World crops linked to decolonizing diets. Smartly balancing diversity with the ecology of exotic introductions and their impacts.
The diversification of the Canadian population has provoked changes in what is being grown. In Ontario, an initial impetus to engage the dominant agricultural establishment was the shift out of tobacco in the 1980s. Grown mostly on sandy soils, the feasibility of growing world crops was explored in some studies undertaken by OMAFRA. Gradually other institutions and NGOs got involved.
World crops is often also connected to new farmers
within the GTA Afro-Caribbeans spend $7 million per month on ECVs (Filson & Adekunle, 2017) Filson, G. C., & Adekunle, B. (2017). Eat Local, Taste Global: How Ethnocultural Food Reaches our Tables. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Adekunle, B., Filson, G., & Sethuratnam, S. (2012). Culturally appropriate vegetables and economic development. A contextual analysis. Appetite 59(1), 148-154.
Nawaratne, Y. (2012). Ethno-cultural Vegetables in Ontario: Understanding the Value Chain (Master’s thesis, The University of Guelph, 2012) (pp. 1-117). Guelph: University of Guelph
Statistics Canada. (2011). The geography of demographic changes in Canadian agriculture. <https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/96-325-x/2014001/article/11905-eng.htm#a2>.
