Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My question today is for the Minister of ITI on agriculture and homegrown harvesters. As we draw towards our home growing season and the season of federal Nutrition North competition, this program on principle is a very good one to the smaller remote communities; however, subsidizing only one side. My question is: what is the Department of ITI doing to provide agricultural home growers support for the upcoming season? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Masi. Minister of Industry, Tourism and Investment.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I thank the Member for the question on Growing Forward 2, because this is an important initiative that the Government of the Northwest Territories has been working on in collaboration with the federal government on bringing agriculture to the Northwest Territories. For the past five years, we have spent approximately $6 million on this program in the Northwest Territories and invested it directly into NWT agriculture. I thank him for that.
In the upcoming season, I suspect that I would have to get that directly from the department, but I am assuming that it is probably relevant to what we did last year in all of the communities. In the Sahtu region in particular, we have done a number of initiatives in the last year. We invested approximately $117,000 in the Member's region under Growing Forward 2. We have made investments to new and expanded infrastructure at the Sahtu Gardens and the McNeely Nursery in Fort Good Hope. We have done summer maintenance programs in the community gardens of Deline, Tulita, and Fort Good Hope, as well. We have also, last year, taken the opportunity to send a number of residents in the Sahtu to Hay River and Yellowknife to learn more about agriculture on some training and a conference that we had here in Yellowknife. I suspect that moving forward in this coming year will be very similar to that. Thank you Mr. Speaker.
I welcome those answers. They are all positive. They are good. They provide positive dialogue to the home growers who are listening here. In some cases, in one community, the Nutrition North program is advertised stating it is subsidized at $2.90 per kilogram. Is there some form of subsidy that could go towards the actual poundage of vegetables or homegrown products there for the people?
Nutrition North is a federal program to increase access to perishable nutritious food across the Northwest Territories and help reduce the cost. Its objective actually lines up quite a bit with the agriculture strategies of the Northwest Territories. Ideally, we want to get the agriculture in the Northwest Territories to a point where we wouldn't need to have Nutrition North to help subsidize the cost of food in the NWT, but we are not there yet. We will have to continue to work with our federal partners and Nutrition North and our commercial producers in the Northwest Territories on how we can work on these programs. I will continue to do that as the Minister of ITI.
My last question is: will the Minister support a gathering to discuss the new agricultural strategy and how could that work in harmony with some of the key stakeholders in the region? It is a small area, so we can pretty much guarantee the names and provide the names to the individuals who are taking an active investment into that home grower program of their own.
As I made a comment in my earlier statement, we brought a number of Sahtu residents to Yellowknife in particular last year for an agriculture conference; this is some of the stuff that we heard there that we put in towards our agriculture strategy. I don't think we need to have another conference already to do that. If the Member from the Sahtu would like us to work closely with the residents of the Sahtu, we can have our superintendent reach out to him and see how we can facilitate that.
Masi. Oral questions. Member for Tu Nedhe-Wiilideh.
