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Against the Grain: Agency & Urban Agriculture in Toronto

Introduction – Imagining a Food Secure Future in Toronto

Over the past decade, Canada has seen a dramatic rise both in local food awareness and urban agriculture projects, while simultaneously witnessing a growing dependence on food banks by its most vulnerable citizens. “In March 2010, 867,948 people were assisted by food banks in Canada. This is a 9% increase over 2009 – and the highest level of food bank use on record.” Time and again, statistics point to a relatively uniform segment of the population requiring annual food aid: the un- and under-employed, single mothers, seniors, visible minorities, students, recent immigrants, and people with physical disabilities.

Unfortunately, with the election of the Rob Ford administration to Toronto’s City Council in October 2010, the future development of a municipally-led and legislated urban agriculture movement has never looked so bleak. The Ford agenda presents an enormous challenge for food and poverty activists in the city. Policies which benefit high income earners and property owners (e.g., tax breaks) have already created budgetary shortfalls which the administration has indicated a willingness to remedy with massive cuts to social spending, the elimination of grants and regulatory oversight, and the privatization and elimination of many city services. Within this toxic policy and financial environment, the likelihood of leadership from City Hall on issues such as short-term investment designed to secure long-term quality of life improvements is slim. Nevertheless, it also creates a perfect opportunity to draw attention to the linkages between food security and income security and to imagine the genuinely radical ways in which supporting urban agriculture in Toronto can create alternative spaces in which resistance to the types of neoliberal policies mentioned above can flourish.

The relationship between hunger and income insecurity is well-established and thus forms the philosophical foundation upon which most food security organizations guide their policy, research, outreach, and community engagement. The development of urban agriculture is a symbiotic solution to both cause and effect. Urban and semi-urban food production is uniquely situated as a means to promote income security through sales and directly confront food insecurity by providing food for household and community consumption. In general terms, any comprehensive urban agriculture policy framework would be created with the input of direct and indirect stakeholders and local communities, would take into account food safety and health risks, and would focus on projects which could be instituted in a sustainable manner with organic and locally-derived inputs and little reliance on industrial production methods. The foundation for such a progressive transformation of Toronto’s foodscape could easily be appropriated from other cities with similar characteristics and already-existing urban agriculture frameworks and further developed within a local context. Additionally, provincial and federal policy could directly support programs in Toronto by, for instance, making access to safe, nutritious, and culturally-appropriate food a fundamental and constitutionally-inalienable human right.

Most importantly, urban agriculture allows for the development of agency in the very communities most likely to be affected by Rob Ford’s austerity measures, and agency comprises one of the most radical ingredients in any revolutionary reorganization of socio-political and economic systems. Forming zones of resistance to capital – zones which exist outside of its logic (i.e., co-ops, non-monetized community gardens and orchards, food shares, non-profits, etc.) – is an integral part of creating viable alternatives to the ultimately unsustainable and dis-empowering neoliberal market. By situating urban agriculture as one such site of struggle and allowing vulnerable groups to empower themselves, a future vision of a food and income secure Toronto is also a radical future vision of a Toronto where human lives and the environment come before tax breaks and profits. “In the food system […] the possibility of achieving a more equitable path of development and the social stability that only greater equity can secure requires a successful challenge of the powerful interests that have captured the economic and political agenda.”

A Framework for Building an Alternative

For most food-focused charities, agencies, and non-governmental organizations, the difference between providing short-term solutions to food insecurity and finding long-term solutions to the systemic causes of that insecurity can be found within the gap between a radical analysis and critique of neoliberal market mechanisms and its acceptance. The very structure of such organizations needs to be built upon a foundation which consists of ultimately eliminating the need for their future necessity.

To advance beyond mere food aid, food-based organizations need to actively engage in a series of multifaceted activities with the goal of one day securing a sustainable and equitable food system. The first of these activities is an active engagement in research and policy analysis (e.g., questionnaires, stakeholder interviews, etc.), the second is the fostering of client and community agency (e.g., the development of a robust urban agriculture plan), and the third is in the formation of alliances with other (non-food-based) organizations and agencies that also explicitly link poverty and class to arrive at an equally damning critique of capital. A combination of all three of these activities can challenge capital even more effectively than one or two in isolation.