Food Policy

The People's Food Policy will be posted here when it is ready over the course of the summer 2010. Watch this space!
 
Some discussion papers are now ready!  Click the link below to see more...
 
Here's the list of the Discussion Papers of the People's Food Policy!
 
About Policy
 
Policy is simply the guidelines by which decisions are made. For example, everyone has a personal food policy by which they decide what foods they will eat, how and where they will get them, and so on. For some people their food policy is determined by religious beliefs. For some people it has to do with how much money they have to buy food. Others are restricted in the food they can eat by allergies or other health factors.
 
Institutions such as schools have food policies, and so do municipalities, provinces, and indeed the Federal Government. Sometimes these policies are not obviously about food, but about things like transportation, water management, or funding priorities.
 
As people work together in communities to create food security, locally and beyond, they find that their personal food policies clash with policies at these other levels. Water management policies of a city, for example, might be a barrier to the establishment of a community garden. Federal policy to support patenting of seeds might be a barrier to a local community developing their own locally-adapted varieties.
 
As we work together in the People's Food Policy to develop policies for food sovereignty, we will be looking at what people are trying to do to create food sovereignty and what policies we need to develop, or to change, in order to make this happen.
 
Click here for an overview of the current regulatory and fiscal frameworks governing food production and supply in Canada (federal, provincial, municipal): Notes from Food Policy Development in Canada graduate course, by Rod MacRae, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2009.