In Timmins, Canada, grocery stores are being affected by droughts in California limiting the supply of fresh produce. Some prices have become three to four times higher in recent weeks, causing stores to put up signs apologizing for the inconvenience and explaining the cause to be falling production in the US and Mexico.
Cauliflower is one of the highest-priced vegetables in Timmins at the moment, going for as much as $5 per head because it now has to be shipped from overseas.
“My second-last shipment of cauliflower came from Spain,” said Brian Dailey, the owner of Dailey’s Your Independent Grocer. “That tells me there is definitely some issues in the states."
There are, in fact, several factors contributing to the high produce prices in Timmins and the rest of Canada, according to Evan Fraser, who holds a Canadian Research Chair in global food security and teaches at the University of Guelph.
One of the reasons is that the U.S. is not producing as many vegetables.
“California is in the middle of the worst drought it’s had in the past 1,000 years,” explained Fraser. “It’s a very bad drought, and it’s been going on for the past three or four years, and as a consequence, vegetable production has decreased dramatically. So there’s a constriction on supply."
But while vegetable production in the U.S. has been falling, so too has the Canadian dollar, which lost 16% of its value compared to the U.S. dollar over the course of 2015, as Canada’s oil industry floundered because of low oil prices.
The problem is that Timmins and much of Canada are almost entirely dependent on vegetable imports, said Fraser, because for the past 20 years much of the vegetable production has been shifting to areas like California that have a year-round growing season.
“To a large extent, we have lost our domestic vegetable production, and domestic vegetable processing has really, really declined. We have lost the ability to produce vegetables ourselves,” he said.
For vegetable prices in Timmins to begin going back down, one of the three primary causes needs to be resolved, said Fraser.
Either the drought in California needs to end, oil prices need to recover or something else needs to cause the Canadian dollar to increase in value, or there needs to be more domestically-grown vegetables.
In recent years, there has been a big push in Northern Ontario for more agriculture, particularly in the communities north of Timmins where there is plenty of land to use.
When asked if the high price might be an opportunity for local producers to compete with the typically much cheaper imported vegetables, Fraser said that was a hard question to answer. Even presupposing the economics at the moment would make it profitable, the problems causing the high prices might not last long enough to establish a vegetable farming industry in Northern Ontario.
“Over a fairly large amount of the past 20 years, it has not been economically efficient to set up a vegetable farm outside Timmins, nor has it been profitable to have a cauliflower processing facility in Timmins. Maybe this year it is, but maybe next year it won’t be anymore. It takes a long time to set up these industries,” Fraser said.
