The provincial budget drops on Monday, and the folks at PROOF just released a fact sheet on provincial policy levers to reduce household food insecurity, with a lot of common elements to our own pre-budget submission. This blog post will take you through some of the key points from both, and give you a sense of what we’ll be looking for in Monday’s budget, and in budgets to come.
The PROOF fact sheet, which uses data on households with children under 18 from the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), makes it clear how critical income interventions are to reduce food insecurity. Some key findings:
A $1/hr boost to the minimum wage lowers a household's risk of food insecurity by 5%
A $1000/month boost to income support rates (bringing them closer to CERB amounts) lowers the risk of severe food insecurity by 5%
On the other side of the ledger, a 1% increase in income tax for the lowest bracket would increase the risk of food insecurity by 9%. Tax decreases in these brackets are a powerful lever.
This data is yet another reminder that there are clear pathways for governments to reduce food insecurity, and those pathways involve getting more money to folks who need it. PEI recently became the first province to set defined targets.
Our own submission to the pre-budget process picks up on this theme, and uses a lot of the recent analysis from the "Cost of Poverty" report for Atlantic Canada produced by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
The call for pre-budget submissions here in NL was structured around 3 questions: where can expenditures be raised, where can costs be cut, and where can service delivery be modernized? We see pathways for the food system in all three areas.
The most obvious and important issue is around poverty. Poverty is really expensive. It drives up our health care and justice-system costs, reduces economic productivity (and the tax take from that), and creates demand for expensive emergency response programs. In cold budget terms, reducing our poverty rate would reduce a huge range of costs and boost a wide range of revenues.
These interventions have costs, of course - some direct to the treasury, but not all (minimum wage is the obvious one here). Reducing the poverty rate would also make a huge dent in our rates of food insecurity, which affects almost 15% of households in the province as of 2017/18 (likely higher now in the wake of the pandemic).
There are a lot of ideas in play right now about our fiscal future and the policy/revenue tools that are, or could be in play. Settling that question isn't going to happen in a blog post, b ut there are options on the table.
There is, of course, more to our food system than food insecurity rates. In a budget context, the food system is already a big economic driver, and could be bigger. Lots of ideas in this space were captured by the Atlantic Food Systems Recovery Vision - http://atlanticfoodvision.ca.
Unlocking food system growth can come at a relatively low cost - by streamlining and speeding up our regulatory systems around food and land access, for example. There are also huge opportunities in food procurement from big institutions like schools and hospitals.
So, what lenses will we be looking through on Monday, and in budgets to come?
First and foremost, are there measures to boost incomes for the folks who need it most, with tough times around us and very likely ahead of us?
Second, does the budget set the stage for our local food systems to thrive? Are there investments in infrastructure and system gaps? Are we getting the most food-system value from the money we have to spend anyhow?
Finally: who is being prioritized? Food insecurity doesn't affect everyone equally. We know that Black folks, Indigenous people, and women in particular face a much higher risk of food insecurity (and many other challenges). Will our budgets recognize that? We hope so.
Further reading
The PROOF fact sheet is online here, and our budget submission is here.
