A novel methodology to assess land-based food self-reliance in the Southwest British Columbia bioregion

Abstract

There is a growing awareness that climate change, economic instability, resource limitations and population growth are impacting the capacity of the contemporary global food system to meet human nutrition needs. Although there is widespread recognition that food systems must evolve in the face of these issues, a polarized debate has emerged around the merit of global-versus-local approaches to this evolution. Local food system advocates argue that increasing food self-reliance will concomitantly benefit human health, the environment and local economies, while critics argue that only a globalized system will produce enough calories to efficiently and economically feed the world. This debate is strong in British Columbia (BC), Canada, where residents and food security experts have called for increased food self-reliance while the provincial government largely supports export-oriented agriculture. As elsewhere, however, in BC this debate takes place in absence of an understanding of capacity for food self-reliance. The few studies that have previously evaluated self-reliance in this region have been limited in their approach in a number of ways. In this study we use a novel methodology to assess current (2011) status of land-based food self-reliance for a diet satisfying nutritional recommendations and food preferences that accounts for seasonality of crop production and the source of livestock feed, and applied it to the Southwest BC bioregion (SWBC) as a case study. We found that agricultural land use in SWBC is dominated by hay, pasture and corn silage, followed by fruits and vegetables. Fruit and vegetable production comprise 87% of total food crop production in SWBC by weight, and a substantial amount is produced in quantities beyond SWBC need per crop type, representing an export focused commodity with limited contribution to food self-reliance. Results illustrate that SWBC is a major producer of livestock products, but these industries rely on feed grain imports. The production of feed grain could therefore be considered a major constraint on self-reliance; SWBC's total dietary self-reliance is 12% if discounting livestock feed imports or 40% if including them. Results demonstrate that a diet including foods that cannot be grown in the region or consumed fresh out of season, limits potential food self-reliance. Our methods reveal the value of factoring dietary recommendations and food consumption patterns into food self-reliance assessments and the necessity of accounting for the source of livestock feed to fully understand the self-reliance status of a region.

Local or global: A biophysical analysis of a regional food system

“…Data on food demand are from Dorward et al (2016) who calculated the annual food demand of the bioregion's residents. Food demand in the bioregion comprised 59 agricultural commodities (see Table 1 in the supplementary materials file for the full list of agricultural commodities).…”

“…The LF included the agricultural land (hectares) required for growing one unit (a ton) of a commodity in the SWBC bioregion and in the main regions from which the commodity was imported. For SWBC land input calculation, we followed Dorward et al (2016) published in this journal. Data are from Statistics Canada (2014).…”

“…Specific objectives of the project included: (1) an estimate of bioregional food self-reliance potential; (2) estimates of income generation, job creation and other economic outcomes; (3) determining the potential to reduce GHG; (4) determining the ecological footprint (EF) of the bioregion's food system; (5) calculating the impact of balancing nitrogen and phosphorous generation from manure with crop need; and (6) calculating the impact of integrating ecologically beneficial farmscape features—hedgerows and riparian buffers throughout the bioregion. Some initial results of the project from which this paper draws have been published in Dorward et al (2016); Harris et al (2016); and Mullinix et al (2016).…”

Assessing the Circularity of Nutrient Flows Across Nested Scales for Four Food System Scenarios in the Okanagan Bioregion, BC Canada

“…Imports and exports were estimated based on a suite of allocation principles and assumptions given that there were no import and export statistics for the Okanagan. Note that, even though it is known that seasonality constraints imply that domestic production may not actually supply domestic demand (see Dorward et al, 2017), Calculations were carried out separately per commodity and for nine pathways from crop production to food consumption (see "disaggregation of calculation"). Each pathway describes a unique combination of where the crop and livestock commodities are produced, and the food commodities are consumed (see "pathways").…”

Delineating the Southwest British Columbia Bioregion for Food System Design and Planning: A Practical Approach

“…The majority of SWBC's approximately 1,500 km 2 (579 mile 2 ) of agricultural land is protected by the provincially legislated Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) (Dorward, Smukler, & Mullinix, 2016;Government of British Columbia, 2013). SWBC is a major center for the production of dairy, egg, turkey, broiler chicken, cranberry, blueberry, raspberry, greenhouse sweet pepper and tomato, and various other field horticultural crops (British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture, n.d., 2013).…”