OCT. 16, World Food Day, should be a day for Canada to brag and for Canadians to feel good.
Despite all the income and weather problems on the farm, Canada remains a food-producing powerhouse. Farmers are efficient, food is in abundance and Canada has a well-deserved reputation as a world bleeding-heart, leading the charge to reduce world hunger.
Former Liberal agriculture minister Eugene Whelan was chair of the World Food Council during the Ethiopian famine of 1984, and for years promoted the cause of a more generous world food distribution system.
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Former Progressive Conservative agriculture minister Charles Mayer returned from a WFC meeting in China in the early 1990s disturbed by the prospect of hundreds of millions of world citizens chronically hungry when the land and technology exists to feed everyone.
Quebec City was the 1945 site for the founding of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, a post-war attempt to end world hunger as a breeding ground for death, despair and war.
So this year, as usual, Canadian leaders used the day to remember the role of food in a healthy world, to extol the virtues of farming and to brag about Canada’s generosity in a food-deficient world.
But in the year 2001, more than ever before, Canada has little to brag about.
In two weeks, a Canadian delegation will be in Rome, at FAO headquarters, to talk about Canada’s role in ending world hunger.
Here are some pitiful facts they should have to account for, brought to Parliament Hill last week by food aid activists who wish Canada was a more active player in the battle against hunger:
- At home, food security for more than 700,000 Canadians last year meant trips to a food bank, double the rate 11 years ago.
- Internationally, the Canadian food aid contribution was sufficient to buy more than one million tonnes of food in 1992, the last full year of Brian Mulroney’s much-maligned Tory government. Nine years later, as prime minister Jean Chrétien continues to extol the virtues of Liberal internationalism and the spirit of Lester Pearson, the value of Canada’s food aid contributions has declined to less than 300,000 tonnes.
- While the world’s less developed countries cry out for help to develop local agriculture, Canada continues to insist that 90 percent of the food aid come from Canada, rather than from area farmers who could benefit from the sales.
- Canada’s contribution to food aid and agriculture development has fallen as much as 80 percent in the past decade and the Liberals in charge of the Canadian International Development Agency justify it on the grounds that new priorities include health, education, gender equality and HIV-AIDS treatment.
Worthy goals all, but the truth is that hungry or starving people are less healthy, less likely to benefit from education and less likely to resist disease.
The current CIDA administration, with Toronto minister Maria Minna in charge, seems to have decided that medicines and vitamins and political solutions are the answer to developing-country problems.
The government seems to have lost sight of the obvious fact that a lack of food is the most basic block to poor country development.
So the assessment of World Food Day, 2001 in Canada? Shame.
