Rainbow Community Garden is more than just a place to grow food and flowers as a hobby; it’s a place where newcomers to the country can grow food they are familiar with while saving on their grocery bills. Along with crops you can find typically find in Manitoba, producers here are growing leaves and vegetables from tropical parts of the world that are difficult to find in the city.

Ngarboui gives me a tour of the site, which is situated on the grounds of the University of Manitoba, not far from the stadium where the Winnipeg Blue Bombers play. It is divided into asymmetrical plots. The bigger the family, the larger the plot they receive. Along one side there is a row of raised beds, reserved for kids aged five to 10, and higher beds for those 75 and up. As we walk amid the rows, Raymond picks up a shovel that someone has left lying on the ground and later uses it to attack an unwanted weed.

Ngarboui speaks from experience when he says it’s hard to adjust to food in Canada. Even when vegetables native to the newcomers’ home countries can be found, they are usually of poor quality and expensive. Ngarboui collects requests for seeds from the growers and places orders with companies in Canada and abroad. He’s also made connections with local garden centres that donate seeds and seedlings once the early summer rush has passed. After the first growing season, seeds are saved for future planting.

According to the Government of Manitoba, of the 16,175 newcomers to the province in 2014, 9.2 per cent, or 1,495, were refugees. Manitoba received the highest number of refugees per capita in Canada in that year. When they first arrive, many refugee families live in apartment buildings in downtown Winnipeg. They may not be familiar with public parks, or know where to take their kids, so they stay inside. This affects both physical and mental health.

Ngarboui tells the story of the oldest gardener, an 89-year-old man, originally from India. He was diabetic and had high blood pressure. Two months after joining the garden, Ngarboui recounts that the man’s family doctor said, “‘Oh! Your health has improved a lot. Did you go to the gym? What have you been doing lately?’ And he said, ‘No, I did not go to the gym, but I’ve been gardening.’” The doctor encouraged him to continue as his health had dramatically improved. “That’s how he became even more interested in gardening.”

Turning the soil

The story of the Rainbow Community Garden cannot be separated from Ngarboui’s own. Ngarboui was born in the early years of Chad’s decades-long civil war. Chad is situated in central Africa, and is the continent’s fifth-largest country. Despite having to regularly flee his home throughout his childhood, Ngarboui completed Grade 12 and studied agriculture at the university level. In his mid-20s, he fled Chad for neighbouring Cameroon, one of tens of thousands of Chadians seeking refuge in that country.

In Cameroon he received a bursary through the United Nations to return to school and he graduated with a degree in business and co-operative management. Another bursary followed, and this time he studied human resources. At the same time, he was working with his fellow refugees to start gardens and raise chickens to help families get income to pay for their children’s school fees. His work didn’t go unnoticed.

On a visit to the country, a delegation from the United Nations Development Program was told about the project Ngarboui had initiated, and they made a visit. The head of the delegation asked Ngarboui if he was interested in resettlement in Canada.

The Canadian immigration agent who interviewed him told him that he’d be a good fit for three locations — Laval, Winnipeg and Edmonton. He was advised that as a French speaker the integration process would be the easiest in Laval. After hearing about the three places Ngarboui declared that he wanted to go to Winnipeg. He was told that it was very cold there and while he wasn’t being advised not to go, he was warned that the adjustment period would be difficult.

“I asked if there were people living there. She said, ‘Yes, there are people living there.’ I said, ‘If there are people living there, it means I can live there too, so I will go there.’” Since high school, Ngarboui had been interested in learning English, but hadn’t had the opportunity.

After touching down in Winnipeg in September 2005 he enrolled in English as a Second Language classes and started to look for work opportunities.

“At that time I gathered information about farming here, the possibilities and opportunities. I realized that farming here was more of a family enterprise… So I said, ‘Okay, it’s better to do something else.’” He was on a break during a night shift as a cleaner at the University of Winnipeg when a sign on a bulletin board caught his eye. Lower-income individuals were invited to apply for a program on community development offered by the Community Education Development Association (CEDA) at Red River College. As soon as his shift ended he raced to CEDA to express his interest. Since then, Ngarboui has gone from being a student, to board member, to being hired as an employee of CEDA in 2009, where he still works today.

For his school assignments, Ngarboui would talk to Indigenous and newcomer families to find out what their needs were and what facilities and infrastructure were lacking in their neighbourhoods. He was also volunteering at a market in downtown Winnipeg where people were asking for fresh food. “That’s how the idea of the garden came out, to supply the market with produce. And also to find a place where newcomer families and refugees could take their kids in the summertime, and to grow their own food and save on their groceries.”

Sowing the seeds

Together with members of his church, Ngarboui approached the City of Winnipeg to see if they might have land available that fit the criteria for his envisioned garden. It had to be accessible by bus, and in a place where families could spend time without being disturbed. The city didn’t have any land that fit the bill, but referred Ngarboui to the University of Manitoba, located in southern Winnipeg.

The university provided land that was previously used as a garden by their plant science department. It ticked a lot of boxes that Ngarboui was looking for: it was remote, quiet, and removed from the bustle of downtown. Kids could run around freely.

The garden was named Rainbow Community Garden, borrowed from the metaphor of the “rainbow nation,” used to describe post-apartheid South Africa. In 2008, its first season, 16 families had garden plots. In 2017, there are over 300 families gardening on six sites, representing 29 nationalities. About 60 per cent of the gardeners are ethnic Nepali refugees from Bhutan who were expelled from the country in the early 1990s. Another 30 per cent are from African countries, and the remainder are South American, Middle Eastern or Canadian-born.

Priority is given to single mothers, then families with at least four members and a senior, then families of six or more. Immigrants with a background in social work are also given priority, and are available to talk to families who may need advice about problems they’re encountering. Most of the gardeners arrived in Canada by way of refugee camps. “When they meet here, they open up, sharing their memories from refugee camps and from their home, the atrocities that they went through. Many times you can see them talking and starting to cry. You can see the tears coming. And after a while they start laughing,” Ngarboui says.

Demand quickly outpaced the supply of garden plots available at the university site, and it was difficult to find more land. Ngarboui started to approach churches and schools about using their backyards. He also put out the call to individuals, asking if their empty backyards could be used.

“The first person who responded to my call was the former lieutenant governor, the late John Harvard. He said ‘Okay, I heard what you’ve been doing and I’m very excited to have you use my backyard.’ It’s a huge backyard. I went there and found that five families can use his backyard. We used it for three years before he sold the house.”

Ngarboui has also worked with building owners and managers to get raised beds built near to apartment buildings where newcomer families live.

Help from a farmer

The families are gardening on six sites in Winnipeg and dotted throughout southern Manitoba. And this is still not enough. “We’ve been working on finding more land, because we have a waiting list this year of 49 families,” Ngarboui says.

One of the six sites is on the home farm of Peter Nikkel, who farms 1,200 acres with his brother, close to Landmark, an hour’s drive southeast from downtown Winnipeg. The two first met when Ngarboui was trying to get the downtown market off the ground. Nikkel had had good yields that year and wanted to check out the potential of selling surplus vegetables at the market. One thing led to another. He was invited to the spring and fall celebrations at the garden and then Ngarboui asked if he might have land available for gardeners to use.

For the past four years, Nikkel has provided two to three acres of what used to be a cow pasture, surrounded by a windbreak. It’s divided into plots for four different groups to use. He says that some years are better than others. “One year you’ll have really good production. You have your reliable crops, like potatoes, carrots, onions, peas, beets. Those are almost one hundred percent. Then the next year you’ll have a cooler weather year, like two years ago, when the warm-weather crops like beans, tomatoes, peppers, often don’t do well.” The Red River clay and the climate aren’t always amenable to growing preferred plants like okra. “So sometimes it works and sometimes not. Sometimes it’s disappointing to drive out of the city, put all the trouble and work into it and in the end get very little or nothing.”

As to why he provides a few acres for the gardeners, Nikkel says, “It’s a bit of charity, it’s a bit of a hobby, it’s self-sufficiency.” He says that most farm people have a long history with gardening. “We like to have that independence of growing our own food. It’s the same as with these people.” And Nikkel’s own mother arrived in Canada as a refugee from Ukraine in the 1940s.

Nikkel says that charity work is part of the fabric of life in the area he lives in. A lot of his neighbours visit projects in Haiti, Bangladesh, or in different countries in Africa, but for him, that work happens just beyond his front door. In the process, he says he’s “learned a lot of stuff, a lot of things about how life works. About different cultures and how difficult it all is. It’s very tough.”

For many of the gardeners, Nikkel is their link to rural Manitoba. On different days throughout the summer he’ll cook some of his chickens over a fire and the gardeners will prepare dishes. Nikkel says this sharing of food outside can remind people of home, an experience they’re no longer able to have living in a downtown apartment. And for him, the expense of travel for new experiences is a non-issue. “I don’t need to go to the country to get the taste, it comes to me.”

Interacting with the newcomers and hearing their stories gives him something to think about as he drives his tractor around and around a field. It’s also made his dinnertime conversations more interesting. “You go to dinner and you have stories. I could talk about soybeans, whether I’ve harvested 38 bushels or 50 bushels, but who cares. The cropping, prices, and futures, I know all that stuff, but it gets boring pretty quickly. People just don’t want to hear about it. But with culture, religion, relationships, whatever people do, it’s huge, it’s what people like to talk about.”

But most of all, he continues to provide space for gardeners because Ngarboui asks him each year if he will. He admires Ngarboui’s skill in building up the project and getting the university, corporations and newcomers all on board, something most people wouldn’t be able to accomplish.

“I would’ve given up on it long ago. But Ngarboui doesn’t. He just keeps working at it. So it’s hard to say ‘No, I’m not going to help, I don’t care. I only care about making my own money, the rest of the world can go and do whatever it wants.’ Once you know somebody, you get along with someone, and you have the resources to help, why wouldn’t you help?”

Over the years, Ngarboui has been nominated for and won a number of awards for his work with the Rainbow Community Garden. This past April he won one of the 2017 Premier’s Volunteer Service Awards. He was told that the award was recognition of the fact that the garden — which has never received any government support — was a good example for both immigrants and Canadian-born of how newcomers can contribute to society.

It takes up a lot of time to find land, procure seeds, organize events, and build relationships with the gardeners, local businesses and supporters. But when I ask Ngarboui why he does the work with the garden on top of his day job, he doesn’t hesitate with his answer. “I’ve benefited a lot. If I’m who I am today it is thanks to the help that I received from people in my communities. I was seven or eight, walking distances to escape civil war, and I was being carried by adults for a distance. One picked me up, and then another one, to reach wherever we were going. And the food was always shared. I grew up in a situation where I couldn’t survive without help from the others around me.”

Sharing the harvest

A great deal of sharing happens within and across the garden plots. Many of the gardeners were farmers in their home countries, so grandparents and parents share their knowledge with younger family members. And then there’s the sharing of seeds and practices.

The gardeners from African countries have become hooked on eating the leaves of the sweet pepper plants, as the Filipinos do. “They found it so delicious and started eating it as well. Now, many of them, instead of the fruit, they rely more on the leaves. Sometimes you will see the peppers without leaves,” Ngarboui says.

He also tells the story of a woman from Liberia who was growing a lot of sweet potatoes in a plot close to his. He assumed she was growing them for the roots, as his family had done back home in Chad. “Usually we remove the leaves and throw them away and just eat the roots,” Ngarboui says. “So I asked, ‘How long will it be taking for you to get the sweet potatoes?’ And she said, ‘No, no, no, I am growing them for the leaves.’ I found it a little bit strange, but I did not say anything.”

Then, at one of the monthly potlucks Ngarboui tried a dish he found very tasty. Turns out it was made from sweet potato leaves. That night, he called his mother in Chad and told her, “‘You know what? The sweet potato leaves that we’ve been throwing away are a nutritious food and we should not throw them away again.’” His mother cooked it for her friends, and now all of them are eating the leaves.

Putting down roots

There was a 100 per cent chance of rain one evening when I visited the garden, so only a few families came by to tend to their plots. Ngarboui said that it’s usually full until sunset. There was a couple with their young son who had come to do some weeding. Ngarboui greeted them in Nepali. They were originally from Bhutan, but the man left as a young boy. His family lived in a refugee camp in Nepal for 20 years before being resettled in Winnipeg in 2011. He has four brothers and calls Ngarboui his fifth. They shared the news with Ngarboui that they had bought a house and would move in the next week.

It’s a moment I often replay in my mind.Ngarboui shakes their hands. As I watch, he congratulates them.

Other farmers, other projects

Harry and Kathe Harder
Clavet, Sask.

Harry and Kathe Harder have a 300-ewe flock in Clavet, Sask., 25 kilometres southeast of Saskatoon. Harry estimates that more than 50 per cent of their farm-gate customers came to Canada as either refugees or immigrants. The Harders have a map of the world on their kitchen wall, where they put a star on each country they’ve had a customer from. There are 75 stars on the map.

It’s a family-run operation, but when they need an extra pair of hands on the farm, such as to build a corral, they will hire recently arrived Syrian refugees. Many are skilled construction workers. Communication isn’t an issue, as Harry speaks Arabic, which he learned as a service worker with Mennonite Central Committee in the Middle East over 30 years ago.

“Many would like to farm,” Harry says of the newcomers he interacts with. “They have a different paradigm and could do something quite positive for farming in Canada.”

Quinte Immigration Services
Quinte Region, Ont.

Since May 2016 the Quinte Immigration Services of Quinte Region, northeast of Toronto, has been running the program Farmers Feed the World. There were two factors at play in starting the program: Quinte Immigration learned that 25 per cent of the Syrian refugees coming to Ontario had some farming experience, and several counties in the region faced a labour shortage in the agricultural sector.

The original intent of the program was to provide information in Arabic to Syrian refugees on agriculture in Ontario. It was quickly observed that finding a job was the top priority for the 150 participants, anxious to be self-sufficient as one year of government financial assistance drew to a close.

Arabic-speaking staff conducted one-on-one interviews with the project participants to gather information on their skills and agricultural experience in Syria. They were then matched with farmers and employers in the agrifood sector who had job opportunities available.

Another component of the project was an event in Belleville, where potential employers from the Quinte Region and Syrian refugees looking for work could meet.

“As a result of this project, 60 per cent of participants obtained some form of employment or self-employment in the agrifood sector,” says Orlando Ferro, executive director of Quinte Immigration Services.

Rod Olson,
Calgary, Alta.

Rod Olson is an urban farmer in Calgary, Alta., growing vegetables in 35 backyards across the city. He sells his produce to restaurants, farmers markets, and a harvest box program.

In the past he’s hired newcomers from Ethiopia and Eritrea to work with him, and last summer he and his business partner employed three Syrian refugees, one of whom had farming experience.

In late 2016 the Alberta government put out a Request for Proposals for 20 acres of provincial land on Calgary’s transportation utility corridor. Olson is a member of a group that submitted a proposal focused on making the land available for newcomers to Canada to grow and sell food. Their proposal was selected, and while there are still a few steps to go before it’s a fait accompli, if all goes according to plan, they will be on the land this spring.

Three initiatives are planned. The first is a community garden with 20 to 30 plots for newcomers, where they can grow food for their families. The second is an apprenticeship program which will be run by Olson and another urban farmer for two to four people, to teach both about farming in the city and on the sales side of the business. The final piece is to have five parcels of land available for entrepreneurs, where they could start out on their own with an agrifood business. There would be the potential to grow foods that newcomers to Canada are missing.

“I know the value of having my own hand in the soil,” Olson says. “Because these people have been displaced, I think that there is nothing more profound than planting a seed, seeing it grow, and then consuming what the earth has given you. There’s a sense of home and stability that comes when you can do that, and that’s been ripped away from any newcomer. And so if we’ve got this land, then why can’t we let them have that experience.”

The post Putting down roots in Canadian soil appeared first on Country Guide.

This summer his fourth play in four years, Boys, Girls, and Other Mythological Creatures, is premiering in Ontario, and his first play, Stag and Doe is on stage in Kincardine, Ont., after having had seven productions in less than two years, ranking it as one of the most produced plays in Canadian theatre over the past decade.

Bed and Breakfast also played at the Centaur Theatre in Montreal this spring, and The Birds and the Bees will be produced five times over the next year in theatres from Kamloops, B.C,. to Victoria-by-the-Sea, P.E.I., after opening at the Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg at the end of March.

Crawford continues to act, meanwhile, and recently wrapped up a month of performing in two Shakespeare plays at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto, and he also moved from Toronto to Stratford so he’s back closer to the family farm and the rural Ontario that he writes about in his plays.

It’s been an impressive five years, transitioning from actor to actor-playwright. Beyond the positive reviews and sold out shows, for Crawford there are great rewards in creating work that brings people out to the theatre, especially for those who may not regularly go. “It’s cool to just give people a really fun night out, and to be a part of that, to give them a different experience. A fun night has great value, especially in the crazy times we’re living in.”

It’s also, it turns out, a good time to be a farm-based, rural Canadian playwright, or artist of almost any kind.

Partly, that’s because the stage is ready for rural plays. In fact, if you’re from rural Canada and watching a Crawford play, you feel like you’re in on the secret. “It’s part of the whole movement of Canadian theatre that came out of the early ’70s about actually going back into places where real people live and making plays about them. It carries on in that tradition,” Crawford says. “We shy away from acknowledging specific cultures within our bigger culture. I think a place like Newfoundland has really embraced that but the rest of the country maybe shies away from it.” That’s something Crawford’s plays are helping to change.

“It’s important to say, ‘hey, where you live and who you are, and your life and your community have value.’”

Crawford’s plays may be set in a specific place, based on the family’s farm just outside the small Ontario town of Glencoe, population 2,100 or 2,200 depending on which sign you read, but the themes are universal. Stag and Doe had a successful run at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax last year even though they don’t have Stag and Does in Nova Scotia. Some at the theatre worried that people wouldn’t come to the show or understand what it was about. But, “ultimately it’s about weddings and it’s about small communities and in Nova Scotia they have lots of those things,” Crawford says. “And people always fall in love and people always screw up.”

But rural Canadians also have unique insights into stereotypes, especially since so many city dwellers make so many generalizations about country hicks.

At bottom, it may be why Crawford thinks so much about stereotypes when he writes his plays. He says he’s interested in “peeling back the layers of characters and revealing more than we first assume.”

That might lead to showing rural characters who are more sophisticated and complicated than the stereotypical straw-chewing yokel that you might see wearing overalls in someone else’s play, but there’s more to it than that. In fact, his shattering of audience assumptions works both ways. In The Birds and the Bees, for instance, he says “the rural characters are revealed to have deep and complicated inner lives — romantic and sexual — but also the one character who’s not from a rural community first appears as a bike-riding, juice-cleansing, ultra-nerd, but by the end we see him as a very smart, deep-thinking, compassionate, fully rounded character.”

The stereotypes go both ways, Crawford says, and the theatre is the perfect place to set them up and then crash them all together for all to see.

But on top of that, there’s another reason why growing up on the farm is good training for a young artist, Crawford says.

If you want a primer for being an artist, growing up as a farmer can be good preparation for the realities of an actor or playwright’s life because, as he says, “sometimes there’s money that’s coming in, sometimes there’s no money, sometimes you’re just in incredible debt, sometimes you can pay off that debt. And you plant a crop and hope to hell it grows and you get paid seven months from now.”

Rural southern Ontario is the backdrop for each of Crawford’s plays. It is a place, he says, with its own, largely unacknowledged traditions, its own way of speaking and its own way of looking at the world.

It was one of these unique rural traditions, his brother’s Stag and Doe, that provided the inspiration for his first play. A Stag and Doe (also called a Buck and Doe or Jack and Jill) is an event held by a young, soon-to-be-married couple to raise money to cover the costs of their wedding. Anyone can attend, and lots do, as it’s sometimes the only thing happening on a weekend night in a small town.

Crawford started writing in the summer of 2012 while acting at the Blythe Festival, a theatre close to Lake Huron. For the previous decade, he had worked full time as an actor. That is, he says, “as much as anyone in the Canadian theatre works full time.”

The Blyth Festival was founded in 1975 largely to produce plays that reflect the culture of southwestern Ontario. It’s a place where there is always a lot of writing happening and Crawford was inspired. He thought back to his brother’s Stag and Doe in 2004, which he had helped out with. “I always thought it was a really funny, weird, very specific cultural rite of passage,” Crawford says. “I thought, ‘maybe there’s a play in there somewhere.’”

Two years later, Stag and Doe premiered at Blyth. The play takes place in the kitchen of a community hall in a small town in southwestern Ontario. A couple is preparing for their Stag and Doe later the same day when a distraught bride-to-be enters and demands to use the hall, as the tent she was going to get married in had blown away in a storm. Being a small town, the characters have an entangled history. Combine this with the usual stresses of weddings, booze, and a catering crew that has landed in jail, and you have the ingredients for a wickedly funny play.

Watching Stag and Doe, it’s obvious that it could only have been written by someone who grew up on a farm, with the dialogue peppered with references to 4-H, heifers, and catering by the United Church Women. One character runs home to do chores, gossip gets shared at the liquor store, and it’s no surprise to find out that folks are connected in all sorts of ways — whether it’s the sharp-tongued lady at the store who turns out to be the maid-of-honour’s aunt, or another who used to babysit the grocery store cashier.

There’s nothing simple or inherently boring about rural life, Crawford says.

“Sometimes we’re so inundated with American TV that we don’t always give value to the place where we live,” he says. “I do think it’s important to say ‘your place in the world is equally important as all the stuff we see that takes place in New York City.’”

The post All the farm’s a play appeared first on Country Guide.

We’ll hear less about the unique contribution farming has made to this country, but farmers have played an oversized role in the shaping of Canada in the past century and a half.

To explore how, we look at three critical points in Canada’s history: at our birth when politicians needed farmers to open up the West; during the First World War when Canadian farmers fed the soldiers at the front, affirming our role as one of the world’s breadbaskets; and during the early 1960s as farms modernized and made Canada one of the most prosperous nations on earth.

Three ministers of agriculture — all farmers themselves — presided over government agriculture policy at these defining moments, helping to shape not only the farm community but also the nation itself.

The founding farmer

Jean-Charles Chapais, Conservative
Minister of Agriculture 1867-69

Among the Fathers of Confederation who united the Province of Canada (later called Ontario and Quebec), Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, in 1867, there was one farmer.

Jean-Charles Chapais of Saint-Denis, in eastern Quebec, was a retail merchant, fishery owner, cattle farmer and politician. As the only farmer among the founding fathers, he was the natural choice to become Canada’s first Minister of Agriculture and to oversee the department’s fledgling office of 23 clerks in Ottawa.

By the time of Confederation, the importance of fisheries and the fur and timber trade had declined, and agriculture was counted on to bring prosperity to the new country. There was hope that agriculture would lead to the expansion of the transportation, manufacturing and commercial industries.

In his short tenure as minister — two years and five months — Chapais’ real focus was therefore on encouraging immigration to Canada and the expansion of agriculture beyond Ontario into what would become the Prairie provinces. In the years leading up to Confederation, migrants had been settling in large numbers in the American Midwest, but fewer were attracted to the lands north of the 49th parallel.

The rock and forest between southern Ontario and Manitoba was an obstacle to the planned agricultural expansion into the West. The solution lay in extending existing rail lines and the subsequent building of the Canadian Pacific Railway to run from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

But Chapais did have two other noteworthy firsts. In August 1868 he prohibited the importation of horned cattle into Ontario and Quebec from the United States. Texas Fever was killing thousands of cattle in the states neighbouring the two provinces. At that time American cattle travelled by rail through Canada to reach markets in the American east. The ban was enacted even though it meant a loss of revenue to Canadian railways. Chapais appointed the first two agricultural inspectors to enforce the ban at border crossings in Windsor and Sarnia, Ont.

Chapais’ second noteworthy act was the passing of the agriculture department’s first piece of legislation, An Act Respecting the Contagious Diseases of Animals, in 1869. Its intention was to provide protection from rinderpest and other diseases for farmers trying to establish their livestock herds. By 1869 the country’s first veterinary inspector oversaw quarantines and inspections at ports and border crossings to stop diseased animals from entering the country.

Chapais’ expansion of agriculture and settlement meant he was a nation builder, but he was still said to be disappointed when he was replaced as minister and appointed Receiver General in November 1869. Agriculture had been a role he was proud of. In a letter to his supporters, Chapais said, “as a farmer… working for agricultural prosperity is, to my way of thinking, more than a duty. It is also a source of immense pleasure.”

The activist minister

Thomas Crerar, Unionist
Minister of Agriculture 1917-19

Conscription was the No. 1 issue in the federal election of 1917. Prime Minister Robert Borden had assembled a coalition of Conservatives, Liberals, independents and labour representatives to run as the Unionists in support of conscription.

Throughout the war Canadian farmers had been encouraged to increase production to meet international demand at a time when labour was in short supply. They rose to the challenge, and in recognition of the important work they were doing at home, they asked that their sons be exempted from military service. The Unionists agreed.

But, in 1918 as recruitment slowed at home, and the war in Europe dragged on, the Union Government cancelled the exemption. The news came in spring as planting was set to begin, and farmers were angry.

Thousands of farmers from Ontario and Quebec, along with farmers from the West and Maritimes, descended on Ottawa to protest the move. It had little effect and conscription of farmers went ahead. Some commentators say that this issue was the first to drive a wedge between the rural and urban populations of Canada.

The minister of agriculture during this tumultuous time was Thomas Crerar. Born in Molesworth, Ont. but raised in Manitoba, Crerar’s credentials to be minister were undisputed. He was a schoolteacher, homesteader, sawmill operator, grain buyer and elevator manager in northwestern Manitoba before entering politics.

Crerar’s most noteworthy action as minister likely came at the end of his tenure, in June 1919, when he resigned from his post. He had always fought for farmers’ interests in cabinet and he couldn’t support the 1919 budget that did not meet demands from agricultural organizations to significantly reduce the 12.5 per cent duty on imported binders, mowers, threshers and reapers.

Crerar retains the distinction of being the only minister to have resigned over farmers’ issues.

Farmer organizations across the country were becoming increasingly vocal and politically engaged at this time. (In the early 1920s, famers’ parties were in power in Alberta, Manitoba and Ontario.) Following his resignation, Crerar helped to create a national farmers’ party — the Progressive Party of Canada — and became its leader in 1920.

In the 1921 election, the Progressives criticized the fact that there were 12 lawyers in cabinet and no farmers. (Of the 30 current cabinet ministers, there are seven lawyers and one former farmer.)

The Progressives won 65 of the 235 seats, the second most behind the Liberals. They won seats in each of the Western provinces, Ontario and New Brunswick. Crerar took a risk in turning down official Opposition status and instead asked for farmers’ policies to be included in the government agenda. His gamble backfired, and Opposition status was instead taken up by the third place Conservatives.

The Progressives’ second-place result was significant for another reason. Canada’s first female member of Parliament, Agnes Macphail, won a seat in the 1921 election under the Progressive Party banner.

Like Chapais, Crerar’s time as minister of agriculture was short at only 21 months. But it was a significant period of time for the nation’s farmers. They had answered the call to increase production for the war effort. Their economic power increased, and with it, they found that their voice could carry further into the corridors of political power. Farmers demanded a better deal on policies that had an impact on their day-to-day lives. They became a voice that couldn’t be ignored in federal politics.

The minister of the modern family farm

Harry Hays, Liberal
Minister of Agriculture 1963-65

In the early 1960s the shift was on to bigger farms, bigger machinery, and higher costs. Between 1941 and 1961 the average Canadian farm size had increased from 237 acres to 359 acres. The agricultural labour force was declining and there were worries that the family farm would disappear.

Farmers found a champion in Harry Hays, one of Canada’s most colourful ag ministers. Hays entered politics first as the mayor of Calgary and then as a member of Parliament, because he needed, in his words, “something to do in retirement.” By the time he ran for a seat in the 1963 election in the riding of Calgary South, he had already made his mark as a rancher and dairy farmer. His resume also included working as a cattle exporter, Holstein breeder, radio broadcaster, and auctioneer (which he remained throughout his time as minister, despite protests from the Opposition).

Hays was promised the opportunity to develop the Liberals’ agriculture policy if he stood in the 1963 election. He ran and won, and was the only Liberal elected in Alberta and Saskatchewan in that election under Prime Minister Lester Pearson.

As Pearson’s minister of agriculture, Hays introduced an ambitious slate of legislation that he believed responded to rapid changes taking place in agriculture. His goal was to see the family farm remain efficient and viable.

One of the most pressing challenges was the availability of credit in order to mechanize and to keep up with the pressure to expand.

Under Hays, the maximum loan amount available to a farmer through the Farm Improvement Loans Act doubled from $7,500 to $15,000. The loans were meant to help farmers purchase better livestock for breeding, labour-saving equipment, and to improve farmhouses.

Hays also amended the Crop Insurance Act of 1959. The original act was created to help provinces provide insurance, but only three provinces had joined and only 8,500 of the 480,000 farms in Canada in 1964 were covered by crop insurance.

Hays said that expanding coverage would remove the “long-standing fear of being ruined overnight by disasters over which they or anyone else have no control.”

A journalist from the Toronto Star Weekly commented of Hays: “No minister seems more inept inside Parliament and few get so much done outside it.”

Hays established the Western College of Veterinary Medicine in Saskatoon and also developed an importation plan to help farmers access quality exotic breeds. In 1965, 113 Charolais cattle were imported into Canada from Europe. Imports of Brown Swiss, Main-Anjou, Simmental and Limousin followed.

Hays’ own involvement in the cattle industry continued throughout his political career. He developed what was recognized in 1975 as the first Canadian pure breed of cattle, the Hays Converter.

Hays was defeated in the election of 1965. Albertans were unhappy with the Liberal Party’s policies on medicare, pensions and the new flag that the Pearson government had introduced. In 1966 he was appointed to the Senate where he served until his death in 1982.

Hays is also remembered as an unusual politician who had little formal education, poor grammar and a tendency to swear in media interviews.

Opposition members chided him as being the “travelling minister.” But, explained Hays, Ottawa’s slow pace was “a burr under my saddle.”

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“When I saw how things were going with the drought, I had to go to work,” she says. Now, her 11-year-old son tends the family’s gardens before he goes to school each day at noon. A neighbour stops in to check on the farm when he can.

On the day I meet Arana, she’s home with her nine-year-old daughter. She’d asked for the day off from her employer to meet with me. Her husband has worked in neighbouring Costa Rica for the past 18 years, returning home once every month or two. So it’s up to Arana to prepare, seed, weed and harvest the family’s seven acres of land. Most of it is dedicated to corn, beans and sorghum, but for the past number of years she’s also been growing fruit trees — coconut, mango, orange, lemon, papaya and passion fruit.

Arana tells me that it’s been two years since she’s harvested anything, due to the drought. She can count on one hand the number of rains in the past year, none of which were significant. She lives an hour’s drive south of the capital city Managua, in what’s known as Central America’s “Dry Corridor.”

Traditionally, farmers in Nicaragua depended on two rainy seasons in the year. Rain would start in early May, and the crops would be planted. A three- to four-week dry window in August allowed the crops to be harvested before the rains began again in early September and the second planting. The first crop cycle is the smaller of the two, but having a harvest is vital for food and to produce seed for the second planting. The second cycle is in the hurricane season when more rain is expected and, in turn, a bigger harvest.

But, that was before. Their agricultural calendar is in disorder now, and scientists blame climate change. The rain has become less predictable, and when it does come, there isn’t enough, and it has been made worse by El Niño.

“Before, the rainy seasons were a lot better,” Arana says. “We’d get 25 to 30 hundred-pound bags of corn, 20 to 25 bags of beans and 20 to 30 bags of sorghum.”

Arana was able to plant in both cycles in each of the last two years, but says that she got next to nothing for her efforts. “We wasted our money,” she says. “We’re in debt because of the drought. I don’t know how we’re going to pay it off. We have enough for food and to send the kids to school and that’s it.”

Arana’s story isn’t unique among smallholder farmers in central Nicaragua. Of the 13 farmers I met during my recent trip to Nicaragua, nearly all spoke of having to purchase food, reducing their meal sizes or cutting out foods that were no longer affordable to them, and needing to search for work off the farm. In recognition of the severity of the drought, the government of Nicaragua, with help from the World Food Programme, increased school meals for children from one to two a day.

The United States Agency for International Development’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) issued a food security alert for Central America and Haiti last fall, calling the drought in the region one of the worst in recent decades. Total rainfall between January 1 and September 10 of 2015 was the lowest in the past 35 years. The alert from FEWS, stating that approximately 2.5 million people in the region were already in need of urgent food assistance, was released on October 16, World Food Day, an annual day to raise awareness of issues of hunger and food insecurity.

High altitude farming

Drought is on the mind of every farmer I meet. But, like anywhere in the world, there are always some who are able to escape the worst of what the climate throws at them. At 49, coffee farmer Felipe Pastrana is one of these, and to thank for that is his farm’s location at 1,600 metres above sea level, near the community of Monzonte, close to Ocotal in Nicaragua’s northwest. “We’re at high altitude so we always get shade and rain,” he says.

Pastrana is temporarily immobile when we meet. A motorcycle accident led to a broken leg, a cast and crutches. We sit in rocking chairs inside the coolness of his house. Music carries in from the next room. I presume if it wasn’t for his bad luck I wouldn’t have been able to meet him. He gives the impression of a man who doesn’t sit still for long.

Pastrana owns about 78 acres of land. He’s recently given just under nine acres to each of his three adult children who manage their portions on top of day jobs. Of the 52 acres he has left, seven are in coffee. Pastrana says that coffee farming has become more technical and better managed in the years since he took over from his parents. He has a field that was planted 17 years ago that is still in production, but the plants are normally renewed every 12 years as yields start to decrease.

“Where I have my farm, it’s cool, so we start the harvest in February and we go through April. We’re the last ones to harvest here because we’re at the highest elevation.” Harvest on coffee farms at lower altitude will start in November and finish in January. Pastrana has four full-time workers and hires 20 more for the harvest season. The temporary workers are also farmers, but at a smaller scale, who have already finished their own harvest before going to work on the larger farms.

There are essentially three harvests, with the coffee being picked at different maturities. First is the select harvest, followed by the main harvest and then finally a clear-cut harvest, where everything is taken including the green berries. Each takes about three weeks.

A typical harvest for Pastrana is 100 bags of 100 pounds each from his seven acres. His export quality beans are sold to a business in Ocotal. The beans are delivered de-pulped and dried. At the plant they are re-dried and prepared for roasting.

Tasters at the processing plant will drink a cup of coffee made from his beans and score it out of 100 points to determine what price he will be paid. The highest Pastrana has been able to achieve is 93. “To get good points you have to harvest the coffee when it’s not fully red, but when it’s turning red. If you harvest coffee and it’s mixed, if you have under-ripe beans mixed with over-ripe beans, they lower your points,” he explains.

“We’ve had three consecutive years of receiving the prize for highest quality in Nicaragua, but when it comes time to sell, they give us the same price as local market coffee,” Pastrana says. “They make a huge profit off of us.”

Despite the uncertainty, the company he sells to offers a better price than he’d get elsewhere in the area. Other businesses will only pay a flat rate for beans, Pastrana says, then separate the best coffee from the lower quality, market it and keep the profit.

The trade-off is that he doesn’t get paid up front, but only when the coffee is exported. He delivered his beans to the plant in April and when I met him in September he still hadn’t been paid. In 2015 he earned US$305 per hundred-pound bag, before taking out US$50 for taxes, transport, customs fees and insurance.

“Here the businesses will pay me $255 for a hundred-pound bag. But in Japan they resold it for $800 for the same market quality. If you look at the margin of profit they are making, most goes to the business. We are just left with a very small profit,” Pastrana says.

Pastrana keeps a portion of his harvest to sell roasted and ground to those in town. He sells it for five cordoba a bag (C$0.25), which makes eight cups of coffee.

While his high altitude coffee plants have been largely spared from the effects of the drought, he says the lack of rain is “a big problem” on his land at a lower elevation where he grows beans and corn. “Those are things we use in order to feed our workers and now we have to buy them because we can’t produce it.”

Conservation agriculture

Head 150 km southwest and you’ll arrive where Guillarmina Castro farms in Pavón, close to Somotillo. Here, Castro and her husband Hector Guevaro are facing problems similar to other farmers working in the country’s Dry Corridor — they cite the lack of rain as their No. 1 challenge — and yet, something different was happening on their approximately 38-acre farm.

Castro lived through the devastation of Hurricane Mitch in 1998 and is now watching as another climate event plagues her community. She says that they’d only had two really good rains in the previous eight months. Nearby rivers that once flooded regularly have gone dry. Despite the hardships, a new way of farming has provided hope.

For the past three years Castro has been adopting conservation agricultural practices, with support from local and international aid groups, including the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. The three main practices — minimal disturbance of the soil, crop rotation, and soil cover — are seen as particularly useful in dry areas, trapping what precipitation does fall.

“We get better yields and can produce with less rain,” Castro says.

Castro’s husband Hector readily admits that it’s his wife who is the motor behind the farm and proudly shows off what she’s accomplished. On a tour of their garden (interrupted by a too-curious and hungry neighbour’s pig that had to be chased away), I’m shown the rich soil, mulch and planting stations with three corn plants in each. It was easy to forget how little rain there had been as we walked through the farm. There were no telltale signs of drought that I had seen in other farmers’ fields.

It is through donations to the Foodgrains Bank, primarily from rural Canada, that this work in Nicaragua is able to happen. “Growing Projects” across Canada see a group of farmers setting aside a piece of land, and planting and harvesting it as a community or a group of churches working together. Proceeds from the sale of the harvest are donated to the Foodgrains Bank and in turn are funnelled into work overseas, such as projects teaching conservation agriculture in Pavón. In 2015 there were 260 “Growing Projects” and other fundraising events across the country. Each project is unique, with some donating the proceeds of wheat and others pumpkins. It is farmers helping farmers.

Agronomists currently work with 187 farmers in the region to help them adopt conservation agriculture practices. While the amount of land each owns differs, by any measure, the farmers are small-scale and wholly dependent on the climate. Farmers are encouraged to first try the method with a portion of their corn or bean crop, but Castro has embraced the concept. In addition to corn, she’s growing pole beans, cassava, watermelons, tomatoes, and green peppers using the three conservation agriculture principles. So far she’s converted just under half an acre of her farm, with plans to increase it to three and a half acres.

“It’s more work. I can’t convert it all in one year. The hard part is making the planting stations,” Castro says. Previously, she would scatter seed on the land. She is now more deliberate, planting three seeds in evenly spaced stations.

As climate change causes an increase in extreme weather events, what was traditionally known as subsistence agriculture is fast turning into survival agriculture in some parts of the world, including Nicaragua. Farmers like Castro have had to adjust to an increasingly arid climate and try new practices. In an imperfect situation, she is adapting and finding reason to be hopeful.

When I ask what her neighbours think of what she is doing, Castro says, “Some laugh at you. Some like it.” But as soon as she learned about it she could see the advantages. In what appears to be the new normal in Nicaragua’s climate, she sees it in her own terms: “the only option for survival.”

This article was originally published as “A world in flux” in the February 16, 2016, issue of Country Guide

Stephanie McDonald is a senior policy advisor at the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. She visited Haiti and Nicaragua in September to study the impact of climate change.

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It’s enough to make him sound like a farmer.

That impression gets even stronger when he continues his list by saying that having a Plan B is essential.

After seven years at the helm, Lacasse says that also on his list are transportation, logistics, and breakdowns beyond his knowledge that slow everything down until a mechanic can get on site.

“You have to be a bit of a hybrid type of worker here,” Lacasse says. “You’re way in the north, so you need to learn different skills and tasks to make it.”

But despite the challenges, he’s an optimist, and he tries to keep everything in a long-term perspective. (Did I already say he sounds like a farmer?) Says Lacasse: “If it happened 10 years ago, and it’s happening again today, it’s going to happen in 10 years.”

Located at 69 degrees north in country’s youngest territory, the community of Cambridge Bay is north of Canada’s mainland, on the coast of Victoria Island.

Cambridge Bay has a population of 1,666, the majority of whom are Inuit, and in the local language called Inuinnaqtun, Cambridge Bay is called Iqaluktuuttiaq, meaning “good fishing place.”

It turns out to be a fitting name in any language, because this is a place rich in Arctic char.

In fact, community members began looking for business opportunities in their resources of both char and muskox in the 1970s, and Kitikmeot Foods was formally established in 1990.

Today, Kitikmeot is one of four fish and meat processing plants operating in the territory as a subsidiary of the Nunavut Development Corporation (NDC), a Nunavut government corporation.

Kitikmeot Foods runs year round, with a staff of six to eight in the plant. This number jumps to 15 workers in the plant during the summer harvest. Teams of local fishermen, totaling between 10 and 15 people altogether, are hired each season to harvest the char on four rivers close to the community.

The season starts at the beginning of July and lasts one to one and a half weeks when the fish are running to the sea. For about a month afterwards, no fishing is done while the char are in the sea, feeding and reproducing. The fishing starts again in mid-August and continues until the second week of September.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, whose staff is onsite during the harvest collecting data, sets the quota for how much fish can be harvested, currently at 98,000 lbs. of char per year.

On two of the lakes the char are caught with a weir, i.e. a v-shaped trap. At each end of the weir is an opening where fish can enter and exit. Most swim forward through a narrow channel and end up in what Lacasse calls a “sock.” Once the weir becomes full, it’s pulled up out of the water. In the other two lakes, char are caught in nets. The fishermen are paid per pound of fish they bring in.

Back on shore the fish are cleaned, put on ice in Styrofoam boxes, and transported by float plane to the community. After being washed and graded in the plant the fish are packed in ice again and shipped out by commercial airline. This whole process is usually completed the same day the fish is caught. Other products are processed or packaged and put into the freezers, ready to be shipped year-round.

The fish is a vibrant orange and the plant makes char fillets, steaks, and jerky — the most popular item — as well as candied and smoked char products. “Char is almost like salmon, but the taste is more wild,” Lacasse says. “The char that we have is a lot higher in omega 3 and oil content. And has less fat.”

Until 2013 Kitikmeot Foods had also organized a commercial muskox hunt and processed the meat. That ended when the number of muskox close to the community dropped and disease was found in the animals across the territory. Muskox products had accounted for 25 to 30 per cent of the company’s sales. To compensate, the plant committed 100 per cent of its time to char and pushed sales of the fish.

Local in the Arctic

The char caught in the rivers around Cambridge Bay and processed by Kitikmeot Foods is shipped to customers and high-end restaurants across America and Canada. It has been written about in the New York Times.

However, despite a North American marketplace that is hooked both by the quality of the char and by the Inuit-caught backstory from the Canadian Arctic, the focus for Kitikmeot Foods is to have their products available within the territory.

“Our emphasis is the Nunavut marketplace. Inuit are our clients, they are our core focus,’ says Darrin Nichol, president of the Nunavut Development Corporation, the 98 shareholder in Kitikmeot Foods. “We’re not against selling product outside of the territory, we don’t discourage that, but our emphasis is in Nunavut.”

“It’s a highly competitive environment. There are char farms, there are lots of options for fish outside of our product, and it can be an expensive endeavour,” Nichol says. “The markets in Nunavut tend to be closer, the marketing emphasis doesn’t have to be as high and the people tend to appreciate our product more for what it is, recognizing that it’s caught by the Inuit of Nunavut and provided back as a finished good.”

At the core of NDC’s mandate is creating employment, Nichol says, as well as generating income-earning opportunities and providing business support. NDC also works in sectors that people rely on for employment, although these sectors tend to be high-task, low-return.

NDC is also interested in ensuring that local food is available to the local population. Nichol speaks of walking into a grocery store in southern Canada. No matter the section of the store, locally grown food is usually available. “That’s economic development, that’s people supporting people, providing quality product for the clients of that grocery outlet,” he says.

NDC has worked with northern retailers to have food from their four plants available in each of the territory’s 25 communities. The demand for locally harvested food has increased as the cost of hunting equipment rises and as more of the territory’s citizens work in their communities, limiting the time that can be dedicated to hunting and fishing.

The meat and fish products from the four Nunavut plants are marketed under the brand “Truly Wild.” The logo has a fish making a splash as it jumps out of the water, with icebergs in the background. A lot of work was put into creating the brand and has been officially licensed. Nichol says that the “Truly Wild” brand is recognized, but reiterates that their focus is on the local market.

“Marketing is fine as long as you have the capacity to deliver what you’re marketing,” Nichol says. “Over the years — and I’ve been at this for a long, long time — where we do have to be a little bit careful, especially when you’re marketing in the south, is that you don’t overstate your ability to supply.”

Future plans

Kitikmeot Foods is preparing for growth, but it will be slow, measured growth.

Lacasse says there are no expansion plans in the near future. They will continue to harvest and prepare products to be put back into the Nunavut marketplace.

Because they fish sustainably and under a quota system, what they can harvest is not unlimited. While he’d like to see the muskox population bounce back, he doesn’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Both Lacasse and Nichol see a market for caribou, but the feasibility of the hunt first needs to be assessed. “Logistics-wise, to carry caribou it’s not cheap. The caribou don’t stay put. They are that kind of animal that like to travel, travel, travel so much a day, so they’re always on the move. It’s not like the muskox,’ Lacasse says.

Going forward, Kitikmeot Foods will continue to operate on the business model it has built up over the past 24 years, sharing the fish that the rivers around Cambridge Bay have been endowed with.

Kitikmeot will also continue to provide employment for community members and local food for the territory’s population in a prohibitively expensive business environment.

The vagary of Arctic animals means the company must remain flexible. And Kitikmeot Foods will continue to contend with its number one challenge, Mother Nature, which as farmers know is always fickle, with a mind of her own.

This article originally appeared as ‘A little bit wild,’ in the March 31, 2015 issue of Country Guide

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But his beliefs know where they are rooted, for Rwakakamba passionately believes that if Africa is going to reach its agricultural potential, it is going to be Uganda’s small-scale farmers, not its big plantations, that help get it there.

They may be small scale rather than large, diversified rather than specialized, and low input rather than high, but these farmers can be the foundation of a healthy future, Rwakakamba says, as long as they get the government support they need for improved access to better seeds, information and markets.

It is a message that he is intent on getting through not only to President Yoweri Museveni, who appointed him special presidential adviser on research and information in 2013, but also to any international audience he can get to listen.

Farmer as activist

From Monday to Friday, Rwakakamba is based in Kampala where he’s always sharply dressed in crisp shirt, pressed slacks and glossy leather shoes.

His schedule is packed. The first time he and I tried to schedule our interview for Country Guide, Rwakakamba emailed from World Trade Organization headquarters in Geneva where he had been invited to debate the question, “Agricultural trade and food security — are the benefits sufficiently inclusive?”

Later, I suggested perhaps we could find some time on Uganda’s Independence Day, but he tells me he has no time that day. It turns out he’s integral to the national celebrations.

On our third try we connect by Skype on a Friday afternoon, although his beeping cellphone is a kind of soundtrack to our conversation.

In that interview, Rwakakamba tells of his journey from growing up on a coffee farm 400 km away from the capital city to now having access to the State House and the president. After finishing university, Rwakakamba rose through the ranks of the Uganda National Farmers Federation and, at age 30, he became CEO of the Uganda National Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

After working as the country director for an East African civil society organization, he founded the Agency for Transformation, a “think and do tank,” as he calls it, which provides research and policy information on agriculture and the environment.

Rwakakamba says he was compelled to create the agency because of his deep roots in the farming community, and because he saw that agriculture policy in Uganda was like a “broken brick.” There were too many policy documents being issued and too many institutions involved in implementing programs. The result was a clash of mandates where nothing moved forward. Now, every policy paper the Agency for Transformation publishes is shared with the president.

The farmer

Ironically, his work for farmers has made Rwakakamba an urban, white-collar professional, sitting behind a desk most weekdays. Yet nearly every weekend he returns to his farm, which he now manages with his parents and a brother. The farm is where he says he can relax and breathe properly. It’s also a place he wants his three children to know, so they can be in touch with their roots and the legacy of those who came before them.

The family’s 15-acre farm is located in Rukungiri District, closer to the borders of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo than the nation’s capital. The family grows coffee and bananas and raises cattle and goats, but the emphasis has always been on coffee. “It’s how we got school fees to go to school. The economy of the household and our education really gravitated around the success of the cash crop. That is why coffee has always been part of me,” Rwakakamba says.

The coffee is harvested twice a year, in April and November. During the harvest season, eight to 10 people are employed on the farm, while half that number work year round. The beans are husked and then dried in the sun. With no electricity on the farm, “it’s very difficult for us to do value addition and have the entire coffee chain contained at the farm. We move value out of the farm and other actors along the value chain are the ones who make the money,” Rwakakamba says.

He cites the example of a cup of coffee, which sells for 10,000 Ugandan shillings in Kampala, or about $4. While the price of coffee constantly fluctuates, in some years the cost of this single cup of coffee is the equivalent of what Rwakakamba makes from selling three kilos of beans to the middleman at his farm gate. “It is absolutely obscene,” Rwakakamba says.

The government has promised that Rukungiri will be connected to the national grid by the end of 2015. And when that happens Rwakakamba has big plans. First, he intends to purchase processing machinery — a pulper, hurler and roaster — for his own beans and to offer on a custom basis to neighbours for a fee. The processed coffee should then fetch a premium price.

Secondly, Rwakakamba intends to transform his farm into an agro-tourism coffee resort. “Lovers of coffee across the world can come to my farm and be able to stay there, harvest coffee, dry it, roast it, and take it,” he says. A house already on the farm will be converted into a guest house. The family will provide local food, and community members will be employed to guide tourists through the coffee experience, from field to steaming cup.

Future is small, efficient farms

Rwakakamba recalls an incident that shaped his belief in conservation and organic farming. He purchased fertilizer from a local market that turned out to be counterfeit and ineffective. When he switched to using his cows’ manure on his coffee and banana plants, the transformation was undeniable. He says that his farm is now an ecosystem of components that support each other.

“For me, the future of agriculture is about making small farms efficient such that they can produce more, but in an environmentally sustainable way,” Rwakakamba says. “We can use our own organic fertilizers and resources to do that. Efficiency is usually confused to mean you have to bring GMO seeds, you have to bring exotic stuff, which for me is really not the case.”

The status quo in Ugandan agriculture was challenged in February 2013 when the governing party’s Biotechnology and Biosafety Bill had first reading in Parliament. If passed, the bill would legalize the use and export of genetically modified seeds, plants and livestock in Uganda. Rwakakamba opposed the bill, but it was in the midst of the debate that the pro-GMO president, Museveni, appointed anti-GMO advocate Rwakakamba his Special Presidential Adviser, catching many political observers off guard.

Two years later, the bill is still pending, deferred to allow members of parliament more time to consult their constituents. Rwakakamba remains firmly against the bill as it’s written. “To increase efficiency we don’t need a kind of seed structure that would make the farmer a slave of the market,” he says.

For Rwakakamba, it’s also a branding issue. In the past, Uganda’s farms might not have had any choice but to be low-input farms because farmers couldn’t get access to inputs. But now, they can use that history as a point of differentiation.

Only 60 per cent of the country’s arable land is being worked, so there is opportunity to expand, but “we cannot compete in economic terms and market access for GMOs with countries which have done GMOs for a long time, like Canada, the United States, and Australia. Going GMO is actually moving away from the niche, because in Uganda, in many ways our farmers remain de facto conservation and organic farmers.”

Rwakakamba points to studies that estimate the untapped organics market for agricultural products in Europe, Japan, the U.S. and Africa exceeds $100 billion.

Once farmers are introduced to genetic modification, Rwakakamba also cautions, “it becomes a different ball game that requires different kinds of skills, that requires a different kind of land space.” He worries that if Uganda opens its doors to the international seed market, the sustainability of its farmers will be compromised. He stresses that commercialization is not bad, but it needs to be done in a way that also protects food security at the household level.

Increasing efficiencies will become the primary focus of agricultural policy moving forward, whether or not the Biotechnology and Biosafety Bill passes. The Ugandan population is expected to reach 114 million by 2050 (in 2013 the population was 37 million with nearly half under the age of 15).

The country will have to significantly increase its productivity in order to feed that population. Rwakakamba thinks it’s doable, with an intensification of smallholder farming where value is added on the farm and there is access to markets, better seeds, extension services and information. “Once we achieve that, then we’ll be sure that we first of all feed ourselves but also feed the continent.”

As our conversation winds down Rwakakamba tells me he’s closing up the office and heading to his farm for the weekend. For the next couple of days, he says, he’s looking forward to changing out of his city clothes, and getting his hands dirty. As he puts it, he’ll practise what he preaches.

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