The Best Food Bank Day Will Be When They Don’t Exist

After seven years in power and a narrow election win, NDP Premier David Eby said he heard the voters’ message that his party needs to do better.

Welcome news if the commitment is demonstrated in the January ministerial mandate letters, which direct cabinet members on their key responsibilities.

One focus — championed only by the Greens in the election campaign — should be B.C.’s widespread food poverty and insecurity.

Household food insecurity is trending upwards in B.C., especially among the unemployed and working poor experiencing severe cost of living increases. Food Banks BC is reporting record-breaking client numbers for 2024.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The record high 1.2 million people, one in five British Columbians, living in food insecure households is a shameful matter of public policy neglect.

Eby, a former human rights lawyer, well knows food is a basic need and a fundamental human right, long recognized by Canada under international law.

Why then is the government relying on charitable food banking to ensure the availability of food and the right to dignified access for low-income households and individuals? Why the lack of political will to end this?

And why does B.C.’s Poverty Reduction Strategy fail to take a rights-based approach to food security and other issues?

Yes, food insecurity is mentioned. But the government is still emulating the Social Credit days of the 1980s by downloading domestic hunger to the happenstance and stigma of corporately driven charitable U.S. style food banks. An early warning sign of Canada’s broken social safety net.

Making food a legal right in B.C. would put an end to the charity food bank model. As defined by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: “Right to adequate food is realized when [everyone], alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement.”

For the right to food to be realized in Canada, food must be universally available and affordable for all; accessible, with individuals and communities able to obtain the food they need and want within communities; and nutritionally adequate and sustainably produced such that the local ecology is not harmed.

But in B.C. the government is providing $50 million to the food bank and charity food sector, rather than working to replace it with a rights-based approach.

It’s not a food problem, it’s an income problem

Canada’s internationally respected evidenced-based research has long shown food insecurity is based on “the inadequate or insecure access to food due to financial constraints.”

In other words, “an income problem” that will not be solved by food banks.

Astonishingly, the 2019 B.C. Poverty Reduction Strategy Act omits any reference to food in the topics ministers are required to consider.

That said, the 2024 updated Poverty Reduction Strategy plans to improve food security from a basic need and food access perspective.

Critically, this includes income security measures: increases, indexation and improvements to minimum wages, B.C. family benefits, renter tax credits and social assistance rates. It also includes plans to support community food access programs such as school meals, community food hubs and Indigenous food sovereignty.

Community organizations applaud the increased funding for food systems, some of which supports community development. While not food banks with lineups in the traditional sense, they still operate emergency food access programs of which most all are at capacity. They are frustrated and overwhelmed by the burden of responsibility of feeding community members who have been neglected by government.

However, confusingly, the strategy also stresses “actively working with food banks” and “providing unprecedented financial support to them and other hunger relief programs.” With food banking now embedded in NDP public policy, what impact will the millions received have on reducing food insecurity provincewide?

Far too much of the funding pie is supporting food banking directly and its infrastructure. Such food aid to hungry British Columbians is merely being achieved through the redistribution of corporate food waste, including ultra-processed food. Surely a matter of public health while the structures that drive food insecurity largely remain in place.

The 2024 annual HungerCount survey reports 225,605 visits to B.C. food banks in March. A shocking figure, but in no way a measure of the number of individuals using food banks. Visits may be repeated multiple times by the same individual. Counting visits is not an accurate measure of food insecurity and cannot be compared to the 1.2 million people experiencing household food insecurity.

Visits to food banks also fail to account for the thousands of food-insecure people who would never enter one or who may otherwise access the hundreds of less-stigmatizing community-based food distribution programs. Nevertheless, food banks globally present themselves as central to solving the food insecurity crisis.

First, a mandate to double down on “cash first” policies already undertaken as the evidence-based path to ending the need for food banks. Higher wages and income benefits are key to reducing food insecurity.

Second, instructions to review the existing research on food insecurity and revise the B.C. basic income report which failed to consider the limits of the food charity economy, and consider current initiatives across Canada to advance a guaranteed livable basic income.

And third, support and fund a role for civil society to participate with the government in focused action on effective community development and a human rights approach to solve food injustice. It is critical that the community food movement, including food aid recipients, are at the table.

Food security, along with concurrent resilience and societal well-being, must be viewed within a broad comprehensive population health perspective.

It is essential to examine the root causes that drive food insecurity such as racism, discrimination and inequity. B.C. needs a comprehensive cross ministerial food rights strategy including a significant role for the Ministry of Health.

Frame future poverty reduction and food security strategy in right to food language. As with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, be bold and imaginative. Adopt the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights into B.C. law and set the standard for other provincial and hopefully federal jurisdictions including Canada’s North.

More specifically why not initiate a Charter challenge process for adopting the right to food into the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms thereby enshrining it in Canadian law; and invite the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food to visit B.C. and Canada to advise on all matters relating to food security. 

Graham Riches is former director of the UBC school of social work and the author of Food Bank Nations: Poverty, Corporate Charity and the Right to Food. Ian Marcuse is co-ordinator of the Vancouver Food Neighbourhood Network and member of Vancouver Food Justice Coalition.

[Top photo: ‘Why then is the government relying on charitable food banking to ensure the availability of food and the right to dignified access for low-income households and individuals?’ Photo via Shutterstock.]