Canada: Sowing justice: When farming is about more than food
Today, stigmas and perceptions remain throughout agriculture. Many simply hear the word farmer and picture a white man, says Ms. Fraser
By Sara Miller Llana
CS Monitor
May 3, 2022
Excerpt:
In Toronto, Black families are 3.5 times more likely to face food insecurity than white families, according to city figures, with 36.6% of the city’s Black children living in food-insecure homes.
Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, a nonprofit leader in community food justice, says that to address the disparities, the narrative needs to be challenged and the structural racism at play understood. “Black folks aren’t inherently more vulnerable to food security,” he says. “Our response as a country has been to collect other people’s leftovers or corporate waste to redistribute without ever saying, ‘Why are these corporations that are producing waste not paying living wages?’”
FoodShare Toronto, which also helped launch Flemo Farm in 2021 to bring underrepresented community members into urban agriculture, led a petition in Toronto for a new food charter to address inequalities in the system – which the City Council adopted in April. The city also approved a five-year Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan in October to support Black-led food security initiatives, including more access to green space for urban farming, markets, and distribution.
