Graham Riches

Food Banks and Food Security: Welfare Reform, Human Rights and Social Policy. Lessons from Canada?

In the past twenty years food banks have established themselves as one of the fastest-growing charitable industries in first world societies. As institutionalized centres or clearing houses for the redistribution of donated and surplus food they have emerged as a key frontline response to the growing problem of food poverty and inequality. As welfare states have been restructured and cut back and basic entitlements have been denied, food banks have become secondary extensions of weakened social safety nets. This paper explores the growth of food banking in Canada and analyses its role in terms of advancing the human right to food, its effectiveness in achieving food security and the extent to which it contributes to, and/or counters the increasing emphasis by governments on welfare reform policies informed by neo-conservative ideology. Food banks are examined from the perspective of their origins and purposes, institutionalization, usage, food distributed and effectiveness. The rise of food banks in Canada is concrete evidence both of the breakdown of the social safety net and the commodification of social assistance. As such, they undermine the state’s obligation, as ratified in international conventions, to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to food. They enable governments to look the other way and neglect food poverty and nutritional health and well-being. A possible future role for food banks in countries where they are already established lies in public education and advocacy, but their institutionalization makes this seem an unlikely course. In countries where they are in their infancy, the question of whether to support their development should be a matter of urgent public debate.

Advancing the human right to food in Canada: Social policy and the politics of hunger, welfare, and food security

This article argues that hunger in Canada, while being an outcome of unemployment, low incomes, and inadequate welfare, springs also from the failure to recognize and implement the human right to food. Food security has, however, largely been ignored by progressive social policy analysis. Barriers standing in the way of achieving food security include the increasing commodification of welfare and the corporatization of food, the depoliticization of hunger by governments and the voluntary sector, and, most particularly, the neglect by the federal and provincial governments of their obligations to guarantee the domestic right to food as expressed in international human rights law. The interconnectedness of hunger, welfare, and food security issues in a first world society are explored from the perspective of progressive social policy and food security analysis and the development of alternative strategies. In terms of advancing the human right to food in Canada, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the state and civil society, and the social and economic rights of citizenship built on an inclusive social policy analysis and politics of welfare, food security and human rights.

Hunger in Canada: Abandoning the Right to Food

The problem of hunger in Canada in the 1990s is persistent and seemingly intractable. Food banks brought the issue to public attention in the early 1980s. Yet a decade earlier poverty had been rediscovered in Canada (Senate, 1971) and in 1977 the People’s Food Commission was formed in response to escalating food prices and the suffering and misery of low-income Canadians. Yet despite all that has been written and said in the intervening years about unemployment, child poverty and welfare reform, hunger continues to grow. Indeed, to the extent that charity has attempted to meet the needs of hungry people, hunger has been depoliticized and ignored by the state. Federal and provincial governments have deliberately turned a blind eye.

Hunger in the Rich World: Food Aid and Right to Food Perspectives

The relationship between food poverty and food charity in developed countries was initially explored in the book First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (1997), the first cross-national study of the development of food aid and the charitable food bank movement from the early 1980s to the mid 1990s. It examined the rise of food banks as community and philanthropic responses to the growing issue of food insecurity in five residual welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. It revealed a growing reliance on the collection and redistribution of surplus and wasted food to feed hungry people. During this period of neo-liberal welfare reform publicly funded social safety nets were being dismantled and government obligations to ensure the adequacy of social benefits sufficient to both pay the rent and feed oneself and one’s family, even during times of strong economic growth, were increasingly neglected. These residual approaches to hunger and poverty turned out to be highly problematic particularly in the short term and pointed to food banks as symptoms and symbols of welfare states in decline if not in crisis. The book anticipated the international growth of charitable food banking in the North as a system comparable to emergency food aid in the South. It argued for right to food approaches and strategies for public action including the importance of inter-sectoral collaboration and a stronger advocacy role for civil society.

Hunger and the Welfare State: Comparative Perspectives

This book is about hunger and the politics of welfare reform and food security in affluent first world societies. It addresses the nature and causes of hunger, explores government and community responses and examines what can and should be done about it. Its focus is the re-emergence of hunger in five advanced industrial states with developed welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, and how as the twenty-first century fast approaches the governments of each of these countries have sought to reform their public welfare systems whilst at the same time neglecting the growing issue of hunger and food insecurity. It is about understanding hunger as a political issue and the possibility of liberal welfare states being able to break their mould and guarantee basic human rights to food, adequate incomes and remunerative employment in the broader context of social justice and economic renewal. Essentially, the questions posed in this text ask whether the real litmus test for any welfare state is its capacity to guarantee the basic rights of its most vulnerable citizens.

Hunger, Welfare and Food Security: Emerging Strategies

A number of common themes and some points of difference emerge from this study of hunger in the final decades of the twentieth century in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. Essentially it is a story of increasing hunger and unacceptable hardships, inadequate benefits and punitive welfare policies, government denial and uncoordinated public policy and valiant but inadequate charitable and community responses.

Canada: Thirty Years of Food Charity and Public Policy Neglect

In May 2012, Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, undertook an official visit to Canada, the first to an OECD country. His report, informed by national statistics, indicated widespread and increasing food insecurity; a deplorable incidence of hunger and poverty amongst First Nations communities and Aboriginal peoples living in Northern Canada; and the lack of a national food policy. He drew attention to the nearly 900,000 people per month dependent on charity-based food aid, noting this ‘reliance on food banks was symptomatic of a broken social protection system’ which served as ‘a moral safety valve for the State’. Observing that Canada had escaped the worst of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis, De Schutter questioned the Government’s lack of compliance with its obligations under international law (ICESCR, 1976) to implement the human right to adequate food (OHCHR, 2012; HRC, 2013a).

Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?

First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997a) offered the first cross-national study of the emergence and entrenchment of food aid and charitable food banking from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It consists of five case studies from advanced industrial countries with developed ‘liberal’ welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. All of the countries were food exporters and food secure through national production and imports, suggesting that domestic hunger could not be caused by the failure to provide sufficient food and nutrition, but rather was a matter of distributional justice and human rights — that is a fundamentally political issue.