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Canada is a net exporter of food and agricultural products, which last year hit a record high of $34.6 billion.

It's the world's second largest exporter of wheat, after the United States, and has surpluses in wheat, meat and dairy that far outweigh our deficits in fruits, vegetables and coffee, and other crops not easily grown in a colder climate.

Farm cash receipts rose to a record $40.5 billion last year on higher grain prices.

Overall, more than 70 per cent of what Canadians eat is produced at home, including most meat and dairy products, partly due to supply management practices that limit import competition for poultry, dairy and eggs.

Bread and cereal products are also largely supplied by Canadian farmers and food processors.

Food price inflation in Canada has risen only 1.2 per cent in the past year, compared to 5.9 per cent in the United States and 7.1 per cent in the European Union.

Countries in Asia with rice-based diets are experiencing the fastest increase in food costs as the price of rice doubled early this year. In China, food prices are up 22 per cent, largely due to blue ear disease in the swine population.

Yes, less meat means less animals raised for food.

But farm animals would be replaced by an increase in wildlife on the land no longer needed for agriculture. Much of this land could be returned to wilderness. While some natural grazing animals like Buffalo emit methane, it is more than offset by the carbon sequestered in the soil and plants that make up a healthy grassland wilderness.

Glad to see dairy lumped in with meat as major contributor to global warming. Even organic, grass-fed dairy is not a solution for tons of reasons, including the fact that grassfed cows emit 4 times as much methane as grain-fed cows.

I disagree that switching from red meat to fish is a good idea, since geophysicists Eshel & Martin published a U. of Chicago study in 2006 reporting that a fish-based diet is as bad as a red meat-based diet. The commercial ocean fishing industry emits ton of CO2 in fossil fuels, and salmon farms are extremely inefficient.

As others have pointed out, the article incorrectly compared automobile emissions to food emissions.

It also did not compare full lifecycle emissions from the operation, manufacturing and storage of automobiles.

Emissions during the manufacture of an automobile are typically equal to around 20% of the operating emissions.

Each automobile requires road space to operate and at least 3 parking spaces; one at home; one at work and one at shopping. If the spaces are in a parkade, significant emissions occur in the construction. If the spaces are surface lots, they decrease the land that can be used by vegetation to sequester.

Road and bridge construction causes significant GHG emissions as well.

The study is flawed because it counts CO2 equivalents of methane and nitrous oxide which have an atmospheric lifetime of only 10-15 and 120 years respectively while CO2 has a lifetime of several tens of thousands of years.

This means that after rime the 8.1 tons of CO2 equivalent from meat and dairy farming will decrease while the 4.4 tons of CO2 generated from your average car will still be the same for tens of thousands of years.

Of course it still isnt good that meat and dairy farming polutes but one must take into account the time factor in such a study before comparing it to transport as when you look at this some will think we should rather be careful of the farming then the transport.

Conclusion: Transport is far worse then farming even though on the short term it looks like the opposite.

There seems to be a decline in cooking, and more of a reliance on pre made mixes, and products. I have actually amazed my friends by making Mac'n'cheese from scratch, in the same amount of time they can make a box. Plus it's all real ingredients, and no chemical additives.

This really hit home the other day when a couple I know said they could not eat food bought from the farmers market of co-op. It was too expensive. A couple questions later, it was obvious that was because they did not cook anything that didn't come in a box pre made. The concept of making pancakes from scratch, and not a mix boggled their minds.

That's why I think it's an issue of learning to cook. If you know how to cook, flexibly, then you can eat local, in season foods. If you spend your life relying on box mixes, then that will seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

There is a green way to eat that trumps everything else -- rescuing slightly imperfect food from being thrown away.

No need to worry about local or organic as environmental considerations when you are buying (or finding) fruits and vegetables that are about be thrown away. Just today, I bought 6 red grapefruits for one dollar. Six! A little dry on the outside, but nice and juicy on the inside.

A 2004 study, from the University of Arizona, found that almost half of all food ready for harvest never gets eaten.

One trick is to be creative: bruised apples can be turned into delicious applesauce, and veggies that are past their prime make fine ingredients for a big soup.

You will also save tons of money.

Check out: Minimizing Waste: Eating for the Earth

You also need to consider the type of food. For example a locally-produced pork chop is likely more energy and land intensive than importing lentils. It takes a lot of land (and therefore energy) to grow the feed crops to fatten animals.

BTW. One problem with trucks is the space they take up on highways. Perhaps we would need less highways or narrower ones if everyone ate local.

A first harvest takes three years from the initial planting.
There's no difference in maturity or tenderness between fat and thin spears.
White asparagus results from heavy mulch laid over the plants, depriving them of light. The same plant can produce white or green spears.
In the Netherlands, the first harvesting coincides with Father's Day, when some restaurants offer all-asparagus menus and hand out asparagus-themed neckties.
It tastes best the day it's cut.
– from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle

Earlier this month, state media reported that cancer became China's top killer last year, and put the blame on pollution, heavy use of additives to make animals grow faster, and pesticides.

Aside from garlic and peas, there's also ginger, tomatoes, water chestnuts, the edible root burdock, apples, oranges, exotic fruits like loquat or pomelo, fish, seafood, cereals, fruit juices, nuts, tea and candy. The only meat imported is canned pork and sausage casings.

Over the past year, the data show that China has consistently had the most shipment rejections of any country. Last month, China had 257 rejections. The next highest were Mexico and India, with 140 and 122, respectively.

The rejections – captured even though a mere 1 per cent of all shipments are inspected in the U.S. – were for everything from filthy salted bean cubes to unsafe colourants in jujubes, from dangerous additives, such as dulcin (a sweetener believed to be carcinogenic) in dried fruit and nitrofuran (an antibiotic banned in Canada) in breaded shrimp, to banned drugs in all sorts of fish.

Vic Carnevale points to the piled-up cases of garlic. On the right side they're from Mexico. On the left, from China. "Those are $55 a case," Carnevale, president of Veg-Pak Product Ltd., a vegetable wholesaler at the terminal, says of the Mexican garlic. Then he points to the left. "Those? $13."

"See those (Chinese) peas?" he continues, dodging hurried buyers in the aisle. "Ten dollars a case. In Canada you couldn't do it for that price if everybody worked for free!"

Every year Carnevale gets more and more fresh produce from China. In the span of just a few years, China has become one of the world's biggest exporters of food. It has become the leading exporter of fruits and vegetables, food additives and ingredients.

"They're coming on stronger and stronger," Carnevale says. "They're going to take over."

It seems that China can't grow enough soybeans to feed itself as internal demand for pork, poultry and beef increases, and the main source of soybean imports, the US, is getting priced out of the market as the farmers all switch to corn, so it has turned to Brazil where land is cheap and soybeans still plentiful.

Frances suggests overpopulation is the root of the problem.

I disagree. Baring a natural disaster, there is nothing we can ethically do to reduce human numbers quickly. Gradual reduction is possible, but do we have time?

What matters more is not the number of people but how they live. For positive change to happen we need two things, education and awareness (Treehugger) and regulation. We need to get rid of agricultural subsidies, make things like rainforest destruction and shark finning illegal, and offer incentives for environmentally-friendly actions.

The other thing that seems to matter is wealth. Most people will live a more environmentally damaging lifestyle if they have more money to spend. As China gets wealthier, they are eating more meat, and importing soy from destroyed rainforest to feed the animals. While Africa remains poor and has a much lesser impact.

Our wealthier world needs more awareness and more positive regulation. And soon.