Food prices are still sky-high. How are communities and community services coping?

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When flooding, mudslides, and washouts forced road closures on the Alaska highway in Yukon during 2012, roads were shallow rivers filled with branches and debris. Without a route for food to be transported into many of the communities, supply shortages in grocery stores were ample. Some stores even arranged for supplies to be flown into their communities. 

Derrick Hastings, a farm manager at the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Farm (TH Farm) in Dawson City, Yukon, remembers when this situation unfolded — and the food scarcity that ensued during this time. Yet initially, Hastings says he wasn’t heavily impacted by this situation as someone who was never too reliant on grocery stores. His family has their own farm, raises their own meat, grows and cans their own vegetables, and even collects and processes their own goat milk. “We’ve always had enough,” he says. 

Others weren’t so self-sufficient.

Though this closure only lasted a few days, it highlighted the heavy reliance many Northern Canadian communities have on food shipments from outside their territories.

TH Farm, Hastings says, came into fruition not long after the Alaska Highway closures and the food scarcity it caused. The farm started up in 2014 as a way to revive northern farming, improve food security, and establish a local and sustainable supply of fresh produce, where the cost of food continues to be tremendously high. According to Hasting, an average single person spends anywhere from $5,000 to $7,000 a year on groceries in Dawson City, where food prices are significantly higher than in Whitehorse. A bag of clementines could set you you back $9, a box of strawberries sell for $10, a head of cauliflower is $7, and chicken is around $4/lb. The current inflation has only exacerbated these prices. 

According to Statistics Canada, grocery prices have increased by 5.7 percent over the last year — marking it as the highest annual increase since 2011. Meat prices are taking a significant hike with ham and bacon prices up by 15.6 percent and beef up by 12 percent. Fresh fruits are also seeing a rise: apples are up by 6.7 percent and oranges up by 6.6 per cent. 

Sunil Johal, public policy professor at Victoria College, University of Toronto, says it’s fairly obvious how COVID-19 has thrown a significant wrench into the supply chain and altered the patterns of demand in Canada for various types of goods and services. “We’re seeing that ripple through the economy and one of the consequences of that has obviously been fairly significant: increases in inflation over the past year.” 

The social and economic impacts of the pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and climate change effects have all come together to create a perfect storm — adding a record-high inflation to the situation has only made inequities more visible.   

How are food banks weathering inflation?

Tamisan Bencz-Knight, manager of strategic relationships and partnerships at Edmonton’s Food Bank says food banks are the canary in the coal mine — they feel big economic shifts much before they reach the mainstream. Before the media starts analyzing the causes of inflation, and before big layoffs happen, small ripples of change are felt like waves for food banks. 

“We are that economic barometer…and I like to say that we will feel it before it’s even announced, because different people are coming to see you, maybe somebody has never used [food banks] before,” says Bencz-Knight, adding that food banks will also be the last ones to recover from economic depression. 

Meanwhile, many food banks’ missions have evolved to also include pushing for systemic solutions to food insecurity. But the current crisis makes it difficult to find the time. 

A brief history of food banks in Canada

Edmonton’s Food Bank is Canada’s first food bank, opened in 1981. Initially the idea was to collect surplus food and distribute it to other social services organizations in need of food. This way, they would streamline the process, reduce duplication and competition, and start a collaborative scenario, explains Bencz-Knight. Since then, the food bank has ebbed and flowed with the changing times, morphing into a significantly more ambitious community service. 

Through partnerships with other community organizations, the food bank acts like a gateway for people to get access to the specific support they need. This includes everything from employment preparation, tax services, settlement services, housing, domestic violence, and substance use support.

The original mission statement at Edmonton’s Food Bank was, “to be stewards in the collection of surplus and donated food for the effective distribution, free of charge, to people in need in our community.” In 2000, the board of directors added a line at the end to say, “while seeking solutions to the causes of hunger.” 

Branching away from solely doing food services is something that Edmonton’s Food Bank isn’t alone in doing. FoodShare partners with communities in Toronto to support local agricultural projects, gardens, markets, all while seeking to take down oppression in our food systems. Community Food Centres Canada builds food programs in low-income neighbourhoods, but also advocates for poverty reduction policies. Similarly, the Ottawa Food Bank has also been focusing on how to delve into some of the deeper issues that are at play when it comes to food insecurity.   

“What we really want to do is make a change — a systemic change to the world of food banking, and how we deal with food insecurity here in Ottawa,” says Rachael Wilson, executive director at the Ottawa Food Bank. “The Ottawa Food Bank itself has really focused on hunger for the last 35 years, and we’ve recognized that putting out more food does not solve the issue of food insecurity, we have to be looking at the root cause, which is poverty and income stabilization.”

At the same time, while food banks are trying to attack some of these root causes, the immediate impacts of inflation are hard hitting for people in need, as well as community service providers whose resources are being stretched further and further in the past two years. 

Pushing for alternative solutions in the face of food insecurity

A recent study by PhD candidate Anita Rizvi examined how food banks were initially set up after a high inflation in the late 70s, as a temporary solution to food insecurity, but have become more or less permanent fixtures in communities on which people heavily rely on. The study, done in Ottawa, found that participants using food banks who were food insecure remained food insecure after 18-months. 

Rizvi draws a conclusion that although food banks offer temporary relief for those who are in need, they don’t reduce reliance — and more importantly, they don’t eliminate food insecurity. 

Wilson says she understands the argument around people’s reliance on food banks but in the absence of massive economic restructuring, she says there will continue to be a day-to-day need for their services. What’s the alternative? 

“If we were to shut our doors, if the 112 agencies we work with were to shut their doors tomorrow, that would only impact those people who are in desperate need of food; it really would not solve the issue. So while we work on solving the issue [of food insecurity] that food banks are filling the gap for, we have to continue providing that much needed food to people,” says Wilson. 

Wilson says the Ottawa Food Bank gets hit by inflation from two sides: their own food costs rising as well as an increase in food bank usage. The Ottawa Food Bank spends over $3 million annually on food alone — which has gone up by 15 percent in the last year as a result of the inflation. Food donations have also gone down since the end of last summer as well, increasing the amount of food the organization has to buy. “Food donations will have gone down for a variety of reasons, but one of those has got to be the fact that it’s more costly to buy food in a grocery store,” says Wilson. 

Meanwhile, the Ottawa Food Bank has seen a 17 percent increase in food bank usage in the last year.

The push for policy changes that target poverty reduction and guaranteed basic income are big parts of the conversation around reducing food insecurity. But Johal says the pandemic has made it difficult for policymakers to focus on these issues. 

“I think the challenge for decision makers is that these are issues facing people across the country, in many different facets of their lives. So there’s not really a single silver bullet fix for these issues; we require sustained systemic change across a whole range of different policy domains and that’s really difficult to achieve, especially coming out of the pandemic where policy makers and decision makers have been in crisis mode for two years,” says Johal.

Rebuilding sustainable food systems coming out of the pandemic

While community gardens and kitchens are not new by any means, the desire to be more self-reliant when it comes to food production is growing among communities across the country, according to Branavan Tharmarajah at Growcer, a company focused on providing communities with hydroponic growing systems.(Hydroponics is a soil-free growing method which Growcer provides for communities across Canada in the form of container farms.) 

Tharmarajah explains that many of the communities Growcer works with are remote, Northern communities that have faced food insecurity for years, and where they don’t have easy access to fresh, affordable produce. Without this, people will naturally start to rely on high-caloric, low-nutrient foods — processed and packaged foods — he says. 

The role of establishing alternative food systems here is to focus on creating a diversity of channels that provide food in order to avoid an over-reliance on just one outlet — especially in times of economic hardship like now — says Tharmarajah. 

“It’s really tough to build a sort of a complete, robust system that caters to the flaws of the current food system that we rely on. A lot of the communities I work with do have shipments that are sent to one store, and everyone in the community goes to the store. But what if produce doesn’t get to that one store or their store has to increase their prices due to inflation?” 

For folks like Hastings in Yukon, the importance of places like TH Farm is vital, living in a town where nearly 90 percent of food has to be trucked in from the south. To avoid being extremely impacted by supply chain disruption, which we’ve seen in the last year are inevitable and frequent, Hastings preaches for self-reliance and growth of northern farming continues.

What to do about the root causes

More localized production, however, is difficult to achieve right now, says Hastings. But Canada’s social purpose sector — particularly organizations with financial capital — can help: “There’s a need for more investment, more development of the local agriculture scene, and infrastructure that’s required to build up the capacity, but there’s not a lot of trained people, especially in the North, who know how to do it,” Hastings says. 

To bridge this gap, TH Farm is also a teaching school that focuses on getting young people familiar with food production and agriculture to keep the growth of this sector steady and rising, creating longevity of a security food system.

“The way the [current] system is — it’s exploitative. It’s exploitative to the working class people here. If you’re making $50,000 a year, you’re not even in the middle class, you’re just living paycheck to paycheck,” says Hastings. “It all leads back to why TH Farm and things of its nature are relevant; it’s because we’re breaking the traditional, capitalistic approach to agriculture. We’re not following suit.”

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