Escaping Old Ideas: Lament for a Canadian Food Policy (original) (raw)

Bringing home the right to food in Canada: challenges and possibilities for achieving food security

Public health nutrition, 2007

We offer a critique of Canada's approach to domestic food security with respect to international agreements, justiciability and case law, the breakdown of the public safety net, the institutionalisation of charitable approaches to food insecurity, and the need for 'joined-up' food and nutrition policies. We examined Canada's commitments to the right to food, as well as Canadian policies, case law and social trends, in order to assess Canada's performance with respect to the human right to food. We found that while Canada has been a leader in signing international human rights agreements, including those relating to the right to food, domestic action has lagged and food insecurity increased. We provide recommendations for policy changes that could deal with complex issues of state accountability, social safety nets and vulnerable populations, and joined-up policy frameworks that could help realise the right to adequate food in Canada and other developed nations.

Serving Us Rights: Securing the Right to Food in Canada

2021

In recent decades, Canada has consistently failed to uphold basic human rights, including the right to food. This has caused widespread and persistent household food insecurity (HFI) which has become a serious, albeit overlooked, public health concern. Working from a political economic perspective, this article situates HFI within the context of the poverty resulting from neoliberal “rollbacks” to the welfare state. The majority of community and policy responses to HFI focus on the production or redistribution of food, which misses the underlying issue of inadequate income. These responses may even perpetuate food insecurity by offloading safety net functions onto corporations and communities that cannot compensate for welfare programs. In order to strengthen income-based responses to food insecurity, we recommend policy interventions under the “right to food” framework, which places primary responsibility on the state. But unlike traditionally legal conceptions of the right to food...

Breadlines, victory gardens, or human rights?: Examining food insecurity discourses in Canada

Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation

Long before the exacerbating effects of COVID-19, household food insecurity (HFI) has been a persistent yet hidden problem in wealthy nations such as Canada, where it has been perpetuated in part through dominant discourses and practices. In this critique of HFI-related frameworks, we suggest that discourses organized around the production and (re)distribution of food, rather than income inequality, have misdirected household food insecurity reduction activities away from the central issue of poverty, even inadvertently enabling the ongoing neoliberal “rollback” of safety net functions. Unlike most scholarship that focuses on the politics of food systems, or health research that insufficiently politicizes poverty, this analysis emphasizes the role of politics in income discourses. In spite of their contradictions, food-provisioning- and income-based discourses are potentially complementary in their shared recognition of the right to food. Operating from the perspective of political ...

Food security and health in Canada: Imaginaries, exclusions and possibilities

Canadian Geographies / Géographies canadiennes, 2014

In recent years, food crises have heightened awareness of food security vulnerabilities even in rich nations. However, the extent to which various issues related to food security (such as consistent access to nutritious food in conditions which maintain human dignity) have been incorporated into Canadian policy and practice is not well documented. This article draws on a number of sources—including policy documents and media reports—to explore how food security is being conceptualized in Canada, particularly at the national level. The article chronicles changes in food security discourse over time, suggesting that recognition of food security as a “Canadian” problem has been partial and contested, and reflects persistent geographic imaginaries of Canada (e.g., as a land of agricultural abundance) and unrelenting social and cultural exclusions (e.g., of Canada's Aboriginal people).

Reframing food as a commons in Canada

Canadian Food Studies / La Revue canadienne des études sur l'alimentation

This paper interrogates the role of the dominant narrative of “food-as-commodity” in framing food systems policy in Canada. Human values shape policies, usually privileging those policies that are aligned with dominant values and neglecting others that confront dominant values. In that sense, valuing food as a commodity privileges specific market-based policy goals, regulations, and public subsidies that aim to enlarge market coverage. This prioritizes both corporate profit over societies´ common good and private enclosures of commons resources over universal access to food for all. Conversely, the normative shift this paper proposes—valuing and governing food as a commons—could enable socio-ecologically based policy goals and regulations, and redirect public subsidies to support customary and contemporary practices that produce and distribute food differently. Such a normative shift, scholars have argued, is a prerequisite for developing legal frameworks that lead to more and bette...

Building Unlikely Alliances Around Food Sovereignty in Canada

Studies in Political Economy, 2012

Theory This paper seeks to speak to two theoretical conversations. The first is about the political economy of Canada's food system and the shape of neoliberalism in this context. The second is about the possibilities of building an alternative governance framework rooted in the principle of food sovereignty. On this latter question, we draw on-and add further definition to-the concept of counterhegemony as employed by neo-Gramscians.

A people-centred approach to food policy making: Lessons from Canada's People's Food Policy project

This paper reflects on a major public engagement process that was established to develop a Pan-Canadian food policy based on the principles of food sovereignty. We present an account of the People’s Food Policy (PFP) as a social and political experiment that mobilized a diversity of civil society networks and Indigenous people to establish transformative spaces and processes for (re)claiming control of the food system. We argue that the PFP process was a successful, yet imperfect model of a people-centred, counter-hegemonic policy-making process enacted through food movement networks that provided important lessons for advancing public participation in deci- sion making and action.