Aliyah Fraser has always been fascinated by the powerful simplicity of growing food.
But it took a long time, a pandemic and a social justice movement, to see farming as a viable career option. “I never saw farmers that looked like me,” she says.
why are we writing this
Charity can be a vital tool to meet immediate needs. But when it comes to food security, generosity alone doesn’t fix the root problems. In Toronto, a fledgling effort shows how nurturing empowerment can be.
Now, she is part of a growing movement to diversify food production in Canada. Amid shortages caused by pandemic-driven disruptions and skyrocketing inflation, that work is helping shift the conversation about food insecurity from one that relies on charity to alleviate hunger to a longer-term goal of empowerment. of blacks and food sovereignty.
In April, the Toronto City Council voted to update its food charter to address inequities in the system. The move is part of a broader effort to support Black-led food safety initiatives.
“In order to get where we want to go in addressing the inequalities that we experience that are holding us back or keeping us down,” says Winston Husbands, a food justice activist, “we need to be in a position to exercise some kind of stewardship of the food system to our own needs and in our own interests.
Moffat, Ontario
Aliyah Fraser has always been fascinated by the powerful simplicity of growing food. She started in her grandmother’s garden in Toronto, where she watched in amazement as tomatoes, pumpkins, and gourds swelled. “I was just running around like a little rascal, eating all the ripe raspberries,” she says. “That garden has always been my safe space.”
But it took a long time, a pandemic and a social justice movement, to see farming as a viable career. “I just never really saw myself as a farmer. I never saw farmers that looked like me,” he says, sinking a homemade wooden digger into the dirt, planting garlic on a chilly afternoon in rural Ontario.
It is as mundane a task as any farmer. But the larger goal, as she begins her second season as the owner of the Lucky Bug Farm, is much less prosaic. “What I am trying to model with Lucky Bug Farm, as a socially just, environmentally sustainable and financially solvent farm run by a black woman, should not be so radical, revolutionary or never seen before. But it is.”
why are we writing this
Charity can be a vital tool to meet immediate needs. But when it comes to food security, generosity alone doesn’t fix the root problems. In Toronto, a fledgling effort shows how nurturing empowerment can be.
She joins other farmers, agriculture groups and justice advocates who are pushing to diversify Canada’s food production and allow underserved communities more control over the system. Amid shortages caused by pandemic-driven disruptions and skyrocketing inflation, that work is helping shift the conversation about food insecurity from one that relies on charity to alleviate hunger to a longer-term goal of empowerment. of blacks and food sovereignty. She is part of a growing movement in North America.
“The normal way to measure food insecurity is to ask people how often… they should go hungry,” says Winston Husbands, a food justice campaigner at Afri-Can FoodBasket in Toronto. “Those are good indicators, and some of the tools that people use to address food insecurity work in the short term. But they do not generate food sovereignty”.
“In order to get where we want to go in addressing the inequalities that we experience that are holding us back or keeping us down,” he adds, “we need to be in a position to exercise some kind of food system stewardship on our own. needs and in our own interest.
changing the narrative
In Toronto, black families are 3.5 times more likely to face food insecurity than white families, according to city figures, with 36.6% of black children in the city living in food insecure households.
Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, a leading community food justice nonprofit, says that to address disparities, one must challenge the narrative and understand the structural racism at play. “Blacks are not inherently more vulnerable to food security,” he says. “Our response as a country has been to collect other people’s leftovers or corporate waste for redistribution without even saying, ‘Why don’t these corporations that produce waste pay living wages?'”
FoodShare Toronto, which also helped launch Flemo Farm in 2021 to attract underrepresented community members to urban farming, led a petition in Toronto for a new food charter to address inequalities in the system, which the City Council adopted in April. . The city also approved a five-year Toronto Black Food Sovereignty Plan in October to support Black-led food security initiatives, including increased access to green space for urban agriculture, markets and distribution.
Afri-Can FoodBasket, which helped launch the citywide initiative, has been advocating for food justice since the 1990s, says Dr. Husbands, an associate professor at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health. But shortages in the wake of the pandemic, which disproportionately affected Black and Indigenous communities, and a social awakening after the killing of George Floyd have helped catalyze the problem.
Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor
Expanding the face of agriculture
Groups like the Ontario Organic Farmers Association have changed their thinking about the role they play in the fight for equality. Last year they hired Angel Beyde as their equity and organizational change manager, an effort to put an anti-racist lens on all their work and help reduce barriers for underrepresented farmers, including access to land and capital, education and mentoring, and representation. says Mrs. Beyde.
It’s not that the farmers’ association hasn’t endorsed those values before, says Ali English, the group’s executive director. “But we used to think that this social justice work was the work of other organizations,” she says. “And it’s become very clear to many of us that doing equity and anti-racism work is something that we all need to actively do, and if we don’t, we’re very complicit.”
Many of the obstacles for black farmers can be traced back to historical government actions and policies, and many Canadians are unaware of their country’s history of slavery and racism, says Ms. Beyde. “There were once prosperous black communities that owned their own land and farms, and then a series of systematic and racist actions, many of which came from the government, disenfranchised those people and removed them from their land,” she says.
Today, stigmas and perceptions remain throughout agriculture. Many simply hear the word farmer And imagine a white man, says Ms. Fraser, who previously worked as an urban developer but became disillusioned by the lack of social and environmental justice in that job. She also says that black farmers face stigma in their own communities, which she says dates back hundreds of years to the traumas of slavery. “When I told my family, ‘I want to be a farmer,’ they said, ‘You had a good office job. Why would you want to give that up to do hard field work?’”
But he had stumbled upon a program called Growing in the Margins, a nonprofit that mentors Black and Native American youth to become farmers in the Toronto area. He gave her the confidence to tackle her first season: growing collard greens, cherry tomatoes, and collard greens. For his second season, he is renting a quarter-acre farm in Baden, Ontario, and selling his produce at a weekly farmers’ market in Kitchener. It’s a steep learning curve, but she feels she’s playing a small part in the paradigm shift.
“I think local farming is important, I think urban farming is important, I think sustainable organic farming is important, but something that is often overlooked is making sure that the food system represents the people who live in this province. “, He says. , “and understand that it doesn’t work for everyone, and it marginalizes a large number of people”.