Canada: Urban farmers want more places to grow and sell food in Toronto
Many Ontarians struggled to put food on the table before COVID-19 — and the pandemic has made things worse. Advocates say that more local planting, harvesting, and selling could help
By Sula Greene
TVO
Oct 21, 2020
Excerpt:
It was only two weeks into the pandemic when Daily Bread Food Bank started seeing a massive increase in demand. Within three months, the food bank had seen a 200 per cent rise in new client visits. “That shows you people are living on the margins,” says CEO Neil Hetherington, adding that the trend has only intensified.
COVID-19 has brought the issue of food insecurity in Ontario into sharp focus. But, as a report released in September by the Community Food Centre of Canada indicates, “Even before COVID-19, nearly 4.5 million Canadians struggled to put good food on the table for themselves and their families. In the first 2 months of the pandemic, that number grew by 39%, affecting 1 in 7 people.”
Research shows that poverty is the most significant determinant when it comes to who goes hungry. “[Food insecurity] is never caused by lack of food but by a lack of income,” says Cheyenne Sundance, founder of Sundance Harvest, a year-round urban farm in Toronto. “We can see that by how Loblaws and Metro throw out garbage every day.”
Hetherington notes that, while Indigenous families make up 1 per cent of Toronto’s population, they make up 5 per cent of food-bank users; Black families, which represent 9 per cent of the population, make up 24 per cent of food-bank users. Black families are also 1.88 times more likely to be food insecure than white families, even when controlling for income. Anti-Black racism, over-policing, and precarious employment could all be factors in this disparity, according to the Daily Bread.
