Thank you.
Good morning, and thank you for having me, Chair. It's great to see some familiar faces in the room and to be among such wonderful presenters.
My name is Jasmine Ramze Rezaee. I'm the director of policy and community action at Right to Food. We are a national food security organization here in Canada. We're leading the community food centre movement and we're connected to more than 400 partners across the country.
Today, May 28, is actually World Hunger Day, and hunger, as you can appreciate, is a growing concern around the world, including here in Canada.
We are a talented, resourceful and abundant nation, but we continue to grapple with an uncomfortable reality: Nearly a quarter of our population, as Neil mentioned, is food insecure. That's almost 10 million Canadians, including 2.4 million children. In a country as wealthy as ours, many people can't afford to eat.
Hunger in Canada is not primarily about food scarcity in the way it may be in other parts of the world. Our grocery aisles are well stocked. We talk about food insecurity because, for millions of Canadians, there simply isn't enough money to afford food, especially healthy food.
Food insecurity tracks income insecurity far more closely than it tracks food availability in our country, which means one of the key solutions to food insecurity is improving people's incomes directly. Our pre-budget submission was co-created with partners across our network, and I'm very pleased to share that it was endorsed by 180 Canadian organizations.
It outlines four recommendations, but I won't go into detail.
One is to set a national target to cut household food insecurity in half and eliminate severe food insecurity.
The second is around—as other speakers have mentioned—improving the Canada groceries and essentials benefit. That benefit is a great step in the right direction, but right now the amount is not adequate to make an actual, tangible difference in reducing food insecurity at the household level.
We're also calling for improvements to the Canada disability benefit, very much in a similar vein to what Neil has shared, and we're calling for greater investment in indigenous food sovereignty, particularly in the north, where food insecurity is not just a reflection of inadequate incomes but is also about indigenous relations to the land, access to land and removing barriers to traditional foods.
For all of the reasons I've just mentioned, we believe the federal government's recently announced national food security strategy needs a strong income security lens. We penned a sector-wide letter to several ministers a couple of months ago, calling for income security to be a key pillar of that strategy, but we're concerned that it might be glossed over. We're certain that if we don't address inadequate incomes, food insecurity will continue to proliferate in our country, regardless of broader food systems discussions.
Perhaps the most important point I want to impart to the committee today is this: Canada's food insecurity crisis is entirely solvable. We already know the policies that reduce poverty and hunger. What is required from the government and from all parties is the political courage to act.
Municipalities across the country are declaring food insecurity emergencies, but the issue isn't receiving comparable federal attention. When 10 million people are struggling to afford enough food, it's not a marginal issue. It's not a reflection of individual failures or poor decision-making. It's a structural economic issue tied to rising housing costs, labour market precarity and a social safety net that hasn't kept pace with the cost of living. The rising cost of food has only made things worse.
One in three workers in Canada is now precariously employed, and many of those folks are food insecure. What's festering in communities across the country is profound stress and anxiety about the future. We're hearing from people from all walks of life who are really struggling to make ends meet: people working full-time jobs who can't buy fresh produce, parents skipping meals to feed their kids, and people taking on more and more personal debt. All of this has devastating economic, health, education and social costs for our society.
Community organizations are doing everything to respond to rising needs, but their rapid expansion is itself evidence that governments have off-loaded the responsibility of upholding the right to food onto an underfunded and overstretched sector. We're asking you to treat food insecurity with the same urgency being applied to other major national challenges.
Again, we're a resourceful and abundant nation, but how we share our collective wealth matters deeply, and right now, too many households are being told to hold on a little while longer while their quality of life steadily erodes. At Right to Food, we're ready to work with you to make hunger a thing of the past.
Thank you so much for your time, and I welcome any questions you may have.