There is common ground in the lifestyles of the people who produce food in Manitoba and the people who most need it.
David Northcott, executive co-ordinator of the province’s food bank, calls it “a fragility.”
Don Dewar, a farmer and president of Keystone Agricultural Producers, agrees. “We both know adversity,” said Dewar.
And on a day when a dozen farmers from across the pro-vince came to Winnipeg to spread the news about what they call the cheap food city folk enjoy, they also learned about the 16,500 families who can’t afford to buy what farmers produce.
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For the first time, KAP celebrated Food Checkout Day on Feb. 12, the day when the average Manitoba family earns enough gross income to pay for a year’s worth of groceries.
Here, the average family spends 12 percent of its income on food. In Spain, the food bill is 21 percent. In India, the tab is 51 percent.
A Manitoba consumer has to spend $16.67 on wheat or $3.50 on pork before the farmer earns one dollar. And then, 93.8 cents of that return goes to expenses.
Donations made
To mark the day, farmers brought 43 bags of creamed corn, pasta, spaghetti sauce, and apple juice to the cool, cramped warehouse of Winnipeg Harvest that holds two weeks’ worth of supplies for the 200 food banks in the city and 25 in rural and northern Manitoba.
KAP’s donation will help 150 families, said Northcott, families who need much more than 43 days of income to pay for food.
A single mom with two children working full-time for $5.40 per hour, the current minimum wage in Manitoba, grosses up to $14,000 per year, he said. She won’t see Food Checkout Day until May 27.
Food accounts for 40 percent of her budget. When she comes to a food bank, she can get four to eight days worth of groceries per month.
Winnipeg Harvest opened its doors in July 1985 as a “Band-Aid” for 1,800 poor, hungry families, giving out 835,000 pounds of food. Northcott said the non-profit agency hoped to close its doors within three to four years.
Now 85 percent of volunteers are people who rely on the food bank. “They want to work,” he stressed to farmers while ushering them around the building.
He shows them where volunteers salvage 6.5 tonnes of not-quite-fresh bread, buns and pastry each day. Spoiled bread goes for feed to a local hog farmer who, in return, donates pork.
It’s one example of how Manitoba farmers help keep food banks running with generous donations, said Northcott.
