Why food banks won't solve food insecurity

CHARITY DOESN'T ADDRESS ROOT CAUSE, GROUP SAYS

When it comes to responding to food insecurity, charity is the Canadian way. The food may be eaten and appreciated by those who receive it, the giving spirit behind the donations admirable. But as research shows, people aren't any more food secure for it.

“It's a beautiful Canadian value that is represented through this huge network of ad hoc food charity programs, but it's not good enough. We need that value to permeate our public policy sector,” says Valerie Tarasuk, lead investigator at PROOF, a research program studying household food insecurity in Canada, and professor in the University of Toronto's Department of Nutritional Sciences.

Donating money or non-perishable items to food banks is often presented as a means of fighting hunger. More effective measures are needed, PROOF researchers say. Those measures must address the causes, not the symptoms of food insecurity.

One in six households — 5.8 million people, including 1.4 million children — were food insecure in 2021, according to PROOF'S latest report.

Rates have remained more or less the same over the past few years. Last year, Tarasuk would have described Canada's food insecurity problem as festering. In the face of 2022's food price hikes, however, she anticipates that the situation has got worse.

Grocery prices showed a year-over-year increase of 11.4 per cent in September, according to Statistics Canada — the fastest pace of growth since August 1981.

“I think we're in a really perilous situation, because we knew that prior to this inflation we had almost six million Canadians struggling to afford basic necessities like food,” says Tarasuk.

The most concerning aspect of this, she adds, is that people already living in foodinsecure households will experience more severe hardship.

Wealthy countries such as Canada have plenty of food, underscores David Nabarro, former special adviser to the UN on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and co-lead of the food workstream of the UN Global Crisis Response Group. Solving the problem of food insecurity depends on enabling people to have enough money to buy the food they need.

“(Food banks) don't actually solve what sometimes people refer to as the structural causes,” says Nabarro. “We are in the midst of a very difficult situation throughout the world at the moment. Basically, prices are rising. And yet the value of the cash in people's pockets is reducing.”

Research has shown income to have more of an effect on food insecurity than food prices, Tarasuk explains, offering the example of the federal subsidy program Nutrition North Canada. According to a 2019 CMAJ study, food insecurity in Nunavut has worsened since the program was introduced in 2011.

PROOF hopes to release a report on the territories in the coming months, but Tarasuk estimates that more than 70 per cent of Nunavut children live in foodinsecure households. (And adds that families in Nunavut receive the same Canada child benefit as elsewhere in Canada, with no adjustment for cost of living.)

“(Nutrition North) has done nothing to change the amount of money somebody has in their purse when they go shopping,” she says. “And the things that seem to be moving the needle on food insecurity in Canada are the things that put money in that purse.”

Food charities have been Canada's primary response to the issue since the 1980s, PROOF highlights. And as systematic monitoring over the past 16 years has shown, they haven't improved food security.

Even as a Band-aid, food charities reach just a fraction of the people who are struggling, says Tarasuk. And though food banks, meal programs and other initiatives make popular political photo ops, they are a stopgap, not a solution, she adds.

“It's not about having more people sort the cans or carry another box of donations in. It's about doing the harder work of saying, `How can we rejig the Canada child benefit to make sure that children in Canada are not at elevated risk?'” she says.

“Or (Ontario, asking), `Why is it that we've got a rate of food insecurity that's three percentage points higher than Quebec? What are we doing wrong?'”

The PROOF report showed marked differences across the provinces: Alberta (20.3 per cent) had the highest prevalence of food insecurity; Quebec (13.1 per cent), the lowest.

Tarasuk sees this seven percentage point separation as a sign that provincial actions play an important role. “Food insecurity is a policy decision,” she says. “It doesn't have to look like this. It's about how policies protect, or don't, the most vulnerable people in the population.”

Severe food insecurity — missing meals and, at its most serious, going days without eating — is strongly associated with significant health issues (including premature death and mental health problems) for children and adults, she underscores.

By the time people report that they're having difficulty buying enough food, they're also having trouble affording rent, mortgage payments, utility bills and prescriptions.

“There's a terrible juggling act that's going on all the time,” says Tarasuk.

“I don't want to call it a balancing act because the whole story is, it never balances.”

According to research PROOF conducted in Ontario, the health-care costs of a person living in a severely food-insecure household are more than double that of someone in a food-secure home.

If the prevalence of food insecurity doesn't concern provincial policy-makers, health-care spending should, Tarasuk adds. “The reality is that we're wasting healthcare dollars every day by having so many people in such dire circumstances.”