Local And Just

Statistics Canada released the latest inflation data this week, and the results aren’t good for anyone filling up a grocery cart.  Over the last year, grocery prices have jumped nearly 5% – much higher than the price increases for other goods.  While 5% doesn’t sound like a lot, that’s an extra $7.50 a week for [...]

Whether it is food security programs in BC, farmers’ market infrastructure in Ontario, or northern community gardens in Manitoba, Canada’s provincial governments have developed a wide range of innovative programs and policies to address food security.  These are documented in the 2011 edition of Provincial Approaches to Food Security.    This annotated collection provides information about [...]

For the first time ever in a Canadian election, all five federal parties have released food policies as part of their election campaigns.  Not only that, but the existence of these policies was fodder for the top story this morning on the Globe and Mail‘s website – indicating that people, and the media, are increasingly [...]

Recently I had the opportunity to read Building a Housewife’s Paradise, a history of the role of gender in the creation and marketing of grocery stores in the United States by historian Tracey Deutsch.  Interestingly, societal understandings of gender, and particularly the role of women, formed the foundation for the development of the supermarket grocery [...]

This past week, I had the opportunity to attend a consultation session as part of the development of the Growing Forward 2 framework.  This federal-provincial-territorial policy framework.  Growing Forward 2 (GF2) will begin in 2013, and is the third agricultural policy framework negotiated between federal, provincial, and territorial governments.  The first, the Agricultural Policy Framework, [...]

A couple of years ago, food prices became a hot button issue in international affairs.  Food riots were seen in several countries in the Global South, as those with the lowest incomes were most susceptible to substantial rises in prices of basic products such as wheat and rice. While food prices did subside somewhat since [...]