Graham Riches warns the UK is treading a dangerous path following in the footsteps of the North American foodbank culture
Martin Sime, chief executive of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations, agrees that surplus food is no solution to food poverty, yet argues that charitable food banking is not part of the problem. He strongly supports supermarket food collections, donating their wasted food to feed hungry people. Yet, if thirty years of North American neo-liberalism – deregulation, privatisation, lower taxes, cutbacks, downstreaming – and increasingly institutionalised food charity is any guide, one should be careful what one wishes for.
Does Scotland really wish to further entrench the ineffective Canadian and US food charity model which accepts surplus food as the answer to food poverty whilst their governments continue to deny the income determinants of food insecurity, ignoring public policy and the right to food?
No one, including foodbank critics such as Peter Kelly and Mary Anne MacLeod of the Poverty Alliance, is questioning the moral imperative to feed hungry people – such practical charitable compassion expresses solidarity and, yes, we do need to celebrate the things people do for themselves and each other. However, as Janet Poppendieck reminds us, we also we need to consider the hidden functions of food charity serving as a moral safety valve: allowing us to feel good about what we do, yet leaving unaddressed food poverty’s systemic causes – low wages, inadequate benefits and fair income distribution. Despite the institutionalisation of foodbanks in both Canada and the USA widespread domestic hunger remains persistent. The real issue is that government has lost its moral compass.
George Osborne’s 2015 UK budget focused as it is on higher wages (but not, in fact, a living wage), reduced taxes and less welfare will only increase demand for local food aid and parish relief
Graham Riches
In the USA the growth of foodbanks was a direct outcome of Reagan’s neo-liberal agenda and cutbacks initiated in the early 1980s. They rapidly proliferated and became institutionalised, and this in a country where public food assistance programmes as a response to poverty have historically been preferred to income transfers (as in Europe), and, which far outnumber food banks. Yet food charity became the common face of hunger alleviation, but to what end? Today, 50 million Americans, one in six, live in households classified as food insecure (ibid). Canada, whose system of social security has historically been based on income transfers imported the US foodbank model in 1981. Yet, food insecurity today is experienced by 4 million Canadians, one in eight of the population, of whom 62% are working poor. Foodbanks, which frequently run out of food, feed nearly 840,000 people a month but are used by only one in four of the food insecure, of whom many still go hungry. Hardly an effective model.
In North America institutionalised food charity is a consequence of the powerful backing of the corporate food sector, the sports and entertainment industries, and the media. Hunger has been socially constructed and is publicly perceived as the primary responsibility of charity and not a matter of human rights – the moral, legal, political obligation of the state.
Under the guise of corporate social responsibility, surplus food redistribution has created secondary food aid markets for secondary food consumers, who endure enduring the humiliation and stigma of begging, whilst perpetuating food waste in the industrial food production and retailing system. Governments are enabled to look the other way, neglecting income poverty and the right to food.
Food is a basic human need and a fundamental human right, a core element of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights ratified by the UK Government in 1976 (but never by the USA). Government is the primary duty bearer for realising the right to food and under international law is accountable for achieving national food security – for ensuring not only a nation’s food supply but access to it, especially for at risk populations. Importantly the right to food is a justiciable concept, a legal entitlement. Food whilst produced and distributed as a market commodity remains, in essence, a public good to which all have a rightful claim.
In short the right to food obligates government to respect, protect and fulfill the right to food. This is fully realised when all have physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or the means for its procurement (UN General Comment 12, 1999). The goal is integrated public policy – income, food, nutrition, public health and social policies directed at food security for all and the implementation of national food policy framework legislation informed by national standards, indicators, targets, benchmarks and timelines. The right to food is not about charity but the right to feed oneself and one’s family with dignity, and enabling people to produce or acquire food in normal and customary ways – having sufficient money to make affordable food choices.
George Osborne’s 2015 UK budget focused as it is on higher wages (but not, in fact, a living wage), reduced taxes and less welfare will only increase demand for local food aid and parish relief. Food insecurity and widening food inequalities will persist and grow. Widespread hunger is the gaping hole at the centre of the failed neo-liberal mantra that the best, and only, social policy is work and economic growth underpinned by low wages, part-time jobs, workfare, punitive austerity and unfair income distribution. More supermarket food collections will not fill this hole.
Rather, the solidarity expressed by civil society is needed to galvanise the state to act on its human rights obligations: by joining with Nourish Scotland and re-framing domestic hunger and the achievement of food security for all within a right to food framework, central to the public policy obligations of the Scottish Government.
Graham Riches is Emeritus Professor of Social Work at University of British Columbia and author of First World Hunger Revisited
