Shaping the Southern Ontario Landscape: A Presentation

The Greater Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Alliance has put forth the Agricultural Action Plan 2021, citing challenges facing a more sustainable food and farm sector that need to be overcome if farming communities are to persist in Southern Ontario. Such challenges include fierce competition for land, transport congestion effecting the efficient movement of goods, lack of integration across the sector, gaps in infrastructure preventing such integration, and an expanding urban form impacting farmers’ abilities to farm efficiently, among others. This presentation seeks to explain the historical development of these challenges in hopes that with renewed understandings of how we have developed as a region we can then make strides in implementing the Food and Farming action plan, achieving what the 2021 action plan calls “growing the food and farm cluster” in sustainable fashion. Moreover, with renewed understandings of how we have developed as a region we can also implement stronger policy in regards to a whole range of issues towards building a more sustainable and resilient regional landscape: from what will come out of the Greenbelt Plan review, to the outcomes of the Canada-EU CETA negotiations, to realizing the full potential of the Rouge national urban/agricultural park.

see the presentation here