An illegal marijuana-growing operation is helping feed people in Vancouver.
When police raided and seized the operation’s hydroponics equipment, they turned it over to British Columbia’s FarmFolk/CityFolk instead of destroying it as usual, said Kathleen Gibson, spokesperson for the food advocacy group.
The group now uses the equipment to grow herbs and greens, she told a national conference of the Anglican Church held Aug. 18 in Saskatoon.
Gibson joined the seven-year-old group because she could see the disconnection between farmers and urban consumers.
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“You need to direct your future or else you’ll fall into one you may not want,” she said, adding that Canada’s cheap food is too good to be true.
FarmFolk/CityFolk’s vision includes feeding Canada’s population first and exporting the rest, supporting the consumer demand for organic food, and responding to the questions of young people and chefs about food. The group works with B.C.’s immigrants and poverty groups, helping them grow their own food or buy it from B.C. farms.
She challenged the Anglican clergy and laypeople at the conference to get their congregations to form partnerships with groups who work on hunger and nutrition issues, and “to lead a consumer revolt to ask for locally grown food because everybody eats, everybody shops.”
Debbie Field heads Food Share, a 15-year-old program run by Toronto’s public health department. It was set up by the mayor to connect food banks to hungry people and to prepare a report on why hunger exists.
Churches in the city got involved, providing space, money, volunteers and moral support.
Field said one way to help eliminate hunger is to increase people’s incomes, either through higher minimum wages or welfare payments. She said that when it became clear Ontario’s provincial government wasn’t going to do that, Food Share looked at how people in the Third World survive. That resulted in a self-help program of community gardens, communal kitchens and bulk-buying clubs.
A conversation between a Food Share worker and a farmer who complained about being forced to plow down his vegetable crop resulted in the Good Food Box program. Fresh vegetables and fruit are purchased from farmers and packed into a box that is sold for $15 in low-income areas. Field said the Toronto program sells 4,000 such boxes a month and returns $300,000 to Ontario farmers. One spinoff is a grant that allows the group to hire street kids for six months to pack the boxes, learn job skills and gain experience.
Conference organizer Cathy Campbell said success stories like these will help the Anglican Church set up its own food and justice national network.
She said there is “lots of church life that happens in the basements, but little connection to the upstairs. There was a sense we needed to spend some work on the downstairs.”
Campbell, who is a minister from Vancouver, said the conference was deliberately located on the Prairies “to show solidarity with food producers in Canada.”
She said it helps the church touch “wider faith and secular issues.”
