http://static.ning.com/socialnetworkmain/widgets/index/logo.gif); background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-position: 100% 0%; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; ">It's hard to imagine such a thing as a food shortage here in the suburbia of Markham, Ontario, a good sized city just above Canada's largest. But at the outskirts of the city limits, where cows still roam fields, and the crops can be seen harvested in the fall, it doesn't take much to see that things are changing fast.
Every year the number of local farms is reduced as developers purchase the extremely valuable land and start to churn out subdivisions. There's a growing support for protection of this very local "farm belt", but they don't seem to be winning. Of course this is a gross simplification of the very complex and dynamic systems of government and policy at work, but the evidence is plain to see: less farms, more development.
Further evidence can be seen in the changing face of the local Farmer's Market, which operates during the summer months. Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of imported produce, seemingly straight from the supermarket, being sold in a stall as "fresh", even though it still has a sticker that identifies it as coming from across at least one border, often two. With such dependence on "food from afar", it seems to me that our very sustenance leans heavily on some of the more unstable and unpredictable places on earth, both meteorologically and politically.
But within the town there are those urban planners who are working away quietly on a plan that would allow for some real sustainability: Changing planning policies to allow for residents to grow their own produce and even keep their own livestock both in their homes and backyards.
This radical, out-of-the-box thinking has not even been made public yet, but represents a real possibility towards sustainability. Notwithstanding the tremendous impact on businesses and infrastructure, it's great to hear about such innovative concepts from local government.
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