UN to investigate Canada's broken food system

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Stephanie Hayward, student life co-ordinator with the ACC Student's Association, organizes the store of can goods at the post-secondary school's food bank. (BRUCE BUMSTEAD / BRANDON SUN ARCHIVES)

As the blockbuster film the Hunger Games set a spring opening weekend record of $155 million in ticket sales, HungerCount was releasing its own precedent-setting numbers.

Put out every year by Food Banks Canada, this national survey highlights that food bank use has soared by 28 per cent in the past three years, with more than 850,000 Canadians making use of a food bank in a typical month. Unfortunately, this is the tip of the iceberg of what is wrong with the Canadian food system.

More than two million Canadians regularly don't have enough to eat, people on government income support and those earning minimum wage are often forced to choose between food and rent, and rates of food insecurity in some northern communities reaches an astounding 79 per cent.

At the same time, farmers and fishers are going out of business, a quarter of Canadians are considered obese, and the industrial food production system is one of the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

Our food system is broken, and the United Nations has noticed.

The United Nations is sending Olivier de Schutter, the special rapporteur on the right to food, to Canada to look into whether the right to food is being respected.

The Government of Canada has legally binding obligations under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which we signed in 1976.

From May 5 to 16, de Schutter will travel across the country meeting with government officials, civil society and aboriginal peoples. It is his first visit to an OECD country.

What de Schutter will find is a food system gone seriously awry, and with no master plan.

Canada urgently needs a national food policy. In the last election, all federal parties called for either a national food policy or strategy. Food-related policy is administered ad hoc in departmental silos, rather than given the careful attention it deserves. An integrated national food policy would make it possible to take a comprehensive look at our food system and make decisions that take into account multiple factors, such as health, poverty, domestic and international markets, regional development needs, the environment and much more.

Done well, this could save money in health care spending. As momentum builds in Canada towards such an integrated approach, the question of participation is key.

The People's Food Policy, a citizen-led initiative to develop a national food policy, is Canada's best example of a participatory food policy process. Based on several years of grassroots work by more than 3,500 people, the People's Food Policy is also the most comprehensive food policy being advanced in Canada today. It includes policy analysis and recommendations on issues such as health, agriculture, the environment, Indigenous food sovereignty, science and technology, fisheries, international food policy, rural, remote and urban food issues and governance. The solutions-oriented recommendations are based on decades of innovative and successful work by the food movement -- people and organizations working on the front lines connecting institutions with locally and sustainably grown food, supporting urban gardens, running school nutrition programs and managing community kitchens.

If tackled collectively, recommendations included in the People's Food Policy would go a long way towards ensuring the right to food for all. This is not a question of lifestyle or personal choice, and even less a "game." Rather, we can expect de Schutter to point out at the end of his mission it's a matter of fundamental human rights, and something all of us should be concerned with.

Diana Bronson is executive director of Food Secure Canada, a national membership-based organization working towards zero hunger, healthy and safe food and sustainable food systems. www.foodsecurecanada.org

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 5, 2012 J11