<p>This paper is a critique of the report released on 25 November 2014 by the Auditor General of Canada (AG), Michael Ferguson, on Nutrition North Canada (NNC), a subsidy program designed to lower the cost of “perishable nutritious food” in northern communities. We argue that the situation is far more complicated than the AG’s report allows and suggest that looking at the challenges faced by the provincial Norths will show the real deficits of NNC.</p><p> </p>
Introduction: This paper looks at the market food environments of First Nations communities located in the provincial Norths by examining the potential retail competition faced by the North West Company (NWC) and by reporting on the grocery shopping experiences of people living in northern Canada.
While land is a nexus for culture, identity, governance, and health, as a concept land is rarely addressed in conversations and policy decisions about Indigenous health and well-being. Indigenous food sovereignty, a concept which embodies Indigenous peoples’ ability to control their food systems, including markets, production modes, cultures and environments, has received little attention as a framework to approach Indigenous health especially for Indigenous people living in urban spaces. Instead, discussions about Indigenous food sovereignty have largely focused on global and remote and rural communities. Addressing this gap in the literature, this article presents exploratory work conducted with Waasegiizhig Nanaandawe’iyewigamig and Shkagamik-Kwe Health Centre, two Indigenous-led Aboriginal Health Access Centres in urban service centers located in Northern Ontario, Canada.
Effective tools for retail food environments in northern and remote communities are lacking. This paper examines the challenges of conducting food environment assessments in northern and remote communities in Canada encountered during our experience with a food costing project. One of the goals of the Paying for Nutrition in the North project is to develop guidelines to improve current food costing tools for northern Canada. Paying for Nutrition illustrates the complex context of measuring food environments in northern and remote communities. Through the development of a food costing methodology guide to assess northern food environments, several contextual issues emerged, including retail store oligopolies in communities; the importance of assessing food quality; informal social food economies; and the challenge of costing the acquisition and consumption of land-and water-based foods. Food environment measures designed for northern and remote communities need to reflect the geographic context in which they are being employed and must include input from local residents.KEY WORDS: First Nations; food supply; cost analysis; rural population La traduction du résumé se trouve à la fin de l'article.
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