In the wake of U.S. tariffs, N.S. academics call for food to be part of national defence

Amid U.S. President Donald Trump's tariffs and threats of annexation, some academics at Halifax universities are calling for Canada to assess whether it can feed its population in a crisis. 

They say Canada needs to think about food as part of the country's national defence strategy.

"You can have all of the weapons in the world and it doesn't matter if you can't feed your population," said Karen Foster, an associate professor with Dalhousie University who studies food systems and rural communities.

Foster is one of four academics who recently wrote an article on the topic in the academic publication The Conversation. 

She said the U.S. tariffs are a "wake-up call" to make the food system more local, pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic as another illustration of how Canada's supply chains can be disrupted.

"It's not only that consumers are dependent on imports, but producers are dependent on the income from exports as well," Foster said. "So we've got a whole system where we're really teetering on this … dependence."

According to Foster, countries like Sweden have put food at the centre of their national defence strategies.

The Halifax Regional Food Hub is one effort in the province to make our food system more local. 

It's a relatively new co-operative that aims to distribute food from farmers and other producers across Nova Scotia to Halifax and other nearby communities.

The goal is also for the organization to store, process and deliver food to wholesale customers like local restaurants or public institutions, said Justin Cantafio, a director with the food hub. 

"The biggest bottleneck preventing the growth of the local food system within Nova Scotia is access to infrastructure," said Cantafio, who is also executive director of Farmers' Markets of Nova Scotia.

As the food hub has been developing, he said there's been a lot of interest, particularly from small- to medium-sized producers.

"What we've been hearing is that [they've] been looking for something like this," Cantafio said.

More than $850,000 in provincial funding has enabled the project to get started. Cantafio said the organization hired an executive director this spring and is now recruiting co-op members and looking for a physical location.

Organizations like Feed Nova Scotia and the Mobile Food Market have been involved with the food hub's work, according to its website. Cantafio said the co-op hopes to distribute food by 2026.

Foster said it's unclear whether Nova Scotia and Canada have the capacity to maintain adequate food resources in a crisis. 

To address this, she said there needs to be co-ordination across sectors and more resources put into strategies like Nova Scotia's Food and Beverage Strategy that is being developed.

According to a 2023 report, the strategy will "outline policies, programs and initiatives that help raise awareness of, improve access to, and increase the production of healthy local food." 

CBC has reached out to the Nova Scotia Department of Agriculture for an update on the strategy.