Inuit protest food prices that leave some hungry
By Bob Weber, Canadian Press, June 9, 2012
(Also, see article further below on UN examination of food policy in Canada. “Canada is flouting its international human-rights obligations by ignoring hunger within its own borders.”)
A head of cabbage for $20. Fifteen bucks for a small bag of apples. A case of ginger ale for $82. Fed up and frustrated by sky-high food prices and concerned over wide-spread hunger in their communities, thousands of Inuit have spent weeks posting pictures and price tags from their local grocery stores to a Face-book page called Feed My Family, (http://www.facebook.com/groups/239422122837039/).
That site is now the nucleus of an unprecedented protest across Nunavut organized for today to draw attention to food prices that would shock southerners.
“This is traditionally not the Inuit way, I understand that,” said Lee-see Papatsie, the 44-year-old Iqaluit mother of four who’s organizing the event. “But we’re trying to get Nunavummiut to step forward and say ‘Hey, food is too expensive.”‘ Papatsie wants Inuit in every com-munity in Nunavut to stand together outside their local grocery store this afternoon. A similar event is being organized in Ottawa.
Weeks after the federal government dismissed concerns from a United Nations representative about food insecurity in Canada’s North, turn-out at the protest could be impressive. More than 10,000 people have joined the Feed My Family site – more than a third of Nunavut’s entire population.
“Food insecurity is so prevalent,” said Nunavut’s territorial nutritionist, Jennifer Wakegijig, who tabled a report on the issue this week in the Nunavut legislature.
It found nearly three-quarters of Inuit preschoolers live in food-insecure homes. Half of youths 11 to 15 years old sometimes go to bed hungry. Two-thirds of Inuit parents also told a McGill University survey that they sometimes ran out of food and couldn’t afford more.
“Every Inuit in Nunavut knows someone in their family or in their community that is hungry that day,” said Papatsie.
The roots of the problem are deep and tangled. Cost is one of them. As Ron Elliott, the MLA for the High Arctic communities of Resolute, Grise Fiord and Arctic Bay said, “We’re at the end of the food chain here.” He tells of one southern Inuit family that tried to send food north to relatives. Shipping $200 worth of groceries cost $500.
Nunavut’s larder of “country food” – caribou, seals, fish and other animals – is there for the taking, but only if people can afford the snowmobiles, gas, rifles, ammunition and gear needed to travel safely. Elliott estimates hunting costs about $150 a day.
Canada’s national Inuit group, Inuit Tapirisat Kanatami, reports 42 per cent of Inuit say hunting is too expensive. And those being asked to bear those costs are among Canada’s poor-est. ITK says half of Inuit adults earn less than $20,000 a year.
But Inuit don’t always have the skills to make the best use of the resources they’ve got, Wakegijig acknowledges. “Even if that cabbage cost $2, there’s no guarantee the Inuit mother would buy it,” she said.
Meanwhile, Papatsie is just tired of paying $500 to $600 a week in groceries for herself, her husband and her one child still at home. “I just wanted to voice one simple message: food costs are too high in Nunavut.”
Ottawa shrugs off UN warning on hunger and nutrition
By Heather Scoffield, Globe and Mail, May. 16, 2012
The UN’s right-to-food envoy is raising the alarm about hunger and poor diets in Canada, but the federal government says he’s wasting his breath. The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, has just wrapped up an official 11-day investigation into food security in Canada.
He has concluded that Canada is flouting its international human-rights obligations by ignoring hunger within its own borders, even as 800,000 households here don’t have the wherewithal to ensure they can put proper food on the table. “What I’ve seen in Canada is a system that presents barriers for the poor to access nutritious diets and that tolerates increased inequalities between rich and poor, and aboriginal (and) non-aboriginal peoples,” Mr. De Schutter said.
He said he was particularly concerned about the large number of people living on social assistance who see their income drained away by housing, and can’t afford to provide an adequate diet for their families. “Here I have to say my concerns are extremely severe, and I don’t see why I should mince my words,” he said. “People are simply too poor to eat decently.”
He called for a national food strategy that would emphasize local food production, reform food subsidies for the North, ensure a living wage for low-income people, and pull together the disparate attempts to deal with hunger across the country.
Mr. De Schutter also criticized Ottawa for failing to make sure provinces spend their transfer payments on social services. And he said the federal government should be far stricter in its regulation of sodium, sugar and fat in the food Canadians buy.
Ottawa’s reaction has been blunt. “I think this is completely ridiculous,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said just before the envoy presented his report. “Canada is one of the wealthiest and most democratic countries in the world. We believe that the UN should focus on development … in countries where people are starving. We think it’s simply a waste of resources to come to Canada to give political lectures.”
Until Wednesday, Mr. De Schutter did not have any access to federal cabinet ministers to discuss his findings, making do with senior officials instead. Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq did finally agree to meet with him at the last minute — but mainly to promote the seal hunt. “The minister was increasingly frustrated that someone would write about food security in the North without going there,” Mr. Aglukkaq’s spokesman said in an email.
Mr. De Schutter travelled to cities across Canada, visited some reserves and met with aboriginal representatives, but did not get to the North. He makes no apologies for being “political” in his recommendations, and said he hopes the federal government is provoked into holding a serious conversation about how to improve poverty and food security in Canada.
The federal government has repeatedly dismissed appeals for national strategies to deal with poverty and housing. The Conservatives argue that those areas are better dealt with by the provinces, since they can take regional variations into account.
Indeed, several provinces have adopted poverty reduction strategies in the last few years. However, the NDP notes that during the last federal election campaign, the Conservatives promised a national farm and food strategy that would focus on buoying local farmers, opening up new markets and ensuring food safety.
Childhood hunger is a Canadian public health crisis
Op-ed by Elizabeth Lee Ford-Jones, The Globe and Mail, May 14 2012
When a crow went down with West Nile virus somewhere in Ontario, my phone would ring. Practicing as an infectious disease specialist at the time, I was alerted to early warnings about threats to the public’s health from infectious agents. Immediate response was expected – and provided – by our strong public health infrastructure.
But here at the children’s hospital where I now work, a group of us meet regularly, if informally, about another pressing public health threat – hunger. We live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But hunger is something that we at the hospital increasingly see among the families that bring their children to us for medical attention.
For 10 days beginning May 6, which marked the start of Hunger Awareness Week in Canada, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food is making a formal country mission visit to Canada. It’s the first-ever visit to a developed nation by Olivier de Schutter, a Belgian law professor who became special rapporteur in 2008.
As a signatory to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1976), Canada has a legal obligation to “respect, protect and fulfill the right to food.” It’s my hope that this visit – and the recommendations in the report that Prof. de Schutter will subsequently produce – will throw a spotlight on the disturbing truth that far too many Canadian children are hungry because their families lack access to adequate and nutritious food.
Food Secure Canada estimates that almost 2.5 million Canadians live without secure access to food. An infectious agent like West Nile poses an immediate threat as well as long-term health consequences (if almost exclusively in adults). Unquestionably, the consequences of hunger and food insecurity in childhood are similar.
Why are we concerned here? Many pediatricians with community practices tell us that finding the money to feed their children is the top problem faced by many parents they meet. We see children whose parents struggle with poverty. We admit proportionately more children from high poverty neighbourhoods to hospital than from other neighbourhoods, and the children from poorer neighbourhoods stay longer at the hospital.
We know that childhood hunger – which of course is linked to poverty – has long-term impacts on physical and mental health. For healthy growth and development, children need sufficient nutrients. Deficiencies of even small amounts during this important period can have long-term health consequences.
One thing we’re seeing in recent years is an upswing in cases of rickets, a condition still prevalent in developing countries but one that I thought would be corrected in Canada through the 1970s, when I trained in Montreal.
Rickets is preventable. It is primarily caused by a lack of sunlight and vitamin D, (including vitamin D supplementation with breast feeding), although a lack of calcium can also contribute to the condition, which causes bones to soften and become prone to deformity. Foods that contain vitamin D include fortified milk, as well as eggs, fish oils, margarine and some other foods. The children we see who have developed rickets are quite simply not getting adequate amounts of sunlight and nutritious food, including vitamin D supplementation with breast feeding.
As a recent report from Toronto’s medical officer of health states: “Children who live in food-insecure households are more likely to have growth and developmental problems, be susceptible to illness and perform poorly in school, compared to children who are food-secure.”
Adequate nutrition is also a key issue when it comes to mental health among youth. Psychiatrists speaking at the request of community youth in one of our priority neighbourhoods advised that the first two mental-health questions that should be asked of young people are: “How did you sleep last night?” and “Have you eaten today?”
We know that in the Greater Toronto Area, the use of food banks is increasing rapidly. A key reason is that housing costs are eating up a growing proportion of family income. Initiatives are under way to help physicians and other health care providers better link families to resources such as food banks and government services.
But while there is a perception that food banks – as well as programs like school and community meal programs, community gardens and kitchens – are providing the needed response to food needs, Canadian research challenges this notion.
The UN Special Rapporteur will present his preliminary findings on food security in Canada on May 16 in Ottawa. It’s my hope that this will put child hunger squarely on the political agenda in Canada – and galvanize action to eliminate it.
Specializing in social pediatrics, Dr. Elizabeth Lee Ford-Jones is an expert adviser with EvidenceNetwork.ca, project investigator at the Hospital for Sick Children and a professor in the department of pediatrics at the University of Toronto.
