If you’ve been to the supermarket recently, you know food prices are high. Politicians looking for a fix are considering government-run grocery stores.
Toronto city council recently voted to approve a public grocery store pilot, a policy made famous by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Newly elected federal NDP leader Avi Lewis’s platform also included public supermarkets.
The idea of a government-run store might seem like an appealing political response and a simple solution. Some argue the government’s buying power could secure lower food prices.
But the idea is just that: simple. It assumes the problem is merely retail margins, ignoring many other factors that determine food prices, like what’s available for sale, how it gets there, where it’s grown, who grows it and all the other stages of production.
The infrastructure behind your produce
Instead of looking only to public supermarkets, governments need to employ a food-systems perspective and look for solutions in time-tested ways — ways that governments have already invested in infrastructure commons. One such example is the Ontario Food Terminal.
The terminal is situated north of Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway in the inner suburb of Etobicoke. It’s one of the largest wholesale food terminals in North America and the only such public facility in Canada.
As a wholesale market, it serves dealers, wholesalers and farmers who sell fresh fruits and vegetables to clients, including restaurants, supermarkets, food banks and other organizations.
If you enjoy fresh fruits and vegetables in the Toronto area — whether from a corner fruit stand, a grocer or a supermarket that isn’t a major chain or franchise — you likely consume food that has passed through the terminal.
This public infrastructure supports a variety of food businesses that would otherwise struggle to compete with the buying power of major supermarket chains.
Read more: Public grocery stores won’t fix Canada’s food affordability crisis
Public investment built the food system
It’s easy to overlook the key role the government has played in making the food terminal possible.
After the Second World War, when farmers struggled to sell their crops at prices that could support their livelihoods, the Ontario government recognized a role for itself in the food system. What followed was nearly a decade of preparatory work by a professional civil service.
This effort was funded by taxpayer dollars and involved a variety of institution-building tasks. These included drafting the Ontario Food Terminal Act, establishing a board to operate the facility, selecting an appropriate location and designing the site. Experts helped select land that could connect to both rail lines and the expanding North American highway network, which was also the result of government investments.
A civil servant named George Frank Perkin was the visionary behind this project, working under a Conservative government that strongly supported the idea. The Ontario Food Terminal Board secured funding in the form of a bond from Ontario Hydro’s pension fund to complete the project.
Today, the terminal is financially self-sufficient, covering its operating costs through rents and fees charged to the businesses that use its infrastructure. However, the public investment that established it — such as legislation, civil service and institutional design — laid the groundwork for everything that followed.
It remains a lasting example of how government can influence a food system without operating a single store.
Lower prices start long before the checkout
Our research on urban food systems shows that public infrastructure investment supports food access across Toronto and Ontario. More than 70 years later, the terminal still fulfils its original goal of connecting Ontario farmers with city buyers while also functioning as a marketplace for produce from around the world.
When we tracked fruit and vegetable prices through the terminal to small independent retailers, we found them selling for significantly less than at major chain supermarkets. Many common produce items were 20 to 40 per cent cheaper at independent green grocers than at large chains — savings that are critical, as 25.5 per cent of Canadians currently face food insecurity.
A public supermarket makes an eye-catching headline. However, if we want lasting, meaningful change in food prices and food security, we need to consider the entire system rather than a narrow focus on downstream retail.
Infrastructure like the terminal demonstrates that the supply chains and systems that deliver food to the city influence what we buy, who we buy from and the cost.
There are many more policy levers for the government beyond opening a public grocery store. We can build more wholesale markets like the terminal in other jurisdictions, as well as public cold-storage and processing hubs to enable small- and mid-scale farms and food businesses to compete in a highly consolidated food sector.
Governments can create a public market action plan, like the City of Toronto recently established, and invest in infrastructure that links producers to the communities most at risk of food insecurity.
These might not be simple solutions, but they do prioritize the public good more holistically than the idea of a government-run supermarket.
Sarah Elton receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Meighen Family Foundation.
Aparna Raghu Menon receives doctoral funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Burstow Award Foundation.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
