FORT SIMPSON, N.W.T. (Thomson Reuters Foundation) — Shipping food to this remote village is never easy, but when the river linking it to the rest of Canada’s sprawling Northwest Territories starts freezing in November, groceries must be airlifted in by helicopter.
Logistical challenges like this push food prices to unaffordable levels for many local residents in Canada’s far north, particularly for fresh fruit and vegetables.
Hunger rates across the north are far higher than the Canadian average, with the region’s indigenous peoples particularly hard hit.
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More than 60 percent of children in Nunavut, Canada’s most northern territory with a mostly indigenous population, aren’t getting enough to eat, according to a campaign group.
The rates are lower in other nor-thern areas: slightly more than 30 percent in the Northwest Territories and less than 20 percent in the Yukon.
“People make do and make ends meet,” said Diana Bronson, head of Food Secure Canada, a research group. “The cost of living is high and incomes are low (in parts of the north). Children are going to bed hungry every night.”
The newly elected Liberal government has promised to spend an additional $40 million over four years on the Nutrition North food subsidy program, on top of the $60 million currently spent annually.
Campaigners welcome the move, but some say money alone won’t be enough to deal with the north’s hunger challenges.
At Northern Grocery, the main store in Fort Simpson, a kilogram of wrinkly red peppers costs $9.59, while an avocado is about $3, nearly double the price in other parts of Canada.
One shopper said it’s not uncommon to pay $12 for a single pepper in February, which makes healthy eating an expensive endeavor.
“We do our best to provide the healthiest food we can,” store manager John Dempsey said as customers chatted and local residents in camouflaged hunting jackets bought pizza, orange juice and bananas.
“Transportation is a major cost due to the length of the supply chain.”
He said the store, which is a seven hour drive from the territorial capital Yellowknife, does its best to keep prices stable, even as transportation costs vary because of the weather.
The local ferry cannot operate when the Liard River connecting Fort Simpson to the territory’s main road is freezing or thawing in autumn or spring,
Trucks must unload food on one side of the river and have it transported into town on a helicopter. During winter months, trucks drive across ice roads to access the town.
Norma Kassi, a researcher on indigenous communities, didn’t grow up waiting for helicopters to bring groceries to the neigh-bourhood store. Like thousands of others, she used to get most of her food directly from the land.
An indigenous Gwich’in from the Yukon, she grew up eating caribou, beavers and fish hunted by family and friends. But like thousands of others, she is now dependent on the grocery store.
The caribou population in Canada’s north has crashed, climate change is making it more dangerous to hunt because of melting ice and unpredictable weather, and fish the family once ate are now contaminated with pollutants, she said.
“Almost everything we ate when I was a kid came from the land,” said 61-year-old Kassi, from the Arctic Institute of Community-Based Research.
“Traditional foods (caribou and other animals) are inaccessible nowadays due to climate change…. That’s what is causing a lot of the problem.”
This shift away from traditional food toward imported goods shipped into the north at high cost has had a profound impact on the region’s indigenous people, she said.
Nunavut now faces the “highest documented rate of food insecurity for any Indigenous population living in a developed country,” according to the Council of Canadian Academies, a government-backed research group.
Indigenous people in the north are six times more likely to face hunger than other Canadians, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food said following a visit to Canada in 2012.
Kassi supports the incoming government’s plan to increase subsidies for the Nutrition North program, but she said the region needs to produce more of its own food.
Rather than simply subsidizing the transportation of food from the south, which is the basis of the Nutrition North program, she believes the government should invest in greenhouses for community gardens and training so local people can raise livestock.
“We (indigenous people) want to be involved,” she said. “In a country that’s rich with lots of resources, this (hunger) is uncalled for.”
