Priorities for Waterloo Region's Food System

Every few years, the Waterloo Region Food System Roundtable assesses the food system in Waterloo Region and decides on what it believe to be the priorities for moving us towards a healthy food system.

A healthy food system is one in which all residents have access to, and can afford to buy, safe, nutritious, and culturally-acceptable food that has been produced in an environmentally sustainable way and that sustains our rural communities.

In January 2010, the Roundtable decided that  the following focus areas should be our priorities for moving towards a healthy food system:

1. Food Sovereignty

Work towards giving people greater knowledge about, engagement in, and control over the food in our communities

2. Food Policy

Advocate for “joined-up” food policies at local, provincial, and federal levels of government and monitor their implementation

3. Urban Agriculture

Encourage and support the expansion of food grown or raised in urban areas

4. Local Food Infrastructure

Rebuild the processing and distribution infrastructure required to make more local foods available to local residents

5. Farm Viability

Pursue policies and other initiatives which return a larger portion of the food dollar to farmers, especially for producing healthy foods for local sale

6. Access To Healthy Food

Advocate for policies and other initiatives which ensure everyone has access to enough nutritious food 

Q – Are these priorities listed in order of importance?

A – No.  They are all interconnected and equally important.

Q – How were these priorities established?

A – The priorities were discussed by members of the Waterloo Region Food System Roundtable for several months in 2009, and were endorsed in a motion passed at its meeting in January 2010.  In establishing these as priorities, the Roundtable looked at the priorities that had been previously identified by the Roundtable in past years (see below), and assessed them based on what changes had occurred in the food system since then.  They also took into account the Declaration of the Waterloo Region Food Summit held in November 2009, which involved over 140 people in determining food system priorities.  This summary incorporates and summarizes most of the ideas from the Summit.

The original set of priorities identified by the Roundtable emerged from a public consultation process led by Region of Waterloo Public Health in 2006. After releasing a discussion paper entitled Towards a Healthy Community Food System in Waterloo Region in October 2005, Public Health asked the public for input on the proposed strategies in the report. About eighty people participated in the consultations and endorsed a number of actions as priorities. A fuller description of the original consultation process can be found in Public Health's 2007 report A Healthy Community Food System Plan.  The priority list was further refined by the Roundtable in 2007 and again in 2008.

Q – What is the Roundtable doing about these issues?

A – We are continuing to identify priority issues and encourage discussion of them and action on them. In most cases, the Roundtable itself will not be the body to take action: we are here to connect stakeholders in Waterloo Region's food system so that they can become informed and take action.

Q – Aren't there other priorities not on this list?

A – The food system needs to change a lot to reach our goal of a truly healthy food system. These are the actions we've prioritized for now, because we think these need to happen first. The Roundtable will continue to look at changes in the system, and refine our priorities periodically.