The Hungry Cities Partnership (HCP) and the MiFOOD Project recently participated in the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS) at York University, Toronto. This event was part of the 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
The theme of the CAFS conference was ‘Reckonings, Reimaginings, and Reconciliations, Within and Through Food Systems’ and explored food as dynamic productive and resistant sites of mistreatment and invention, ill-health and well-being, and separation and hospitality. The MiFOOD Project organized three sessions on international migration and urban food security, which took place on May 31, 2023.
Zhenzhong Si discussed selected findings of qualitative and quantitative research with three refugee communities in the Kitchener-Waterloo region and their experiences of the pandemic, especially increased food insecurity linked to weakened economic circumstances, rising food prices, and limited geographical mobility.
Cheryl Martens and Jonathan Crush highlighted the interactions between pre-existing migrant precarities and pandemic-generated precarities and their outcomes for high levels of food insecurity among Venezuelan and Zimbabwean migrants in urban Ecuador and South Africa, respectively.
Zack Ahmed argued that the securitized approach to managing the pandemic in Kenya and the decrease in remittance receipts deteriorated the food security of Somali refugees in the Eastleigh neighbourhood of Nairobi.
Elizabeth Onyango made a case for strengthening cultural food security as a key component of food security for self-identifying Black households in Canada.
John Abraham presented some early results of the large-scale survey in the Indian state of Kerala with female migrant returnees from Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries documenting the food security effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on their sending households.
Building on an intersectional gender framework and his research with female migrant domestic workers from Nepal to the Middle East, Hari KC offered some insights into the feminist food justice and feminist food sovereignty approaches to migration and food security.