In a situation the United Nations has called an international food crisis, prices are soaring for food staples such as corn, rice and grains. In Haiti, folks have been reduced to making mud patties with salt and oil sprinkled on, just to ward off hunger pangs.

Yet here were otherwise healthy trees capable of producing nutritious tender fruit being ripped from the ground.

With the looming closure of the CanGro cannery in St. Davids, the market for upwards of 150 growers of pear and peach varieties designed for canning has effectively been wiped out. CanGro will still sell its canned fruit brands such as Del Monte in our supermarkets, but the fruit inside the cans will now be grown in foreign countries where labour and other input costs are far less.

CanGro is a symptom of our short-sighted food policies that allow food products to be labelled as a product of Canada, even if they're produced half a world away. As long as 51 per cent of production costs take place here, federal rules say consumers can be duped into believing they're buying products that support local farms.

Each year, fewer and fewer farms remain in Ontario. Farmers struggle to break even because for the last 30 years or so we've had policies that encourage artificially low food prices.

Just as our DVD players and kitchen utensils are made in China now, we're increasingly relying on foreign farmers to put food on our tables.

The international food crisis should be a wake-up call for all of us that by allowing our domestic farm sector to whither, we're putting our food security at risk. Brazil and India have already slammed the door shut on exports of some types of rice, to protect their domestic food supply and control price increases.

Don't blame supermarkets who sell foreign-produced food: they're simply in the business of giving us what we want. If we demand and buy locally produced food, stores will stock it -- pure and simple.

Consumers must make a choice. Either they're willing to pay a few cents more for food products produced here, or they're willing to be vulnerable to potential food shortages down the road. If the day ever comes when we're reduced to making mud patties to at least have something in our empty bellies, we'll rue the day we let our farms die.