Thoughts Before Provincial Budget 2021

The provincial budget drops on Monday, and the folks at PROOF just released a fact sheet on provincial policy levers to reduce household food insecurity, with a lot of common elements to our own pre-budget submission. This blog post will take you through some of the key points from both, and give you a sense of what we’ll be looking for in Monday’s budget, and in budgets to come. 

The PROOF fact sheet, which uses data on households with children under 18 from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), makes it clear how critical income interventions are to reduce food insecurity.  Some key findings:

• A $1/hr boost to the minimum wage lowers a household's risk of food insecurity by 5%

• A $1000/month boost to income support rates (bringing them closer to CERB amounts) lowers the risk of severe food insecurity by 5%

• On the other side of the ledger, a 1% increase in income tax for the lowest bracket would increase the risk of food insecurity by 9%.  Tax decreases in these brackets are a powerful lever.

This data is yet another reminder that there are clear pathways for governments to reduce food insecurity, and those pathways involve getting more money to folks who need it. PEI recently became the first province to set defined targets. 

Our own submission to the pre-budget process picks up on this theme, and uses a lot of the recent analysis from the "Cost of Poverty" report for Atlantic Canada produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

The call for pre-budget submissions here in NL was structured around 3 questions: where can expenditures be raised, where can costs be cut, and where can service delivery be modernized? We see pathways for the food system in all three areas. 

The most obvious and important issue is around poverty. Poverty is really expensive. It drives up our health care and justice-system costs, reduces economic productivity (and the tax take from that), and creates demand for expensive emergency response programs. In cold budget terms, reducing our poverty rate would reduce a huge range of costs and boost a wide range of revenues.  

These interventions have costs, of course - some direct to the treasury, but not all (minimum wage is the obvious one here). Reducing the poverty rate would also make a huge dent in our rates of food insecurity, which affects almost 15% of households in the province as of 2017/18 (likely higher now in the wake of the pandemic). 

There are a lot of ideas in play right now about our fiscal future and the policy/revenue tools that are, or could be in play. Settling that question isn't going to happen in a blog post, b ut there are options on the table.

There is, of course, more to our food system than food insecurity rates. In a budget context, the food system is already a big economic driver, and could be bigger. Lots of ideas in this space were captured by the Atlantic Food Systems Recovery Vision - http://atlanticfoodvision.ca.

 Unlocking food system growth can come at a relatively low cost - by streamlining and speeding up our regulatory systems around food and land access, for example.  There are also huge opportunities in food procurement from big institutions like schools and hospitals.

So, what lenses will we be looking through on Monday, and in budgets to come?

First and foremost, are there measures to boost incomes for the folks who need it most, with tough times around us and very likely ahead of us?

Second, does the budget set the stage for our local food systems to thrive? Are there investments in infrastructure and system gaps? Are we getting the most food-system value from the money we have to spend anyhow? 

Finally: who is being prioritized? Food insecurity doesn't affect everyone equally. We know that Black folks, Indigenous people, and women in particular face a much higher risk of food insecurity (and many other challenges). Will our budgets recognize that? We hope so.  

Further reading

The PROOF fact sheet is online here, and our budget submission is here.

2021: Opportunities for Food Systems Change

As we head into a new year, our food system in Newfoundland and Labrador continues to face many challenges - but there are also some big opportunities for system shifts. 

As we move towards a post-pandemic Newfoundland and Labrador, the big questions and conversations driven by our challenging economic situation have resumed — but in a very different social context, one that is more aware of the huge numbers of people in the province living on or close to the margins, and one in which we expect to see a high pace of policy and program change.

The key conversation on the table now is about recovery, and within that conversation Food First NL sees many opportunities to enable a more sustainable and just food system. 

The framework for these conversations is now emerging, with multiple interlinked and overlapping processes:

• The work of the “Premier’s Economic Recovery Team”, which will deliver its report this coming spring

• A “renewed strategy to reduce poverty” is the top item in the Mandate Letter for the new Minister of Children, Seniors, and Social Development1 

• A ten year “Health Accord” process has been launched to redesign the province’s health care system with a strong focus on the social determinants of health. 

• The House of Assembly voted unanimously to create a committee to study a basic income for Newfoundland and Labrador. 

• The “Coalition for a Just Recovery NL,” has developed an open letter to the Government of Canada focused on how investments in the recovery from COVID-19 can be used to advance equity and justice (www.justrecoverynl.ca).

• A Vulnerable Populations Task Force and associated community-government working groups created during the early days of the pandemic continue to meet. 

• Within the Atlantic Region, an informal group of food-systems organizations convened by Food First NL, Food for All NB, and Farmers’ Markets Nova Scotia has been working to develop a shared regional food systems agenda.

• Local to St. John’s a large-scale “food assessment” led by Food First NL will proceed through 2021. This assessment will map opportunities and gaps in the local food system through consultation and research and will develop a community-led action plan to be implemented by a team of trained animators. 

Taken together these processes amount to an opportunity to re-write the social contract in Newfoundland and Labrador and reimagine many aspects of our food system. They also present a challenge, both in the sheer volume of input being gathered, and in the complex ways that input is sure to interact and conflict. In particular, there is a real challenge here around engaging people with lived experience of food insecurity to participate because of the heavy demands on time and attention that these processes impose. 

Within this massive systems shift, Food First NL sees five areas where the potential for positive changes in the food system is particularly strong this year:

Opportunity 1: Basic Income in Newfoundland and Labrador

Over the past year, the concept of a basic income has transformed from a radical idea into a legitimately considered and debated policy option in the province. A basic income has been endorsed by a wide range of community organizations, a motion in the House of Assembly to create a committee to study the idea was approved unanimously, a lively discussion is happening amongst civil society organizations, and the concept is being worked into briefings to government. The recent adoption of a recommendation to create a basic income in PEI is also motivating interest.

From a food insecurity perspective, a basic income could be transformative. Most models being advanced in Canada involve an income floor established through the tax system that would be universal and substantially more generous than existing, inadequate social assistance rates. With 65% of social assistance recipients in the province identifying themselves as food insecure, the impact of enlarged transfers on this population could be very significant. We also know that many households relying on employment income face major food insecurity challenges, and that the existing charity model of support is not a solution to food insecurity. 

More broadly, a basic income could transform the social contract in some important ways that could support a more resilient food system. By enabling individuals to pursue more flexible and sometimes risky paths through employment and business development, a basic income could seed business innovation in the food system, and support more sustainable livelihoods in rural communities.

The specifics of any proposed basic income model matter a great deal, and there is a legitimate debate to be had about the concept - we are encouraged to see that debate get moving.

Opportunity 2: Regulatory and infrastructure reforms to enable local food systems

There are many infrastructure and regulatory gaps and obstacles within the food system in Newfoundland and Labrador, particularly for smaller producers or those looking to introduce new products or methods into the food system. Significant investments are already being made by government in shared physical and sales infrastructure, including regional cold storage and a regional food hub pilot led by Food First NL. There is a clear opportunity to emphasize the importance of this kind of infrastructure in the context of economic recovery, particularly where it enables food-based businesses to thrive in smaller communities with fewer economic opportunities.

On the regulatory side, we hear a lot about regulatory barriers local food producers have identified as they start up and scale up. Regulatory reforms that would enable more local production are a low-cost “win” that can be clearly articulated as part of the recovery agenda and we are optimistic that there will be further progress on this file.

Opportunity 3: Local food in institutions 

Meeting ambitious provincial targets for increased food production is unlikely to happen without significant efforts to leverage the procurement power of large institutions. Secured contracts from hospitals, schools, prisons, and other institutional buyers would enable producers to invest in expanded capacity over the long-term, but major process barriers remain. 

Nonetheless, we have seen significant progress in this area; Eastern Health worked with Food First NL to integrate local procurement language into a new 10-year food procurement agreement that became active this January. Other health authorities are pursuing farm to healthcare pilot projects, and schools continue to work on farm to school programs across the province. Memorial University, another major food purchaser, is also heading towards a new food procurement contract in the coming years.

The food security crisis brought on by the pandemic has also helped animate this conversation as people realized how much of a role school food programs were playing in supporting household food security for families in the province. This has the potential to further energize advocacy for universal school food programs in the province.

Opportunity 4: Systems change in the emergency food sector

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant shifts within the group of organizations that provide emergency food aid - community freezers, food banks, meal programs, and similar. A wider range of organizations is now involved in the provision of these supports, with groups such as town councils, Pride committees, seniors’ organizations, and Indigenous organizations all having added major food relief work to their portfolios during the pandemic. 

Many of these groups are new to the emergency food space, and this is fuelling healthy ,if challenging, conversations around the ways emergency food aid is provided, the relationships between this work and systems-change advocacy, and the stigmatizing elements of the emergency food system. 

The groups involved in this work are also more networked than in the past, in part thanks to service coordination work taken on by Food First NL as part of our pandemic response, and in part due to the sheer scope and complexity of the challenges 2020 presented. 

We anticipate a continued and deepened conversation both within this sector and about this sector, with the voices of service users well represented in driving reforms in the coming year. 

Opportunity 5: Community leadership in systems change

This past year has seen a great deal of collective action and collaboration amongst community agencies, particularly those who serve vulnerable populations. Coalitions of groups have been coming together to advance a just recovery agenda at multiple levels and to advocate for more equitable policies and programs.

As the government continues to roll out multiple overlapping consultative processes, there is a great incentive for further collaborations between community agencies, particularly to work together to create a process that is inclusive of marginalized voices. We see a great potential for this to translate into further transformative work within the food system as the voices at these tables continue to broaden. 

Conclusion

With the support of a wide network of partners (provincial and national), 2021 has the potential to be a transformative year for Newfoundland and Labrador’s food system. This outcome is by no means guaranteed. We know that we will be facing budgetary austerity and many competing priorities, but never before has food security had such a high profile as a cross-cutting public policy issue with so many diverse champions. Many lives could be changed for the better by this time next year.