Vancouver’s 150 page draft ‘Food Strategy’ goes before city council

Vancouver’s Draft Food Strategy: Blueprint for an edible city – 71 recommended actions

By Randy Shore
Vancouver Sun
Jan. 26, 2013

Excerpt:

VANCOUVER — The city’s new food strategy depicts a high-density urban environment lush with edible landscaping, community vegetable gardens, green walls, rooftop greenhouses, farmers markets and thousands of green jobs based in a burgeoning local food economy.

City council intends the Vancouver of the near future to be a model system of just and sustainable locally-grown food, a city as pretty as it is delicious.

“People will be able to see the fruit of this plan everywhere, when they walk down the street, in schoolyards and community centres, you’ll see it on empty lots and on vertical walls, farms that pick up and move from location to location,” said Coun. Heather Deal. “Food will be grown everywhere.”

Among the goals contained in the document:

— Add 13 new farmers markets, for a total of 22.

— Add 1,300 new community garden plots, for a total of 5,000.

— Double the number of urban farms in the city from 17 to 35.

— Encourage commercial growing in urban spaces and create a business license category for farms.

— Encourage edible landscaping and food-bearing trees on boulevards and traffic circles.

— Explore the creation of a processing, distribution and retail sales centre for locally grown foods.

— Establish procurement policies for schools and park concessions requiring a percentage of food served to be grown locally.

Read the complete article here.

See the complete 150 page report here.