It has been over a year since Russia invaded Ukraine. At a press conference at a grocery store earlier this week, our prime minister mentioned that Russia invading Ukraine was a reason why food went up. That is partly untrue, so let’s talk about it.
The government of Canada announced last year that a 35% tariff would be applied to all of the chemical fertilizer imported from Russia. This means that the cost of production would go up for farmers. The problem with this tariff is that there is not a lot of competition. Russia is one of the big producers of chemical fertilizer and there isn’t any alternative to it. This resulted in a large number of Canadian farmers reducing the amount of fertilizer on their fields, which in turn, also reduced the amount of food produced.
When President Trump imposed tariffs on products made outside of the United States, the idea was to discourage American consumers from buying those products. For example, if the government imposed a 30% tariff on a car made outside of their country, and their country produces an alternative to this car, consumers would be more inclined to buy the American-made car. This worked well for the United States because they had alternative products made in their own country.
The problem in Canada, is that the tariff on chemical fertilizer is essentially a tax on food. Russia does not suffer in any way because of it. We still import the same amount of fertilizer into Canada, and farmers have to pay the surplus to the Government. There is also currently no program by the government to reimburse this tariff back into the farmers pockets. It is one of the reasons why your grocery prices are going up. If the cost of production goes up, so do the prices at the grocery stores.
While there isn’t much that we can do to stop the tariffs on chemical fertilizer in Canada, we can buy from local farmers who use regenerative methods of growing. EarthCows is a marketplace to buy and sell locally grown food, such as vegetables, dairy, meat, eggs. By buying (or selling) local food, you can help reinvest into your community, decentralize the way in which you purchase groceries, and eventually the price of food will go down because there is more competition.