Lance Bishop hit the nail on the head in last week's Kings County Register when he said, "for most farmers in this province there is no fairness in their farm trade."

We need fair trade for our farmers. After hearing Janet Eaton talk about continental integration and watching the documentary Hoodwinked, I now know that practically our entire Canadian economy has been sold down the drain to the American corporate oligarchy. It’s high time to learn and react.

Relocalization is one strategy we should adopt wholeheartedly. This process aims to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of the relocalization movement are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies and to improve dramatically environmental conditions and social equity. www.relocalize.net/">www.relocalize.net

There are role models we can look to. In Devon, England in early December, for instance, a McDonald's restaurant shut down because it couldn’t compete with local traders and a strong farm market. Campaigners went to work when McDonald's arrived in 1999 and they succeeded. In fact, the Tavistock market just picked up a prestigious food award. www.localfood.org.uk/">www.localfood.org.uk

In Puget Sound, Washington State, Steve Evans is a government employee acting as a ‘farmbudsman’. For the last eight years, he and the Cascade Harvest Coalition have supported the preservation and revitalization of the food and farm system in the western part of the state after representatives from a number of diverse groups met to address the need for greater unity and a stronger voice within the agricultural community.

Through forums, promotions, better inter-communication, research, education and collaboration, the coalition’s member organizations and individuals are trying to address urbanization, the loss of critical farmer support, vague and uncertain environmental and land use regulations, the need for better marketing, and the loss of irreplaceable farm lands. www.pugetsoundfresh.org/">www.pugetsoundfresh.org We aren't the only region fighting for survival.

As a member of the Kent Co-op since 1992, I thought our family was doing its bit to support local producers. You can trust that co-ops aren't sending their profits over the border. The carrots I buy in New Minas might travel to Moncton and back before they go on the shelf, but they’re grown locally by Sawler's.

I think that each of us not only has a responsibility to buy local, but to be educated about the manifold reasons for doing so. As Pam Farrow, a co-op board member sees it, "if everyone understood by not buying local, when you can, we’re actually putting ourselves at a disadvantage and at the whim of others for our food supply."

The Wal-Mart mentality, where price is the bottom-line, cuts off our collective future to save pennies. Check out the Post-Carbon Institute, which was started by an interesting character named Julian Darley, who is now based in Vancouver.

Darley is also author of High Noon for Natural Gas: the New Energy Crisis. One of his initiatives is a website he calls public service broadcasting for a post-carbon world. It has some excellent information. www.globalpublicmedia.com/">www.globalpublicmedia.com

In Canada, the mindset is beginning to shift. Again in Vancouver, in 2003 social planners started defining a just and sustainable food system as one in which food production, processing, distribution and consumption are integrated to enhance the environmental, economic, social and nutritional health of a particular place.

They formed the Vancouver Food Policy Council, which is comprised of individuals from all sectors of the local food system. The primary goal is to examine the operation of the food system and provide ideas and policy recommendations for how it can be improved.

Food security is another aspect that our B.C. cousins have grappled with already. Protecting scarce agricultural land from urban sprawl is a smart growth strategy and the goal of B.C.'s Agricultural Land Reserve. They have developed tools to strengthen farming through efficient local planning rather than turning good land over to subdivisions.

Food is about politics today. Perhaps federal agriculture minister Chuck Strahl, who is trying to shut down the respected Canadian Wheat Board, needs a lesson in food sovereignty.

Food insecurity affects many and presents itself in different forms across this country. Look at the number of people using food banks, the financial problems of farmers and fishers and their communities, diabetes rates among aboriginal people, widespread obesity, and pollution and habitat destruction associated with the food system.

Food Secure Canada's website says we believe there is an increasing need for informed citizen participation in important decisions dealing with food policy, food safety, health and poverty reduction. Antigonish resident Christine Johnson, of the Nova Scotia Nutrition Council, is the only Maritimer on the steering committee.

Supposedly when the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has traveled at least 1,500 miles, so we need to start rethinking. According to Andy Jones, the author of Eating Oil: Food in a Changing Climate, a typical calorie of food energy in the industrial food system will require 10 calories of input energy. In 2005, Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chose to confront these unsettling statistics with an experiment. For one year, they bought or gathered their only food and drink from within 100 miles of their apartment in Vancouver. Thus, the 100-mile diet was born.

So the question we need to ask ourselves is can we eat well in Kings County without buying chemically-altered foods picked and packaged three weeks ago by exploited migrant farm workers and marketed by giant international corporations for huge profits? Yes, it can be done.