COVID-19 caused levels of household food insecurity to spike, but the precarity of so many people in wealthy countries is an outgrowth of decades of eroding public provisions and labour protections that once protected people from hunger, setting the stage for the virus’ unevenly-distributed harms. The prominence of corporate-sponsored foodbanking as a containment response to pandemic-aggravated food insecurity follows decades of replacing rights with charity. We review structural drivers of charity’s growth to prominence as a hunger solution in North America, and of its spread to countries including the UK. By highlighting pre-pandemic pressures shaping foodbanking, including charities’ efforts to retool themselves as health providers, we ask whether anti-hunger efforts during the pandemic serve to contain ongoing socioeconomic crises and the unjust living conditions they cause, or contest them through transformative pathways to a just food system. We suggest that pandemic-driven philanthropic and state funding flows have bolstered foodbanking and the food system logics that support it. By contextualising the complex and variegated politics of foodbanking in broader movements, from community food security to food sovereignty, we reframe simplistic narratives of charity and highlight the need for justice-oriented structural changes in wealth redistribution and food system organisation if we are to prevent the kinds of emergency-within-emergency that we witnessed as COVID-19 revealed the proximity of many to hunger.
Housing and food are both fundamental human rights and key social determinants of health. Yet despite their interrelations, housing and food are often treated separately by government bodies, policymakers and social movements. While both ‘food insecurity’ and ‘housing insecurity’ have been the targets of much research and activism in recent decades, we find less attention to their intersections, and to the potential for research and activism that centres these intersections in struggles to address their linked underlying causes. This scoping review aims to bring these two domains into closer conversation by further developing the notion of the ‘housing-food insecurity nexus’. We conceptualise this nexus as the co-occurrence of housing and food insecurity, often resulting from unaffordable housing costs (and the relative flexibility of food expenditure) in the context of neoliberal housing policy and market conditions where living costs outstrip incomes for many. The review highlights empirical and explanatory intersections and explores potentials for more coordinated action that can help to ensure people are able to realise both their right to housing, and to good food. The review is based on literature from Canada and pays particular attention to urban areas but bears relevance elsewhere. We first give empirical evidence for the housing-food insecurity nexus, and how this might differentially affect particular marginalised groups. Second, we suggest explanatory frameworks that broaden perspectives onto the nexus and particularly draw attention to underlying drivers of increasing food and housing unaffordability. Finally, we review proposed solutions, from short- to long-term. We conclude that necessary to the implementation of these solutions is a re-politicisation of the right to food and housing, uniting around the shared harms of many: renters, food producers, and movements for economic justice. We thus also examine the potential for cross-sector and multi-level partnerships that can leverage power in the pursuit of these twinned, essential goals.
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