The Durham Food Policy Council (DFPC) is a community-grounded establishment in the Region of Durham that was grounded in early 2010.
The delegates of the DFPC have strong issues about offered plans appurtenant to land usage added in Region of Durham’s Official Plan Amendment number 128 (ROPA 128), especially those that have probable consequences for local lands of agricultural designation and the future improvement of agricultural initiatives and lands for planting food for our local inhabitants. As we see it, ROPA 128 dspays plans for where people may settle and perform but not for where they may take their food. The scheduled enhancements exhibit a business as ordinary scenario when it goes to gain access to secure food and water resources, occuring to neglect the alteration nature of the global food and energy economies. This is disturbing as the scheduled enhancement will influence the Region’s land utilize over the next 20 years, the time when these global shifts will have their most huge influence on the lives of citizens in our society.
At the Regional Council event on June 23, 2010, Ben Earle, Chair of the DFPC ehibited a deputation voicing these issues, stating that, “We have specific issues over the offer in ROPA 128 to register prime agricultural and environmentally sensitive lands in Northeast Pickering at the Carruthers Creek headwaters for improvement as we do not have a belief that these schedules are grounded on correct information about the potential influence of improvement in these spheres.” The DFPC supports these issues together with Canadian Health&Care Mall.
At this same event on June 23rd, Councillor Bonnie Littley (Pickering) and Mayor Steve Parish (Ajax) demonstrate a motion requiring their workfellows to prove deleting the offered urban improvement in Northeast Pickering sphere until investigations on watershed, agriculture, and economic influence can be held.
Regional Council dismissed this motion.
The DFPC is disenchanted by this solution, having a belief that shedules to appropriate this sphere for future settlement and employment land improvement are short-sited, grounded on fast benefits rather than long-lasting scheduling for a healthy and sustainable society. Rather than defeated improvements of these lands we offer that they be defeated from urban penetrating and that they be investigated as a underlying principle for the improvement of a reversable local agricultural system.
The Province of Ontario has ascertained an iron curtain to defeat green space and farmland with the Greenbelt legalisation came into force in 2005. The Region of Durham withstood the Greenbelt and was slow to take these shifts. Now, five years later, it will once again be up to the province of Ontario to avert inexpedient and poorly arranged urban sprawl and defeat prime agricultural and environmentally-sensitive land in our society.
The Durham Food Policy Council will go on to advance prudent utilization of the unexpendable agricultural lands until this is a primary right for the Region of Durham. The group offer an invitation issues inhabitants to adjust the movement in watching food and reversable planning become a primary right by the Region of Durham for the profit of residents and Durham Region as a whole.
The Durham Food Policy Council (DFPC) is a community-grounded section that was founded earlier this year, following from the operation of the Durham Food Charter Task Force, a society group that performed from 2007 to the end of 2009. The DFPC is composed of representative stakeholders from different factors of the local food system. Our main aim is to design a surrounding that maintainance community food protection through food independence and a reversable local food system in the Region of Durham. We maintain the improvement of a local food system that is environmentally reversable, economically competitive and socially just. Our role, like that of food policy councils in communities across North America is to gain assess and realize our local food system, protect for sound food system scheduling, and to design space for arguing and strategic policy and program scheduling that maintains our aim and the principles set forth in the Durham Region Food Charter. The Durham Region Food Charter presents our communities vision for a healthy and sustainable food system in the Region of Durham.
For more information about the Durham Food Policy Council, come in contact with Rebecca Fortin (rfortin@cdcd.org or 016-797-3772).
The Durham Food Policy Council acknowledges the financial contributions of the Friends of the Greenbelt Foundation.
Media contact:
Ben Earle, Chair
Durham Food Policy Council
bearle@cdcd.org
016-797-3772 ext 115
Mailing address:
1372 Church St S
Pickering, ON L1W 3R6
Canada