  How do we reward our farmers fairly and make sure everyone gets access to healthy food?

We can lobby our local politicians at all levels of government and demand protections, guarantees, changes to liability laws, insurance, etc for farmers, as well as higher minimum wages, increases to disability pay, ontario works pay, universal childcare, subsidized housing, etc to free up more money for buying food. 

Two directions:

• Lobby Grocery stores, distributors, etc to carry more local products
• extablish alternative ways of distributing local food - markets, group ordering, etc

No Frills off of Montreal street was closed despite a community disapproval. 

Kim:  Beef producers lost 30% of their income after the .  Through refinancing some have managed to recover some ground. The food system seems to be damaged.  Farmers are feeling the crunch, some having to resort to using food banks as a result.

$5.00 box of Corn Flakes contains approximately $0.11 of actual farm products. 

Provide for the farmers so they can support the rest of us.  how to do this? 

• the importance of supporting a local food system and cutting out some of the "middle man" who profits fromeveryone

Free trade and contracting out jobs overseas don't serve us well. 

Ethanol for fuel has hurt the beef and pork economy.  Subsidize the corn (feed and food) producers and not the ethanol producers.  

Solutions:

• Raise the minimum wage, lower taxes (Government initiative)
• Farmers cannot carry the burden of feeding the poor.