A RECENT shift in Ottawa’s foreign aid and development strategy marked a significant advance for Canadians who believe world hunger and poverty are blights and agriculture is a solution.
Implementation details are scarce but at its centre, the government has decided that hunger and food security will be among the core objectives of the Canadian International Development Agency’s mandate.
It means more emphasis on helping developing country agriculture and more effective use of dollars spent on food aid.
“Ready access to food is a fundamental need for all people,” international co-operation minister Bev Oda said in a little-noticed Toronto speech recently. “Without adequate supplies of food, development is impossible.”
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For the thousands of farmers who contribute every year to aid projects like the Canadian Foodgrains Bank and the hundreds of thousands of rural church goers who regularly contribute more proportionately to international aid funds than their urban counterparts, Oda’s proposition would be a no-brainer.
Of course an adequate diet, access to food and support for local food production must be the core of international work.
But surprisingly, Oda’s announcement was a significant shift. When she was CIDA minister more than half a decade ago, Liberal Susan Whelan made agriculture and food a central focus of the aid and development strategy.
But during Paul Martin’s short-lived Liberal government, the CIDA mandate was reviewed and moved away from food.
In the mandate unveiled in spring 2005, agriculture and food were nowhere to be found.
Aid groups like the Winnipeg-based CFB criticized the omission.
“This really is a step backwards,” Stuart Clark, senior policy adviser to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank in Winnipeg, said at the time. “It is odd, I don’t want to use the word perverse, to be downplaying food and agriculture in a development strategy.”
Then-CIDA minister Aileen Carroll insisted the critics misunderstood.
“Some of you may be concerned that CIDA’s focus on these priorities means the agency is somehow less committed to agriculture,” she told a conference. “I want to assure you this is not the case.”
But much as Carroll insisted agriculture and food didn’t need to be singled out because their role is obvious, the critics were not mollified. In fact, bureaucrats took the omission as a sign that food aid and agricultural development were yesterday’s solutions.
So it is curious that Oda’s dramatic change of direction received so little coverage. Or maybe not. Food issues are not exactly mainstream in Canadian media.
Besides, the announcement did not fit the general narrative created to describe the Conservative government.
The narrative that critics of the Conservatives have built is of a cabal of small-minded ideologues with limited vision, turning their backs on the world and Canada’s traditional commitments to development.
Lord knows there is ample evidence of the government’s small-minded foreign policy. But in this case, the decision to embed food issues in aid and development is a good move, reversing some Liberal urban snobbery.
It should be acknowledged.
