Food subsidy making little impact in North
A researcher has found a federal subsidy intended to reduce astronomically high food prices for northern families has resulted in stale-dated, unreliable food on store shelves without making grocery bills more affordable.
Tracey Galloway of the University of Toronto, whose findings are to be published later this month, says the Nutrition North program should be reformed with mandatory price caps on essential food.
“Without price caps and regulatory framework for pricing, the retailers have arbitrary control on how they set prices,” she said from Iqaluit, where she was presenting her results. “We have not seen prices come down over the course of this subsidy.”
Food in the North costs between two and three times what it does in the south. Grapes were recently selling in Nunavut for more than $28 a kilogram.
Such costs are a major cause of food insecurity. In 2014, Nunavut’s territorial nutritionist found almost three-quarters of Inuit preschoolers live in food-insecure homes. Half of youths 11 to 15 years old sometimes go to bed hungry.
Nutrition North is a $77-million program that, since it replaced the Food Mail initiative in 2011, has sought to reduce costs by subsidizing shipping to 121 communities in the three territories and northern provincial regions. The federal government is reviewing the program and has held public meetings.
Ottawa says between 2011 and 2015 the cost of a food basket for a family of four dropped about five per cent and the weight of eligible items shipped north increased by about 25 per cent. Retailers say the full subsidy has been passed on to consumers and federal compliance checks back that up.
Galloway said Nutrition North only created a price drop because there was a gap between when it began and Food Mail ended. The drop reflects the difference between subsidized and unsubsidized prices during the gap — and not the two subsidy programs.
As well, because the program lacks Food Mail’s quality checks, much of what winds up on northern shelves is past its best-before date — a complaint made repeatedly in the public meetings.
“Yesterday, I went to the grocery store to buy myself a can of soup and I turned it over and it had an expiry date of 2015 on it,” said Galloway.