UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization Calls Food and Hunger a “Crisis Within a Crisis” of COVID-19 Food often suffers from the problem that it can’t get no respect as a public policy issue. But the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has been quick off the mark to produce a flurry of food-related briefings reminding people that food policy must stay front…
Category: Food Policy
Local food system responses to COVID-19: Toronto and its city region
Toronto and its city region – known as the Greater Golden Horseshoe – is the most populous area in Canada, with nine million inhabitants. As in much of the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the economy, leading to spiralling unemployment, increased food insecurity, and questions about what changes to the food system are called for. Ontario has been in…
Four ways COVID-19 will change food systems and food security
It’s too early for precise answers to questions about the coronavirus pandemic’s long-term impacts on the ways food is produced, processed, distributed, eaten, recycled and appreciated. But my experience managing food policy issues in Toronto for one of the world’s leading city-based public health departments gives me some searching questions that can help us prepare for possible outcomes. These open…
How government food policy got in your face but not in your heart
Cuts to Government Services, But not to Double Standards By Wayne Roberts Politicians at all levels are promising more cuts to government expenses without any cut to services. For politicians, this is better than a gift that keeps on giving. It’s a promise they can keep on promising. For most of the past 40 years, North American and British politicians…
The Pillars of Cheap Food are Cracking
The worldwide price level of food is taking a great leap upward for the second time in less than five years. My bet is that this food price hike will match a rise in oil prices for wrenching impact on geopolitics, especially as the two are intimately connected. Food cannot be fertilized and shipped without imports of cheap fossil fuels,…
Wayne Roberts at Alberta Pathways 2 Sustainability Conference
Wayne’s spoke in Red Deer, Alberta, at their exciting Pathways2Sustainability conference; a reporter’s preview of the talk is available here: https://permaculturebc.com/Wayne-Roberts-Food-Security-Organic
Are We Seeing the End of Supermarkets?
I grew up with the habit of Thursday nights as the time when family shopped together at the local supermarket, and I always assumed, for good or ill, that supermarkets were permanent. It’s now clear that old style super-markets are on their way out. Beginning this month, Wal-Mart Canada kicks off its one-year agenda to add 40 new supercenters to…
Do Food and Health Policy Have Anything to do with the Arizona Murders?
There’s something a tad self-absorbed about the outpouring of media grief and analysis over a shooting rampage that left six dead in Arizona. Analysis is normally reserved for things that have larger numbers attached to them, like the uneventful and painfully slow death from starvation each day of at least 16,000 children (some reputable agencies put the number at 32,000…
PRACTICING FOOD SOVEREIGNTY: PUTTING LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY ON THE BONES OF A RENEWED FOOD SYSTEM
Here is the text of my keynote address to Food Secure Canada conference in Montreal, Saturday, November 27. It can be discouraging to learn how far we need to go in such a short time to set the world right, and the the world’s burdens can weigh heavily on our puny shoulders. It can also be uplifting to see how…
A Raging Bull in a Tea Party Shop: What Foodies Can Learn from a City Election in Toronto that Foretold U.S. Mid-term Elections
I wrote most of this as an assessment of Toronto’s election during the day of October 25, before the polls were closed and any votes counted in Toronto’s city elections. I didn’t know who won, but I already knew what lost — Toronto’s longstanding consensus around the “radical middle” of city responsibilities for social belonging and environmental leadership. As it…