Are food prices too low?
Recently, MaRS hosted a Global Leadership Series event, Rising Food Prices: Global Dynamics & Canada’s Response. MaRtian Chris Evans wrote a great recap on the MaRS Blog, here.
I’ve been interested in food politics since taking a seminar on the global ecology of food with Josée Johnston. There, I discovered the work of Wayne Roberts, a journalist and activist who chairs the Toronto Food Policy Council and has a weekly column in NOW Magazine on food and environmental and social justice issues.
I was excited to see Roberts’ take on the Rising Food Prices panel in this week’s NOW. Like panelist John Johnson of RBC, Roberts points out that food prices remain at historic lows, and that, counterintuitively, cheap food actually exacerbates the global food crisis:
“Poverty, not the rising cost of food, threatens with starvation the third of the world’s people who earn less than $2 a day. Since there’s still plenty of food to go around at this point, today’s crisis is caused by lack of money, not lack of food… The most efficient way to [mitigate the effects of the food crisis] is to find ways to raise incomes, not ways to suppress food prices, which only makes the poor poorer and hungrier.”
Reinforcing nutritionist Marion Nestlé’s observation that “you can talk about anything through the lens of food,” Roberts uses the issue of food prices as a springboard, connecting the dots between cheap food, wasteful farming methods, global poverty and the twin malnutrition/obesity epidemics.
For more information on food politics, start here:
- UN Food and Agriculture Organization
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation – Food and Society
- Gourmet’s Food Politics
- The Community Food Security Coalition also has an extensive list of web resources
Kathryn provides market intelligence services to MaRS Advisory Services clients and to The Innovations Group at the University of Toronto. She is a graduate of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information.
