In the wake of the discovery, Japan, South Korea, and much of Europe—all major buyers of the American export—have ceased import and distribution pending testing. Much of Europe is strictly GMO-free, and over 60 countries require foods with GM ingredients to be labeled.

A Kansan wheat farmer from Morton County, Ernest Barnes, filed a lawsuit June 3 accusing Monsanto of “gross negligence,” and other American farmers have joined him.

Monsanto has provided tests to the EU, Japan, and South Korea to determine if the American wheat they have is genetically modified. So far, all the tests have been negative, but American farmers have already lost money.

This is not the first time rogue GMOs have caused a ruckus. In 2006 genetically modified rice entered the American rice crop with dire economic consequences: nearly $1.29 billion (USD) in lost exports. Eleven thousand farmers sued Bayer, the company responsible for the development of the genetically modified rice grain, and received a settlement of $750 million.

Sounding more like a WTF than a FTW? Wheat is a much larger U.S. export than rice. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all import huge quantities of white wheat, used to make noodles. Even this potentially brief halt in trade could have dire consequences for the wheat industry in the U.S., an even more significant loss of revenue and dire consequences for Monsanto’s corporate image.

The company recently gave up on a campaign lobbying the EU’s GM-free zones to change their laws banning modified crops, saying in a statement that Monsanto respects a region’s right to remain GMO-free. This gross negligence charge emphasizes just how little respect Monsanto has for both farmers and agriculture, and how little control they have over their seeds.

This time, though, there may be real consequences for Monsanto.

Sign for the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Task Force protesting the Melancthon Quarry. Photo courtesy NDACT.

Carl Cosack wonders who is standing on guard for his piece of Ontario. The 52-year-old rancher manages a herd of black angus cows and 30 horses, making him one of Ontario’s last traditional trail hands and proud owner of one of the province’s few remaining amateur ranches (don’t call it a “dude ranch”). Thanks to a bid to build one of the world’s largest limestone quarries in his backyard, Cosack can also add “activist” and “lobbyist” to the mix.

Cosack is vice-chair of the North Dufferin Agricultural and Community Task Force, whose main goal—along with trying to effect larger policy change—is to oppose the Highland Companies’ application for a 2,316 acre quarry in Melancthon Township, about 60 km north of Brampton. Many in the area never saw it coming. Highland, a group of investors backed by the US$23-billion Boston-based hedge fund Baupost, bought the first farms in Melancthon Township in 2006, under the name Headwater Farms. Starting out as potato farmers, the company soon accumulated 8,500 acres—then came the quarry application. “People in the area just started asking questions,” Cosack says. Mostly: Who’s going to stop it?

Highland’s land includes parcels of farmland classified as Honeywood Silt Loam—some of the finest agricultural soil in Canada. That’s a key point for Leo Blydorp, director and policy advisor of the Dufferin Federation of Agriculture. The idea that Canada is a vast and underdeveloped land mass is wrong, he adds. In fact, 89 percent of Canada’s land mass is unsuitable for agricultural use, he says, and only 0.5 percent of Canada’s agricultural land is in the top class. More than half of that is in Ontario. “We continue to lose prime agriculture land at an alarming rate in Canada,” says Blydorp, “and in Ontario specifically.”

Then there’s the water. The proposed quarry is at the headwater of several major rivers that run in different directions into the remainder of the urbanized south. “They’re talking about managing 600 million litres of water a day,” says Cosack—the daily usage equivalent to 2.7 million Ontarians. Likely, it’s these concerns, and others, that prompted the Ontario government to call for a full environmental assessment of the project in September (although some feel it had more to do with election timing).

Kate Jordan, spokesperson for the Ministry of Environment, says the EA process will give concerned residents like Cosack a more formal opportunity to get educated, and involved. “There will be much more complex studies and more information,” she adds. The process also encourages every concerned Ontarian to speak up. Which would be nice, says Cosack. After all, he’s got a ranch to run.

Photos by Ian Willms

Robert Beynon’s dairy farm sits just north of the Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill, on one of the southernmost edges of Ontario’s greenbelt. It’s a small operation (40 cows, 350 acres) set back off of busy Bathurst Street. Behind his 150-year-old brick farmhouse and squat green dairy barn stretches a patchwork of bare fields, still muddy in mid-April. It’s the kind of pastoral scene city dwellers naturally think farms look like.

What those urbanites likely wouldn’t picture is what surrounds Beynon’s piece of rural paradise. Across the road, on the east side of Bathurst, sprawls MacLeod’s Landing, a 1,400-unit subdivision of looping streets and oversized homes. Houses bleed north onto former agricultural land—much of which Beynon’s family used to farm. He’d like to expand his property, but it’s boxed in on one side by the development, and on another by land slated to become a cemetery. Besides, he says, “The land’s too expensive, and you wouldn’t want to set up a bigger dairy operation next to a subdivision. Everyone loves the idea of living in the country, but they don’t really want to live beside somebody milking a couple hundred head of cows.” Later he wonders aloud, “And who wants to farm in the city when it comes down to it?”

Beynon is 33 years old; he’s no grizzled old-timer ready to retire. When he was still in school at the University of Guelph, taking a farm operations program, he and his father made plans to move outside of the GTA, away from the already encroaching houses, to buy more land and milk more cows. But in 2001, the Oak Ridges Moraine Act became law. (The moraine area’s 470,000 acres run from Brampton to past Cobourg.) The result was strict land-use regulations dictating how farmers could alter or expand their operations. There was also a moratorium on intensive development, but that didn’t stop construction on MacLeod’s Landing; the development was grandfathered because it had been approved before the moraine policy was created. There was no such provision for Beynon, whose family has owned its land for 150 years.

Then in 2005, the provincial government created the 1.8-million-acre greenbelt, which wraps itself around the Golden Horseshoe—running north of Toronto, Hamilton and their suburbs. (The greenbelt also includes the Niagara Escarpment, which bends down from the Georgian Bay to Niagara Falls, and encompasses the environmentally fragile Oak Ridges Moraine, the expanding Rouge Park, and the Holland Marsh.) Beynon claims his property value dropped about 70 percent. Now he and his wife Trina are stuck. “We don’t plan. We can’t justify putting an addition on our farm. And there isn’t more land to rent,” says Beynon, exasperated. “I’m not happy.”

Not that you would know that from his demeanour. Giving me a tour of his farm one April evening last year, he talks constantly, filling up silence and filling in detail. He opens the creaky wooden door to his dairy barn and calls to his big black lab, Jake, to follow him. Inside, his Guernseys chew their cud under the old barn’s low ceilings—the building, constructed around the same time as the farmhouse, has hardly changed in 40 years. “This barn’s dated,” says Beynon, more serious now. “Through the ’90s we were not improving our farm because what’s the point when you’re supposed to move? So we got behind on that and now we’re trying to play catch-up,” he says, explaining that he’s trying to modernize his barn—to make milking and cleaning more efficient— without spending too much money on facilities he still hopes to leave. “But it’s hard to make a business plan when you’re in our situation.” So for now he waits, hoping he finds an opportunity to sell his farm and move his operation out of the GTA.

Other farmers, fed up with the costs, the traffic, and the bureaucracy are doing exactly that, setting out for more open, less regulated, less occupied spaces to the south, east, and north. Some believe a mass exodus is inevitable, and that as agricultural land empties, it will be bought up by wealthy urbanites and made into 100-acre hobby farms. “Little by little, down in the greenbelt, some of those [farms] are going to become big estates. What happens then, to good, quality land?” asks retired veterinarian and dairy farmer Terry O’Connor. The promise of a sustainable, local food source for millions of Ontarians may be thwarted by the very policies designed to foster it.

How did this happen? Despite good intentions, the government made a false assumption about agriculture: just because you save the land doesn’t mean you save the farms. Without a well thought-out provincial agricultural policy implemented along with the greenbelt, those good intentions will remain wishful thinking, or even worse, the death knell for small-scale agriculture in the GTA. If things keep going this way, farmers warn, the future of the greenbelt will be one of large-scale industrial farms and barely productive hobby farms—the worst of both worlds.

“Ontarians will never have to fear that our access to food runs out. Unless we experience a nuclear holocaust, we will always have access to farm-fresh foods.” That’s Burkhard Mausberg, president of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, paraphrased last summer by urban affairs magazine Spacing. “We have our own food basket in our backyard,” he said.

That’s the dream. In 2006, one year after the greenbelt was created, The Globe and Mail reported [PDF] that Municipal Affairs Minster John Gerretsen was happy with the result: the scheme was “strutting its stuff in that it’s curbing urban sprawl, protecting water supplies and ensuring land for food protection.” Four years later, the Toronto Star’s Christopher Hume chimed in: “There was much shouting and screaming at the time—most notably from certain developers whose fury knew no bounds—but half a decade later, the wisdom of the move has been widely acknowledged.”

The Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation, a nonprofit whose purpose is to promote the protected area, boasts on its website that “possibility grows in the Greenbelt,” and claims the area is the most diverse of its kind in the world, both ecologically and agriculturally. It’s certainly one of the largest. At 1.8 million acres, it beats out London U.K.’s 1.2-million-acre swath, B.C.’s 716,000 acres, and the Netherlands’ 395,368.

There’s also no doubt Ontario’s greenbelt has saved land from developers. Conservationists and the public cheered the promise of land staying pristine, frozen in time. In fact, supporters cheered so loudly, they barely heard the grumbling from farmers out in their fields. Farmers weren’t consulted until after the McGuinty government announced the policy, and even then, they claim, no one listened. Agriculture, farmers groused, came second to environmentalism.

While she makes clear that she’s a staunch greenbelt supporter, food journalist Margaret Webb says, “When the local food movement gained momentum a few years ago, my perspective was that no one was really talking about the farmers… I think there was a misunderstanding of how farmers need to make a living.”

“We’re lashing out at the greenbelt because it’s the last insult,” says Niagara-area grape grower Howard Staff. “They should have talked about viability and programs that should have kept farmers in business.”

On the phone from his mid-town Toronto office, Mausberg—a former University of Toronto environmental studies professor and Ivey Foundation environmental director—says need for land protection was dire. “There was enormous growth eating up the land. Every year [in the GTA] we lost the equivalent of 1,200 soccer fields”—about 2,400 acres.

According to University of Toronto researchers Felix Fung and Tenley Conway, Toronto is “one of the fastest growing regions in North America, with the annual population increase exceeding 1.5 percent between 1996 and 2001. It is estimated that an additional 3.7 million people will make the region their home by 2031.” It’s no coincidence the greenbelt was created around the same time as the Places to Grow Act, a province-wide planning program to better manage municipal growth.

The Greenbelt Act itself states that the policy was created “to sustain the countryside, rural and small towns and contribute to the economic viabilities of farming communities;” “to preserve agricultural land as a continuing commercial source of food and employment;” and “to recognize the critical importance of the agricultural sector to the regional economy.”

But nowhere in the act’s 5,000 words does it lay out policies that support agriculture in any concrete way. Farming near an urban area, with its traffic, lack of agricultural infrastructure, and high land prices is difficult and frustrating. Those problems weren’t caused by the greenbelt, but they should be ameliorated by it.

In August 2009, University of Guelph rural-planning professor Harry Cummings and two grad students released a detailed analysis of agriculture in the region. Using census data, they looked at agricultural change from 2001 to 2006 in the greenbelt, and compared it to the rest of Ontario. What they found was that, in those years, the greenbelt area lost 490 farms and 86,000 acres of farmland, and every livestock operation in the region was either experiencing more rapid decline or slower growth than those in the rest of the province. The number of pigs had decreased by 31 percent in the greenbelt versus 14 percent elsewhere in Ontario, and the number of greenbelt beef cattle dropped by 24 percent versus 13 percent. The number of dairy cattle in the greenbelt fell by 13 percent versus 9 percent. (London, England’s greenbelt, created in 1939, faced a similar problem in the mid-1980s. High land prices forced farmers to rent land rather than own, and according to three University College London researchers, the percentage of family-run farms dropped from 45 percent in 1970 to 29 percent in 1985.)

Mausberg isn’t convinced by Cummings’ research. He says the numbers present a cause and effect relationship between the greenbelt and the flight of farmers that doesn’t actually exist. He calls Cummings’ research shoddy (something he’s even told the researcher himself), explaining that Cummings’ team studied census data from 2006, even though the greenbelt was only implemented the year before. “When you look at animal agriculture, it’s the first to leave when urbanization comes close because the infrastructure for that kind of farming is too far,” he says. “Urbanization is the single largest reason why farmers move, not land-use regulations. If you want to keep livestock agriculture, then you need to grow the greenbelt.”

Cummings, however, believes his conclusions will be borne out when he redoes the study after the 2011 census. “The one thing I want to make clear is I never claim the 2006 data shows the impact of the greenbelt; I’m just showing what happened between 2001 and 2006,” he says. “I hope that in 2011 we’ll see some new agriculture being created in the greenbelt, but that’s not what I hear. In fact, what I hear is the province hasn’t chosen to have any special near-urban agricultural policy.”

While Toronto Regional Conservation Authority planner David Burnett says farmers are exempt from some regulations if there is no alterative (they could, for example, build that shed within 30 metres of the buffer zone for a waterway if there was nowhere else to build it), Cummings says it’s still a burden farmers aren’t able to carry. “Many of the people who are stronger environmentalists than they are agriculturalists haven’t thought of the implications of how we grow our food in a responsible manner and have a green countryside,” he says. “It’s a lack of comprehension about the total picture.”

On a stretch of secluded rural road about a 10-minute drive east of Kitchener lives dairy farmer Ken McNabb, his wife, Marie, and their three boys. I visit one morning in late spring, and McNabb takes me for a tour around his property, showing me the grove of giant, sheltering trees, a backyard swimming hole, and tidy, black-metal-clad barns. This is the alternative Toronto-area farmers are seeking. Marie is baking a batch of muffins when I arrive, and as we all sit at the kitchen table, McNabb, a lean 52-year-old with a kindly, matter-of-fact demeanour, tells me what it was like to move 40 cows, his farm machinery, and all of his family’s household belongings from Georgetown, about 15 kilometres west of Brampton, to New Hamburg: easy. Okay, maybe not easy. The process of packing up and hauling away their entire livelihood was stressful, but McNabb regrets nothing. They don’t have to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic backed-up in front of their house (“You try to teach a 16-year old to get across four lanes of traffic with a tractor and a wagon”); they don’t have to worry about encroaching suburbs. And they can see the stars at night.

Though McNabb’s former property wasn’t inside the greenbelt, he faced many of the same problems farmers there do. He was too far from a lot of farm services like tractor mechanics, stable cleaners, and machinery repair services. And they owned only 88 of the nearly 300 acres they farmed, so he couldn’t expand. But unlike Beynon, McNabb was handed an easy way out. Farmers on either side of the greenbelt say that when the legislation was enacted, it was almost like someone drew an arbitrary line in the soil. It was hard to say why some were encompassed in the protected swath and why some were left out.

The McNabb farm ended up on the south side of the line, in the so-called white belt—land on the Toronto side of the greenbelt left ripe for development—and between April 2004, when he and Marie started thinking about moving, and February 2005, when they sold, the value of his farm nearly tripled, from $1,800 per acre to $5,200 per acre.

McNabb sold his land to a speculator. It’s still being farmed, but will inevitably be developed. While he seems sanguine about his own situation, he’s fatalistic about farming around the Golden Horseshoe. “Eventually everybody has to go. Everybody leaves at a different time for a different reason, but eventually they all have to leave,” he says. “Some tolerate it longer than others. It depends on where they are, who their neighbours are, and what traffic is on the road. But it’s not as easy to pursue agriculture in the greenbelt as it is out where we are.”

About 100 farmers, planners and environmentalists gathered at the Four Points Sheraton in Thorold, Ontario, near St. Catharines, on a Wednesday in March 2010, to talk about the greenbelt. The summit was a makeshift review of the policy, hosted by the Region of Niagara. Local MPPs Tim Hudak and James Bradley were invited, but didn’t show.

The Greenbelt Act won’t be up for official review until 2015, 10 years after it was passed, but farmers here have decided they want to be prepared. “Just because the province can’t review it doesn’t mean we can’t,” says Len Troup, chair of the tender fruit marketing board and one of the summit’s five panelists.

Some, like TRCA planner David Burnett, believe a lot of farmers are mad the greenbelt took away their retirement funds. “They thought that their retirement would be based on selling their farmland to a developer…they feel certain rights were taken away.” But that isn’t the main reason for farmers’ anger. On the contrary, they’re upset by the “browning” of the greenbelt as land slips out of agricultural production. Ultimately, they want the same things as the food activists: viable local agriculture, more access to local markets, and support from their communities and government.

Mausberg was also at the summit in March, and while he believes more conversation is needed among farmers, citizens, and the government, he doesn’t share all of farmers’ sentiments: he thinks they’re focused on the wrong problems. “If we start the conversation with why the greenbelt was terrible and how the government forced it on you, we’re not going to have a dialogue,” he says. “You can sit there and whine about the fact that this happened five years ago, or you can talk about it.”

Even if opposing groups do find common ground on the issue, fixing the greenbelt is going to take more than a simple review. Suggestions of ways to revamp the act read like a long wish list. Foodies like Webb and Toronto-based food writer Sarah Elton, author of the book Locavore, want a food policy; farmers want an agricultural policy—it’s something they’ve been asking for since the beginning. “It’s about time the government came out with a statement to the effect that agriculture is a needed industry in Ontario,” says GTA Agricultural Action Committee chair Peter Lambrick.

“Farmers have to get the sense that they’re actually wanted here and that they can make a living,” says Lambrick. “I think it will come, but whether it will be this generation that does it or the next is what we’re asking now.”

Gillian Flies of The New Farm. Photo courtesy The New Farm.

The first time I visited The New Farm, Brent Preston and Gillian Flies’ bucolic 100-acre spread near Creemore, Ontario, the barn was kitted up with twinkle lights. Bundles of hay provided seating for a play and, later, for listening to the foot-stomping tunes of the Sunparlour Players. Professional chefs cooked up a delicious dinner with veggies fresh from the fields, and we hung around a campfire as the stars popped out of the big sky. It was every urbanite’s fantasy of rural life.

Of course, after five years working the land, former city dwellers Preston, Flies, and their two young children don’t have many illusions left about the tough daily reality of organic farming.

“It’s gotten easier as we’ve gotten smarter, but it’s taken longer, been harder work, and cost a lot more than we ever expected,” says Preston with a laugh.

Still, the couple, who met in Malawi and spent nearly a decade working to strengthen democracy movements in Africa, South America, and Indonesia, aren’t going anywhere. In fact, despite the challenges, The New Farm has become a leader in Ontario’s food movement. The family sells over 75 varieties of its heirloom organic veggies at farmers’ markets and to top restaurants—all while advocating for small producers, their rural community (where Preston was recently elected councillor), and engaging young people through farmer training internships.

But the most innovative partnership they’ve forged is with the least likely place: a Toronto food bank and community food centre called The Stop. Still, the fit seemed natural. “We love our customers, but we didn’t get into this to only offer our food to the wealthy,” explains Preston. “And The Stop does more than just hand out food. Like us, they look at the whole food system.”

In fact, The Stop has become The New Farm’s single biggest customer. Farm fundraisers like the one I attended (proceeds go to The Stop, which buys New Farm produce for its many food programs) are the biggest money generator for the partnership. But an entrepreneurial venture called Grow for The Stop—New Farm veggies are sold at independent grocers with 10 percent of proceeds going back to The Stop, which spends the money on more fresh produce—is gaining ground.

It’s a win-win situation. The Stop gets healthy organic veggies for its low-income neighbourhood—where diet-related health problems are rampant—and the New Farm has a ready market for its produce, and its values.

“The potential for collaborations like this is huge,” says Preston. “In fact, we think this holistic approach is the only way to change the food system.”

Off the Hook uses the community-supported agriculture model to keep fisheries healthy and bring fresher fish to market. Photo by Sadie Beaton.

It’s hard to find fresh fish to buy in Canada. Even in Halifax, in view of the ocean, it takes at least six days for local fillets to make it from the fishing boats to the supermarket. Now, a group of five fishers are changing the way fish are caught and sold. They’ve founded Off the Hook, an organization they call a community supported fishery, inspired by the local food movement’s community supported agriculture (CSA) plans. As with a CSA, members pay the fishers at the beginning of the season in return for a weekly share of the catch.

This close connection between consumer and fisher is new to Nova Scotia. Ever since colonial times, the Maritime fishing industry has fed the long-distance market. The fisherman relied on the fishing lord, the middle-man, to buy the entire catch. By creating the cooperative and selling directly to the consumer in nearby cities, fishers are reinventing the supply chain. They can also make more money. Whereas the price at the dock for haddock is between 80 cents and a dollar per pound, members of the group buy the fish for $3 a pound, which means they’re helping to keep the fishers on the water.

And because they have a guaranteed market, fishers are able to fish with a bottom hook and line, a method that doesn’t damage ocean habitat—unlike the commercial fishery’s trawlers that drag a large net along the ocean floor, sweeping everything up with it—a technique that contributed substantially to the collapse of the cod fishery.

The fish is good too. As people picked up their fish on one of the final days of the season last fall, they planned dinners of fish tacos and baked fish with herbs. Selling fish that’s just hours out of the water, rather than days, Off the Hook is giving “fast food” a whole new meaning for its members.

It may be anticlimactic for those who picture transgenic animals as products of zany laboratory cut ’n pastes, but Canada’s first genetically engineered animal to be raised for food looks just like the ordinary farm pig that shares its DNA.

Dubbed “Enviropig,” its creators at the University of Guelph say it’s a boon to the environment because it excretes 30–70 percent less phosphorous than a regular pig.

But critics are skeptical of its practicality and concerned about its potential place on your dinner plate. The pig is currently undergoing reviews by Health Canada and the FDA for approval to be commercially bred and marketed in Canada and the U.S.

We spoke with Steven Liss, University of Guelph professor and Enviropig spokesperson, and Lucy Sharratt of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network about a few of the issues raised by this complicated animal.

Regulatory/Access to information

U of Guelph says: The world of transgenic animals and their approval for human consumption is relatively new. Enviropig puts Canada at the forefront of this technology.

Flipside: How Health Canada determines if a GM animal is safe is not yet public knowledge. And so far, Guelph has not publicly released its Enviropig application to Health Canada.

Biosafety

U of Guelph says: Enviropig is a genetically enhanced Yorkshire pig. Liss says that scientific testing supports that both types of pigs are equally safe to breed, raise, and eat.

Flipside: As previous food safety scandals have shown us, when it comes to what we eat there’s no room for error. Genetically modified pigs have not yet been approved for human consumption and there has been no independent testing of Enviropig or the impact it could have on both food safety and the environment. Sharratt notes that genetically engineered foods don’t have labels, and there’s been little public oversight and little public debate over such items in our food supply. “The advent of Enviropig raises all of this at once.”

Livestock management and the environment

U of Guelph says: “The primary benefit is to the environment,” says Liss. Enviropig’s special digestive system allows it to better digest the phosphorous in its plant-based diet. This results in less phosphorus in the pig’s manure—and that means less phosphorus leaching into nearby waterways. Result: less algae growth and fewer poisoned fish.

Flipside: By reducing phosphorous output, farmers could theoretically raise more hogs while still meeting environmental regulations, so Enviropig may not actually lessen the stress on the environment. Enviropig also does nothing to address other issues associated with large-scale meat production like air quality problems or the spread of disease. And the phosphorus in a pig’s manure can already be reduced by up to 50 percent by simply adding common supplements to its diet.

Economics

U of Guelph says: Enviropig could save hog farmers money by reducing the costs associated with the phosphorousreducing supplements they already feed their animals and by cutting back land costs for spreading hog manure. Commercializing and licensing the pig could also mean big money for the groups—including the University of Guelph, Ontario Pork, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs—that have invested at least $1.4 million in its creation.

Flipside: As a trademarked technology, the cost of Enviropig is likely to outweigh the cost of buying competitively priced, phosphorous-reducing supplements for regular pigs, argues Sharratt. She also believes the Enviropig could shatter consumer confidence in pork, an industry already in financial crisis. Meanwhile, taxpayers have shouldered the cost of developing the Enviropig through the use of public funds.

Vanessa Rodrigues serves up musical food activism. Photo by Tom Inoue.

When she isn’t playing jazz organ in Rio de Janeiro or running her own jam session during the Montreal International Jazz Festival, musician Vanessa Rodrigues can usually be found making her own pickles. The Montreal-based musician has her plate full with music projects, but high on her list of priorities is food—the growing of, the eating of, and the educating about. She recently released her album Soul Food for Thought, a dancey, funky album all about food and the politics surrounding it.

“I am not a hard-core activist,” she says. “Nor am I going to play the part of a preachy vegetarian. I support local, organic markets and am pro small business. I grow my own food whenever I can.”

With mostly instrumental tracks, including tunes like “What’s in This?” and “Eater’s Manifesto,” Soul Food for Thought gets listeners thinking about what they are eating. The song “Ode to Monsanto” might not have any lyrics, but the creepy, uncomfortable feeling Rodrigues gets from the agricultural biotech company is vividly conveyed. Accused of trying to take over the world’s food supply by patenting genetically modified seeds, and making farmers desperately dependent on their particular pesticide, the chemical firm is—with good reason—under constant scrutiny.

Rodrigues has done her homework on Monsanto and advises everyone to do the same. “People … need to know who Monsanto is, what it has done and what it is doing. These people made Agent Orange. You trust them with your food? Really?” Rodrigues recently started tending her own garden and now happily grows her own kale, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and carrots. But does she use pesticide?

“No thanks!” she says. “Sheep manure, that’s it.”

Tony Maas

Tony Maas is WWF-Canada’s national advisor on freshwater policy and planning. He will be speaking about how organization can expose, assess, and mitigate their “water risk” at the Canadian Water Summit in Toronto on June 17.

Alixandra Gould: What is the biggest threat facing the health of fresh water in Canada today?

Tony Maas: Just one? A lot of the impact on water resources is very local in nature. But writ large, one factor or challenge that we face, that cuts across anywhere in Canada and the world, is the implications of climate change. Climate change will, in some cases, lead to changes in availability and demand for water. It’s changing the context of water management.

Alixandra Gould: WWF-Canada seeks to reduce demand for fresh water while maintaining strong economies. How exactly do you accomplish that?

Tony Maas: One of the most important ways is by recognizing that money can be made by reducing our use of fresh water — if we’re smart about it. There are a lot of technologies that are based on being more efficient with water resources. Those technologies range from smarter irrigation systems for agriculture to municipal systems where we’re capturing rain water, and systems for treating water quality as well.

Alixandra Gould: You co-authored Changing the Flow: A Blueprint for Federal Action on Freshwater. Can you tell us a bit about that blueprint?

Tony Maas: That blueprint is a very comprehensive look at the many things the federal government can and ought to be doing to complement things at the provincial level where water management is more prominent. But the federal government has some very clear authorities and opportunities to provide for a much more robust water management system across the country. A good example of what the federal government could and should be doing, and seems to me more and more backing away from, is collecting data on water availability and water use. They’re getting a bit better on water use, doing industrial surveys and things like that, but much of the science and monitoring that the fed government used to do is falling by the wayside.

Alixandra Gould: What do you think of charging people more for water? Do you think that would change behavior on a mass scale and create an incentive for people to conserve more?

Tony Maas: Yes, but I don’t think it’s a silver bullet. It’s not qualified. It doesn’t mean that if we raise the price of water everything will be okay. The devil in the details — and it’s not really that devilish at all — is that it’s not about the price necessarily. It’s about how to create the pricing structure to better reflect the value of fresh water. One of the key things is a “life line.” You provide a municipality with a certain amount of water, of good quality, for a very low cost or no cost at all. The first 50-100 litres that come out of your tap each day are free, or very low cost. Then you increase the cost to the user as their water usage rates go up. That’s referred to as an increasing block rate.

Alixandra Gould: Irrigated agriculture accounts for 70 per cent of all water used by humans. How do you reduce the amount of water used on Canadian farms?

Tony Maas: This is one of the things we’re really going to have to bump up against in short order, especially in the breadbasket of this country in the prairies where scarcity this year is a very good example of challenging times. It’s a tiered response. The first is looking to technology — smarter irrigation systems, timed irrigation when it’s required most for the crops to be able to provide a product that’s suitable and desirable for market. The next level of consideration needs to be a bit more forward and must start asking the difficult questions about what are the most productive ways of using the limited water we have available. Of what crops are of higher value that provide a stable, reliable, and reasonable income for farmers that may take less water to grow? Pulse crops in Saskatchewan are being looked at as very valued crops because there’s a growing export market for pulses. That’s lentils and other legumes. They’re being looked at in places like China and India, because their populations are growing beyond their capacity to grow their own. So you may be talking about shifting from irrigating a field of alphalpha to feed to beef as your end product, to shifting more of that to pulse foods that are less water intensive and also provide for good economic opportunities for the economic sector.

Alixandra Gould: It’s your job to advocate WWF-Canada’s positions and perspectives on freshwater in government relations. What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

Tony Maas: At the federal level, there’s largely a hands-off approach. There’s an attitude that it’s not a priority for them. For decades now, the federal government has been deferring to the provinces. What that means is some stuff doesn’t get done because the provinces only have a certain capacity.

Alixandra Gould: Which province has been the most difficult?

Tony Maas: I certainly haven’t advocated governments across the country, but I think there are interesting opportunities right now in B.C. as they go through their water act modernization process. In Ontario, they’re looking at this water opportunities and water conservation act, but the details are still coming. Alberta is certainly a challenging place to work, and it’s been challenging for us. I try to maintain some optimism, but a I do believe that with continuing pressure, particularly when citizens voice their perspectives on this, then we can make moves in ways that reform Alberta water policy that protects water for nature but also provides water for economy.

Alixandra Gould: Beijing aims to reuse 100 percent of its waste water by 2013. Is an effort like this possible in some of Canada’s major cities?

Tony Maas: Well, you’re not talking to an engineer, so I’ll qualify that. So I guess my answer becomes very simple. If a city the scale of Beijing can make that happen, then certainly major cities in Canada could make that happen.

Alixandra Gould: Where should the limited financial resources we have be directed to make the biggest impact possible?

Tony Maas: It depends where you are. In the prairies, the limited resources have to go to looking into how to reform agricultural production in that part of the world, and the water allocation system, in ways that ensure we maintain economic activity but put water back into the South Saskatchewan basin, because it’s dangerously close to drying up. In the great lakes basin, endangered species is one of the greatest concerns.

Alixandra Gould: Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Seattle told National Geographic that we will inevitably solve our water problems. Do you agree?

Tony Maas: You’re making me say I’m an optimist twice in one interview! Yes, I think we will solve it. It’s on us to be pushing our governments to be stepping up. It’s one of the biggest questions of the 21st century.

Congratulations to This Magazine contributor (and former intern!) Jenn Hardy for her nomination in the inaugural Professional Writers Association of Canada Writing Awards. Jenn’s cover story on permaculture, “Cleanup in Aisle One,” in the July-August 2009 issue of This was a reader favourite from last year, so it’s great to see it getting some more recognition now from her professional writer peers.

This is the first year that PWAC is running awards of this kind, and it’s another much-needed opportunity to recognize and thank the talented, hard-working (and usually underpaid) freelance writers who make magazines like This possible. We were thrilled to be able to publish Jenn’s article and we’ve got our fingers crossed for next Friday, when PWAC will announce the winners at the Writers’ Industry Awards Luncheon. Friday’s also the day of the National Magazine Awards, where we have three nominations. Big day!

Sugar palms are one of the crops that make up the plantation. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

Halfway around the world, on the eastern side of the island of Borneo, near the oil city of Balikpapan, a new tropical rainforest is being created out of what was once a poisonous wasteland. It is a story of radical loss and recovery for an entire ecosystem in a relatively short time. Only a century ago the rainforest was disparaged as “jungle,” wild and ripe for exploitation by the willing and the unscrupulous, its vitality apparently endless and unassailable. As part of that, in Borneo, near a town called Samboja, the land was ravaged by a lethal succession of mining, logging, slash-andburn farming, drought, and fires. Trees were cut down or burned. Alang-alang grass took root and secreted cyanide into the earth. The birds and animals disappeared. The sky was empty, dry. People could no longer make a living from the land. There was malnutrition. The life expectancy plummeted. Crime spread.

It was a heartbreaking downward spiral. As in Africa, South America, and Asia, Borneo’s once lush tropical rainforest was shrinking rapidly, pulling an entire ecosystem down with it, including one of the planet’s four species of great apes, the orangutan, now threatened with extinction. The process of devastation at Samboja started with the discovery of crude oil a century earlier but accelerated as the logging industry moved in, chewing its way through the forest to plunder its bounty. Nothing was left but barren fields of grass—the perfect fuel for the wildfires that snuffed out what remained of the land in the 1980s, when an El Niño–induced drought swept across the island. Blackened stumps still stand as symbols of the conflagration.

It seemed hopeless at Samboja—but, today, a controversial initiative is attempting to reverse the ecological collapse that has destroyed the forest. The project is the brainchild of a Dutch scientist named Willie Smits, a forester, microbiologist, and founder of the world’s largest agency for the protection of orangutans, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation. Smits has a deep reverence for orangutans and so he launched this US$10-million project at Samboja designed to save the orangutans by saving Samboja’s rainforest. Smits, in his typically grand and ambitious way, is creating a model for a new kind of rainforest, one where people and wildlife can live harmoniously in an almost utopian symbiosis. Here, human beings, plants, and wildlife will exist together in a forest that sustains them both but preserves the fragile peace between humans and apes with a thorny barrier of salak palm trees. The orangutans get a home and food; the people regenerate the land that earns them a living.

The key to Smits’ vision is that human beings will have reason to protect the rainforest instead of just exploiting it. The new forest at Samboja could be an example to the world of a bulwark against the destruction of a species and, even more, the prototype for creating an entire ecosystem. Smits has such high hopes the project will endure that he named it Samboja Lestari—or “Samboja Forever.”

Dutch scientist Willie Smits with one of the Samboja orangutans. Photo by Cees Bosveld.

Eternity aside, there are more immediate concerns. Smits wants to preserve the diversity of a part of the natural world under severe stress—according to a 2007 Greenpeace report, Indonesia, which encompasses most of Borneo, has the highest rate of deforestation in the world. Smits believes his ambitious scheme can do a better job of sustaining both the local population and the local wildlife than traditional conservation methods. And yet Smits’ scheme is contentious and the science uncertain. His defiance of official and conventional thinking has created opposition—even within his own foundation. “The model I have developed is truly a model that can be modified for worldwide application,” Smits insists. “We can implement the techniques of Samboja in any place in the world. It is a recipe that is replicable.” If Smits’ project succeeds, it will be a miraculous accomplishment and a new symbol in a world where hope seems to be rapidly fading to reverse largescale environmental crises. But the big question still to be answered is whether Smits’ new ecological model is the best solution to deforestation—or just an expensive mirage.

The 53-year-old Smits is no idle dreamer, judging by the remarkable results so far at Samboja. I was there in 2004 while interviewing him for a book I was writing about orangutans and spent a week with him. It seemed that he was beyond ordinary things like food and sleep. Last summer, I went back to see the progress at Samboja Lestari.

Nature had returned. The hills that were once bare were flooded with trees. Where before there was nothing but grass and dirt across the project’s 1,850 hectares, frilly sugar palms had shot up alongside a diverse array of other tree species. Orangutans roamed on small islands and the distance between human and ape seemed to vanish for an instant. A mother orangutan was feeding a small child. A male gave me a bold look—and then quickly lost interest. A young orangutan was hauling himself through the leafy canopy on a rope. Officials from the project took me in a battered jeep to bounce along rutted and muddy roads to see the forest’s outer edge, where there are five villages with a total population of more than 10,000 people, some of them working to supply fruit and vegetables for the orphaned orangutans at Smit’s rehabilitation centre. Nanang Qasim, one of the project managers, told me the project tries to hire local people, rather than those from Balikpapan. It is the beginning of re-integrating a damaged natural community.

I talked to Muhammad Trafakhur Rochim, the Indonesian co-ordinator of human development for the project, who trains farmers from the villages. “They have a commitment to protect the land,” he said. “They really understand that this project is really important.” He said the contract to supply food for the orangutans is worth 125 million Indonesian rupiah a month (about $14,000) for a total of 150 people, and estimated the average monthly income for a worker in the villages is between one and two million rupiah.

I saw one truck come in loaded with melons for the orangutans and, in true Indonesian fashion, it stopped at a house just outside the preserve for a boy to pick a melon for his family, a gift from the red apes. The food was bound for orangutans confiscated by officials after they had been held captive illegally in homes, sometimes as though they were members of the family, at other times chained or held in cramped cages. The orangutans are quarantined and those who are not too sick to be released are rehabilitated for the forests. Those forests, however, have been reduced by logging. One of the three vets at the project, Dr. Siswiyani—with the single name that many Indonesians have—told me: “It’s difficult to find a release site for them because there is so much deforestation.” As we talked, a male orangutan named Sipur wandered nearby. “I love them all,” she said, echoing the kind of comment I heard so often from people who work with orangutans. “They are like humans, so I feel close to them.”

It is a critical time for a project like this, considering the endangered status of orangutans. Orangutans are only found in the wild in Borneo and Sumatra and most of that land is under the control of Indonesia. There are an estimated 60,000 orangutans left in the world, a number that is dangerously low and shrinking: close to 90 percent of the wild population was lost in the 20th century alone. The rainforests of Indonesia are decimated for palm oil plantations, which support consumer products such as cooking oil, biofuel, chocolate, ice cream, margarine, toothpaste, soap, cereal, and cosmetics. “There is not a single protected area in Indonesia that is not under threat,” says Smits. He believes his project can eventually support 2,000 people and 1,000 orangutans, the number of orangutans that many scientists think can create a self-sustaining population without inbreeding.

Melons are grown by local farmers to feed the orangutans. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

It is a task of incredible complexity (some would say scientific hubris) to recreate the diverse ecology of a tropical rain forest. And yet Smits seems to be accomplishing just that. The reconstruction of the ecosystem, as he explains it, needs nutrients and microorganisms that live in symbiosis with the roots, and it needs the right combination of the right trees, everything staged in the right sequence. The compost for the transformation—an elixir of life —comes from a recipe that Smits concocted to combat the hard, infertile soil. He mixed alang-alang grass, rotten wood, sawdust, rice husk, leaves, peels, and remains of fruits and manure from cattle and chickens with a microbiological agent he made from sugar and cow urine. Chalk and nitrogen were added to speed up the process, which takes less than three weeks to complete. Smits says the trees that were planted have created a microclimate that has lowered the average temperature in the forest by between 3 and 5C, increased cloud cover by approximately 12 percent, and improved rainfall by 20 percent. The project has small lakes and reservoirs, an eco-lodge, a sun-bear sanctuary, and a research centre where individual trees are monitored by satellite imaging. There are now over 1,200 species of trees, 137 species of birds, and nine species of primates at Samboja Lestari.

With all the changes, according to Smits, the health, contentment, and economy of the community have improved dramatically. A community of 2,000 Indonesians is being established through the local farmers, who are offered free land for agreeing to live harmoniously with the wildlife and to support the ecology of the forest. The farmers plant crops of pineapples, papayas, beans, and corn, and that list will be expanded to include bananas, cacao, and chilies. The farmers can harvest the sugar palms, which may someday be sold to the sugar refinery that the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation wants to build, and can also produce the material for ethanol to run a generating station. Smits wants to build schools for the farm community that will teach humanitarian principles and ecological practices.

He says that unless they build a forest that supports the local economy, the onslaught of logging will continue. So this new forest is designed to be protected by the people who make a living from it. “If you want to help orangutans, make sure the local people benefit,” he insists. “This forest can do so many small things that make the total sum much more.”

Not everybody is convinced by what Smits says. They have questions. They want details. They want to know why so many resources should be put into creating new forests, when efforts could go toward saving the existing ones. Erik Meijaard is one of those asking pointed questions. A conservation scientist with a background in biological anthropology, Meijaard has been working in

Indonesia for the past 18 years, including a stint in the 1990s under Smits. Meijaard says it remains unclear whether Samboja Lestari is a good idea that achieves results, and that the success will ultimately depend on the extent to which it can improve community livelihoods and achieve long-term financial stability. “That question remains unanswered,” he notes, “and will remain so for a few years, because that is the kind of time such projects need to be evaluated.” Meijaard raises other questions about the enormous cost of projects like Samboja, and their financial sustainability, too. He, like others, says that it is better to concentrate on projects that attempt to protect the remaining forests instead of trying to create new ones from scratch.

“Overall this is a good project with some real potential benefits for people, nature, and climate,” he says.

“But the question is how cost-effective and sustainable is it compared to other approaches.” Meijaard says that during his time with The Nature Conservancy, Indonesia had agreed to protect two limited forests, of 38,000 and 11,000 hectares respectively, holding between 500 and 750 wild orangutans. That is as safe as it gets in Indonesia, says Meijaard. He adds: “This is not a competition between two projects, but it does raise the question whether the far higher costs of Samboja Lestari justify its relatively limited benefits.”

According to Meijaard, the Samboja Lestari project is a reaction to the intensive illegal logging on the release sites where Smits’ organization had sent rehabilitated orphan orangutans—but without a clear indication of how many orangutans survived those circumstances. “So, the idea was to rebuild a forest from scratch, get local tenure issues sorted out from the start, deal with community conflict before it arises, and eventually have a safe haven for orangutans. But how many orangutans could the area harbour?” Despite Smits’ infectious optimism, Meijaard points out that the normal population of wild orangutans that a forest can support is much lower than the number planned for Samboja Lestari. “Can the forest provide enough resources for such high densities, or will it be more of a semi-wild population that relies on additional feeding and cannot be allowed to breed? And where would the population expand to?”

Smits thinks the obstacles can be overcome, that Samboja Lestari could hold 50 times more fruit trees than a natural forest, and support a near-miraculous 1,000 orangutans in a space where a conventional forest could normally support only 60. And yet even Smits is worried about how precarious the project is. “So far,” he says, “it is an experiment and I fear it can still go wrong.”

A mother and child at the Samboja Lestari orangutan preserve. Photo by Shawn Thompson.

There is a deeper meaning to the venture at Samboja Lestari. It is a critical time for rainforests and the life that depends on them, including ours, and Smits’ rainforest could encourage a pivotal shift in our thinking. If the idea of Samboja overcomes all the political and economic obstacles and proves to be workable, it could be part of a momentous change in our relationship with the natural world. The broad history of our interaction with the rainforest has been defined by our denigration of its strength and beauty. We have misunderstood it, reviled it, misused it. Now Smits wants to take a big leap forward with a radical recreation of a forest designed for human beings and wildlife alike.

Smits has seen what happens if we don’t dare to think big and act boldly. He told me about the dramatic effect the huge fires that swept across Kalimantan had on his thinking. They were the catalyst for Samboja Lestari. “We were busy trying to save as much forest as possible. One night we went to save my research plot from fire and drilled a water hole. When the first muddy water came out we were overrun by at least 10 wild boars that bumped us over and started to drink the muddy stream. There was a deer standing still and I could touch it and noticed its legs had burned. Then she fell.” The deer died soon after. “An owl sitting on a branch fell dead. Those pictures of what happens in those forests that are drying out—a process that is worsening with climate change—are some of the most dramatic images I still carry with me.” Smits says it is images like these that make him attempt the near-impossible. “In Samboja Lestari, when I stood on that barren hill in the afternoon, I was watching the most extreme consequences of those fires and forest destruction—the vastness of yellow grass, just grass eerily silent. Not even insects! I wanted to see a damp forest again and hear the voices of birds.”