Skip to main content

Your veggies (and other plants) are under attack

#209 of 228 articles from the Special Report: Food Insider
Plants are essential for everything from oxygen to oatmeal, but researchers warn they're under threat — and Canada is ill-equipped to respond. Photo by Thandy Yung / Unsplash

Help us raise $150,000 by December 31

Goal: $150k
$15k

Canada's plants are under attack from climate change and global trade, yet our governments aren't ready to protect them, over a dozen researchers are warning.

Plants are essential to most aspects of life, from producing oxygen to sustaining biodiversity and people's livelihoods. As the climate changes and global trade accelerates, they're being exposed to more extreme weather, new diseases, and fast-moving pests that threaten entire ecosystems. But according to a new report by the Council of Canadian Academies commissioned by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, Canada's patchwork approach to protecting plants is inadequate to tackle the threat.

"Plant health is overwhelmingly critical for all life on Earth," explained co-author Deborah Buszard, a plant specialist and biology professor at the University of British Columbia's Okanagan campus. "Yet we can see from the research that there are issues, there are critical failures, there are environmental disasters impacting (our) plants."

While trees, crops, and other economically-important plants are directly responsible for about three per cent of Canada's GDP, they directly impact about 500,000 people, many of them in rural areas. Moreover, they are essential to maintaining healthy ecosystems, sequestering carbon, public health, and are of social and cultural importance to people across the country.

"We didn't look at individual plants. We were asked to look at the risk to the system of plant health and the nature of the risks," said Buszard. While extinction is the "ultimate" threat, more worrying is that many ecosystems — both natural and managed, like fields — could suffer a devastating loss of biodiversity that can help them weather changes in the environment.

Canada's plants are under attack from climate change and global trade, yet our governments aren't ready to protect them, over a dozen researchers are warning. 

"That loss of diversity makes ecosystems more fragile," she said.

The report noted that efforts to address threats like new diseases or extreme weather are stymied by Canada's fragmented approach to protecting them — a task currently falls on dozens of federal, provincial and territorial, and municipal government agencies. For instance, at the federal level alone, decisions about how best to protect crops from diseases and pests draw on the expertise of at least three ministries and other agencies.

The result is that there is no "systematic tracking" of plant health that could give researchers and politicians the data needed to protect them more effectively. In practice, that could look like anything from boosting soil conservation and regeneration efforts to managing water and agricultural chemicals more efficiently.

Better collaboration between federal, provincial/territorial, and municipal governments and Indigenous communities is essential. Moreover, the authors noted governments should also include a broader range of Canadians, not just specialists, in monitoring and conservation efforts to make them more effective.

Most Canadians are "unaware" of the role plants play in daily life, Buszard said. It's a reality she hopes will start to change.

"Most Canadians live in cities and do not have a good idea of what the forests of Canada really are, where our food comes from … so (plant health) doesn't become a real high priority in politicians' eyes."

Comments