This week:

• Agricultural policy expert Peter Andre speaks with Green Life reporter Peter Stock about some of the challenges of small scale farming, such as why many government agricultural policies are sorely out of step with the market realities, why you can’t buy a free range chicken in Quebec, and why the controversial and uniquely Canadian Milk Marketing Board makes sense.
• Susan Walsh, Executive Director of USC Canada, speaks with host Jordan Poppenk at Toronto’s Seedy Saturday seed diversity event. Susan takes a different perspective, spelling out holistic reasons why small scale farming is essential in Canada and the global south.

The headlines in brief:

• The Ontario budget includes a measure to apply provincial sales tax to energy for the first time as a way of making up the deficit.
• The University of Winnipeg has become the first Canadian campus to ban the sale of bottled water.
• The Polaris Institute has announced that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has been underreporting problems it finds in bottled water.
• The federal government has restored funding to the United Nations Water Program, after cutting it off earlier this year.
• Italy and Switzerland have decided to re-draw national borders to account for melting Alpine glaciers.
• The House of Representatives has voted to grant wilderness status to two million acres of public land in the United States.

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- Photo credit: Arthur Chapman -