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’ve never seen farmers who looked like me,” she says.
Why we wrote this
Charity can be an essential tool for meeting an immediate need. But when it comes to food security, generosity alone won’t solve root problems. In Toronto, a burgeoning effort shows just how nourishing empowerment can be.
Now she is part of a growing movement to diversify food production in Canada. Amid scarcity caused by pandemic disruptions and rising inflation, that work is helping to shift the conversation about food insecurity from one that relies on charity to alleviate hunger to a long-term goal of black empowerment and food sovereignty.
In April, the Toronto City Council voted to update its food charter to address inequalities in the system. The move is part of a wider effort to support Black-led food security initiatives.
“To get to where we want to go to address the inequalities we experience that are holding us back or limiting us,” said Winston Husbands, a food justice activist, “we need to be able to exercise some sort of stewardship. about the food system for our own needs and in our own interest.”
Moffat, Ontario
Aliyah Fraser has always been fascinated by the powerful simplicity of growing food. It started in her grandmother’s garden in Toronto, where she watched in awe as tomatoes, squash and squash would swell. “I’d just run around like a little rascal, eating all the ripe raspberries,” she says. “That garden has always been my safe place.”
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’ve never seen farmers who looked like me,” she says, sticking a homemade wooden spoon in the soil and planting garlic on a chilly afternoon in rural Ontario.
It is about as mundane a task as any farmer. But the larger goal, as she enters her second season as the owner of Lucky Bug Farm, is much less prosaic. “What I’m trying to model with Lucky Bug Farm, as a socially just, environmentally sustainable, and financially solvent farm run by a black woman, shouldn’t be so radical, revolutionary, or never seen before. But it is.”
Why we wrote this
Charity can be an essential tool for meeting an immediate need. But when it comes to food security, generosity alone won’t solve root problems. In Toronto, a burgeoning effort shows just how nourishing empowerment can be.
She joins other farmers, agricultural groups and justice advocates to diversify food production in Canada — and empower disadvantaged communities to take greater control of the system. Amid scarcity caused by pandemic disruptions and rising inflation, that work is helping to shift the conversation about food insecurity from one that relies on charity to alleviate hunger to a long-term goal of black empowerment and food sovereignty. It 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,” said Winston Husbands, a food justice activist at Afri-Can FoodBasket in Toronto. “Those are good indicators, and part of the tools people use to tackle food insecurity in the short term. But they do not generate food sovereignty.”
“To get to where we want to go to address the inequalities that we experience that are holding us back or limiting us,” he adds, “we need to be able to exercise some sort of stewardship over the food system for our own needs and in our own interest.”
Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor
Changing the story
In Toronto, black families are 3.5 times more likely to be food insecure than white families, according to city figures, with 36.6% of black children in the city living in food insecure homes.
Paul Taylor, executive director of FoodShare Toronto, a nonprofit leader in community food justice, says addressing the inequalities requires challenging the narrative and understanding the structural racism at play. “Black people are not inherently more vulnerable to food security,” he says. “Our response as a country has been to pick up leftovers from other people or company waste to redistribute without ever saying, ‘Why don’t these companies that produce waste pay a living wage?’”
FoodShare Toronto, which also helped launch Flemo Farm in 2021 to bring underrepresented community members into urban farming, led a petition in Toronto for a new food charter to address inequalities in the system — which the city council passed 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 push through the citywide initiative, has been advocating food justice since the 1990s, says Dr. Husbands, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. But scarcity in the wake of the pandemic, which disproportionately affected black and Indigenous communities, and a social awakening after George Floyd’s murder have catalyzed the problem.
Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor
Broadening the Face of Agriculture
Groups like the Ecological Farmers Association of Ontario have changed their minds about the role they play in the fight for equality. Last year they hired Angel Beyde as their wealth and organizational change manager – an effort to put an anti-racism lens on all their work and lower barriers for underrepresented farmers, including access to land and capital, education and mentorship, and representation. says Mrs. Beyde.
It’s not that the farmers’ association hasn’t been behind those values before, says Ali English, the group’s executive director. “But we always thought that this social justice work was the work of other organizations,” she says. “And it’s become very clear to so many of us that doing equality and anti-racism work is something that we all need to be actively doing, and if we don’t, we’re very complicit.”
Many of the obstacles for black farmers can be traced back to historic government actions and policies, and many Canadians are still unaware of the history of slavery and racism in their country, Ms Beyde said. “Once there were thriving black communities who owned their own land and farms, then a series of systematic, racist actions, many of them from the government, that stripped people of their rights and removed them from their land,” she says.
Today, stigmas and perceptions persist throughout agriculture. Many just hear the word farmer and imagine a white man, says Ms. Fraser, who previously worked as a city developer but became disillusioned with the lack of social and environmental justice in that job. She also says black farmers face stigmas in their own communities, which she says go back hundreds of years to 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 she had come across a program called Growing in the Margins, a non-profit organization that helps black and Indigenous youth become farmers in the Toronto area. It gave her the confidence to start her first season of growing kale, cherry tomatoes and kale. For her second season, she rents a one-acre farm in Baden, Ontario, and sells her produce at a weekly farmers’ market in Kitchener. It’s a steep learning curve, but she feels she has a small part to play in changing the paradigm.
“I think local farming is important, I think urban farming is important, I think sustainable ecological farming is important, but something I often overlook is making sure the food system represents the people who live in this province,” she says. “and understand that it doesn’t work for everyone, and it marginalizes a lot of people.”