Conference Board adds to growing calls for national food strategy

The Carleton Initiative for Parliamentary and Diplomatic Engagement hosted a lively debate on International Human Rights Day:  Does Canada Need a National Food Policy.  Diana Bronson from FSC was on a panel with Michael Bloom from the Conference Board of Canada, Ron Bennett from the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, Terry Audla from Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK). Check out the coverage in the Ottawa Citizen below. We may not all agree on the details, but we all agree that we need a national policy or strategy on food!

(Photo credit: Justin Tang.) More pictures here.

OTTAWA, December 10, 2013 — At a time when Canadians waste an estimated $27 billion of food every year, but 70 per cent of preschoolers in Nunavut don’t always have enough to eat, a growing chorus is calling for a national strategy on food.

That could include everything from a year-round nutrition program in every school — something most other developed countries have — to ramping up Canadian agriculture to make the country a world powerhouse. Those ideas are from the Conference Board of Canada, which created a Centre for Food in Canada four years ago and is set to release its own national food strategy early next year. Michael Bloom of the Conference Board was among panellists at a Carleton University sponsored conference Tuesday discussing whether Canada needs a national food policy.

The Conference Board is not the only organization talking about federal food policy and even creating its own blueprint of such a policy. The advocacy group Food Secure Canada published a document called Resetting the Table in 2011 which it said addresses the urgent need for a national food policy in Canada.

“Close to two and a half million Canadians are food insecure. Farmers and fishers are going out of business, our natural environment is being pushed to the limit, a quarter of Canadians are considered obese, and we are the only G8 country without a nationally-funded school meal program. The status quo is no longer an option,” reads the document.

Diana Bronson, chief executive of Food Secure Canada, told the panel there is both burgeoning interest in food and nutrition among Canadians and growing concern about poor health related to food and unequal access to it. Nearly four million Canadians live in “food insecure” homes, she said, and that number is three times higher among aboriginal Canadians.

“We have an enormous opportunity in this country.”

The Canadian Federation of Agriculture has also called for a national food strategy that recognizes food is a basic human right, that includes a sustainable food production system that is resilient to climate change and that ensures food is accessible to Canadians.

Terry Audla, president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, said access to nutritious food is a very real crisis for Inuit who eat less “country food”, which they harvest, and more food from the south, which is increasingly out of many peoples’ financial reach. Weekly groceries cost up to $460 for a family in Nunavut, compared with $226 in the rest of the country. Median salaries, by comparison, he said are $16,000 in Nunavut compared with $25,000 in the rest of the country.

Bloom of the Conference Board said he doesn’t believe a national food policy should necessarily be strictly overseen by government. He believes there is also a place for business involvement.

Despite the growing chorus calling for more co-ordination around the availability, understanding of, production and sale of food, there is little sign it is a priority of the federal government.

When the UN’s special rapporteur for food Olivier De Schutter visited Canada last year to look at access to food among Canadians, he warned that a large number of Canadians are “unacceptably too poor to feed themselves decently” and that inequality is getting worse. De Schutter said he was in Canada to launch a conversation about a national food strategy, something Tuesday’s panel echoed.

At the time, then Immigration Minister Jason Kenney criticized De Schutter for wasting his organization’s money visiting a developed country that provides food aid to other parts of the world.

De Schutter said the right to food is about politics. “It’s a matter of principle and it’s a matter of political will. I think these comments are symptomatic of the very problem that it is my duty to address,” he said.

Article originally published in the Ottawa Citizen: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/business/Conference+Board+adds+growing+call...