Prof. Graham Riches is the director of UBC’s School of Social Work and Family
Studies.
Many Canadians are planning for their annual Christmas feast. For others
it is just another day of hunger. As we approach the millennium it is time to
reflect on the growing issue of hunger in our society, and ask what should be
done.
A good place to start is Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security. Introduced
on World Food Day in 1998 as a response to the World Food Summit (Rome, 1996),
its commitment is to halve the number of the world’s hungry by 2015. Significantly,
it acknowledges the right to food and presents an international and domestic
agenda, including strategies directed at access to food; sustainable agriculture
and rural development; trade and food security; and private investment.
Community food security advocates have rightly criticized the plan for its
emphasis on further trade liberalization as the key to national and global food
security. Yet, its main problem is its lack of visibility. One year after its
introduction, who knows it exists?
Why is this so when food poverty in Canada remains such an acute and long-standing
human rights issue?
Increasing food bank usage, strong demand for school meal programs, malnutrition
among seniors and the plight of prairie farmers are hardly indicative of a food
secure society, nor one which tops the UN Human Development Index. What has
gone wrong?
The most critical issue is that we have lost sight of the real meaning of
food. Today it is just another economic commodity subject to the laws of the
global marketplace where the bottom line is corporate profitability.
Transnational corporations now control the food agenda, its production, trade,
and distribution. Expanded trade liberalisation, the key focus of the recent
WTO meetings in Seattle, will only enhance the dominance of the global food
export/import model and its accompanying environmental, health and social costs
associated with industrial agriculture.
What guarantees are there that food security in the South and North will be
enhanced? What role will there be for food self-sufficiency and sustainable
agriculture?
This commodification of food makes us forget that food is the basis of diet,
nutrition and health, and of life itself. It is also a social and cultural good,
vital to our sense of individual, family and community well-being.
We are what we eat though it is doubtful whether many of us know anymore what
we are eating (or where our food comes from). And while the market treats us
as food consumers, which gives us a degree of choice, our rights as food citizens
are being denied.
Food democracy is under attack. Farmers no longer control the food they produce,
and too many Canadians cannot afford to feed themselves or their families. Indeed,
they must rely on charitable relief.
The situation is not uniquely Canadian. Food poverty remains a chronic issue
in the South and a growing problem in the US and Europe.
Global hunger of course is not a new issue, nor is the problem of food poverty
in Canada. Food banks have been with us since 1981 when the first one was established
in Edmonton.
Today there are 698 food banks across the country and in March, 1999, 790,000
people used them. In the same month B.C.’s 87 food banks fed 71,000 people.
What started as an emergency, short-term response to the severity of the recession
of the early 1980s has resulted in food banks becoming a secondary tier of our
welfare system, a social safety net that no longer meets the needs of vulnerable
people.
Food banks cannot guarantee an adequate supply of nutritious foods. They strictly
ration their handouts and turn people away. International studies demonstrate
they are not an effective response to hunger.
To address the problem of hunger we need to recognize that since the early
1980s governments of all political stripes in Canada have implemented social
spending policies which refused to acknowledge the right to food and adequate
benefits.
In so doing they have failed to comply with their international obligations
as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International
Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights which asserts the right to
food. Canada has also committed itself to a range of international conventions
and global conferences which likewise affirm this right.
Yet, in terms of welfare policy, governments have proceeded as if they were
unaware of their obligations to respect, protect and advance the human right
to food.
Unless or until we recognize this point, food poverty will continue to grow
in Canada and Canada’s Action Plan for Food Security will remain invisible and
the policies and debates it raises will be unaddressed.
