Agriculture, it seems, is a delicate proposition.
Yet, as we hear the ongoing concerns about the heavy rainfall and flooding in the area, we would do well to keep the severity of this problem in perspective.
It’s true that standing water and flooded rivers have had a serious, detrimental effect on the food producers in our region.
Westlock County’s agricultural services supervisor has said that there could be some negative impacts on some of the different crops in the area — in particular, the canola that can be seen in countless fields all across the county is at risk of producing less than is expected or, if the rain keeps up, some of the crops could be lost entirely.
Certainly the heavy rains can be as bad as drought for food production, which is bad news for area producers. At the end of the season, though, all the farmers, their families, and the members of this community will still have food on their plates.
It’s safe to say that not a single resident of Westlock County will die of starvation even if every single crop in the area is lost.
Compare this to some other parts of the world, where the fear of starvation is ever present. While we worry about the health of the local farming community through this wet summer and wonder if the provincial government is going to step in to help, on the other side of the world people are facing food shortages that make our own problems seem trivial.
The United Nations officially declared famine in two regions of southern Somalia last week, which needless to say is a problem that far surpasses our worries about our own crops.
And the problem isn’t unique to Somalia. Food security is an issue facing nearly every country in the developing world, and some in the developed world as well. In Canada, we are blessed with huge tracts of fertile agricultural land and an extremely low population density. Even if we lost a year of crops, we’d probably be able to weather the storm.
This is not to trivialize the issues faced by our region’s farmers. When business is bad, it affects all of us. It’s just that we must all remember that as bad as our problems might seem here, we’re still in a position to feast.
