The provincial government Thursday announced the establishment of a task force to improve the competitiveness of B.C. agriculture in the face of tariffs and other challenges.

B.C.'s Agriculture Minister Lana Popham announced the task force at the provincial legislature with Danielle Synotte, executive director of BC Agriculture Council, and James Donaldson, CEO of B.C. Food and Beverage. The duo will serve as co-chairs along with Popham's deputy minister, Michelle Koski.

Popham said the task force will provide government with recommendations on topics such as access to water, land, competitiveness and investment.

"This will not be a long, drawn-out process that ends with a binder that is put up on a shelf," Popham said, adding the task force is expected to report back within 10 months.

Popham said industry has been asking for a better, collective approach and this task force responds to that.

"Our goal is to build and grow a stronger, more resilient and secure B.C. agriculture and food systems, ultimately improving food supply and food security for all of British Columbians, while also building stable markets globally." 

The task force starts its work amidst challenging times for food producers. They include extreme weather events destroying entire harvests and threatening animal herds; rising costs in the face of diminishing returns for their products; questions about the long-term availability of land; and trade issues, none more important than the pending possibility of American tariffs followed by Canadian counter-tariffs.

Looming behind these issues is the broader question of food security. The trade dispute has given the issue further urgency as various voices have encouraged British Columbians to buy B.C. or Canadian produced food as an expression of patriotism.

"It has never been so important to buy B.C. and to support our food economy," Popham said during her opening remarks. 

But for British Columbians to vote with their pocketbooks, Popham acknowledged more work needs to be done. According to research from Metro Vancouver published in 2020, international imports accounted for 39 per cent of B.C.'s food supplies. About 34 per cent came from B.C., the rest from other provinces.   According to research from the University of British Columbia, U.S. states supply 67 percent of Canada91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ™s vegetable imports and 36 percent of Canada91ÂãÁÄÊÓƵ™s fruit imports.

According to UBC, 81 per cent of spinach, 70 per cent of lettuce and 75 per cent of onions came from the U.S. in 2022. Ninety-two per cent of strawberries were imported from the US and Mexico in 2022, and 97 per cent for avocados were imported from Mexico in 2022.

"We thought we had a stable partner with the United States," Popham said. "That's proven to be wrong and so we need to find different measures to move our goods, but that also includes provinces and territories right here in our country." 

Conservative Ian Paton, MLA for Delta South, said it is frustrating to see another task force come into existence when the B.C. NDP has had eight years to deal with some of those issues. 

"Having said that, I'm always happy to see government working with the farming community and to come up with ideas to improve issues with water, with (food) processing and all these different things that need to be dealt with." 

He added that farmers asking for a few basic things.

"They are asking for some sort of tax relief, carbon tax relief, they are asking for short-term, no-interest loans," Paton said. "There's got to be ways that we, the government, can act right now to help out farmers that are in a tough go right at the moment." 

Agriculture has also become a lens through which provinces are seeing the issue of inter-provincial trade barriers, a point that re-appeared in this week's Speech from the Throne.

"British Columbia has led the way on this front for years, most recently by securing a deal for our wineries to sell directly to customers in Alberta," it reads. "Discussions are also underway with Alberta for greater co-operation and alignment on a range of issues...it should not be easier to buy and sell with Washington State than with our Canadian friends and neighbours."

But breaking down these barriers won't be easy where quotas for products such as milk, eggs and poultry, aim to give farmers guaranteed returns. Some critics, however, have argued quotas inflate prices for consumers, a point of considerable debate.

Popham Wednesday defended supply management when talking about B.C.'s dairy farmers within the context of local sourcing. 

"I also would like to mention that there could be no better moment right now than to support supply management," she said. "Here in British Columbia, you can go to any retailer and find milk and eggs produced in British Columbia and that is show the strength of our supply management system," she said. 

When asked how her support for supply management can be reconciled with her government's stated willingness to reduce trade barriers, Popham said supply management is a national system.

"The cost of production is decided on a national level," she said. 

Paton, a former dairy farmer himself, also broke a lance for the system while acknowledging other agriculture-related barriers require review. 

"I think supply management is pretty solid right across the country," he said.