Food (In)Security Policy in Canada (and Likely Elsewhere) has been Derailed by Attention to Food Access

This paper contends that the intractability of food insecurity as a social policy issue may have arisen in part because food access has become central to the interpretation of what is required to be food secure. We revisit key features of the evolution of the right to food and examine developments in the instruments used to monitor right to food progress. We articulate how the materiality of food access has come to the forefront of food systems policy, within which food insecurity is embedded but its structural underpinnings are lost. In turn, civil society food-based responses to growing food insecurity prevalence prevail. The pre-eminence of objectified food access as a socio-political orientation to food insecurity has refabricated the social problem of food need. A conscious uncoupling of food access from how we study and respond to food insecurity is needed to re-design food insecurity policy that is grounded in poverty alleviation.