What Can Agricultural Land Use Planning Contribute to Food Production and Food Policy?

Food Security and Food Sovereignty are two of the most important issues facing Food Policy. Maintaining productive farmland and sustainable farms as well as providing adequate volumes of foodstuffs have led to measures to protect farmland and farm activities in many countries. These include land use planning with agricultural zones and in some jurisdictions legislation to ‘protect’ agriculture in agricultural reserves. Are these tools adequate to maintain sustainable agricultures particularly around major urban and metropolitan centers. Agricultural zones and agricultural reserves in many jurisdictions have continued to experience removal of farmland in order to permit different types of urban development (e.g. residential development and industrial parks). An emerging response to this has been the integration of strategic development planning for agriculture in certain jurisdictions (e.g. the province of Quebec (Canada)), because this approach can integrate the necessary parameters to enable the development of sustainable agricultures, including how to respond to opportunities as well as adapting to emerging stressors. This approach also ideally requires the integration of farmers and their families as actors and participants in the strategic development planning process.