Addressing food insecurity in northern Canada – Alaska Dispatch

The challenge of northern food security is not new, but awareness on the issue has been growing, thanks to efforts from local activists.

The main reasons for current food insecurity in the North can be narrowed down to a few main factors: the transition from subsistence to wage economies and the resulting decline of local harvesting of meat, fish and berries; the high cost of groceries due to small, remote markets and difficulty of transport; local preferences for salty, sugary and fatty processed foods; and the relative poverty of northern inhabitants.

One recent response to the problem has come from the Council of Canadian Academies, which was asked by Health Canada to put together an expert panel to assess the state of knowledge on the issue. Amongst its many findings was that northern indigenous households experience some of the worst food insecurity in the developed world, particularly in Nunavut, where 35 percent of households are severely food insecure. The panel, disappointingly, failed to offer policy recommendations. But it usefully documented the spectrum of food security solutions being adopted across the North. These fall broadly into short term, medium term and long term solutions.