Marking 40 Years of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank

Some call it one of Canada’s best kept secrets. Secret, because you won’t read or hear much about the Canadian Foodgrains Bank (CFGB) in print or broadcast media. Ask countless smallholder farmers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, though – people who’ve received CFGB-facilitated emergency food assistance or, with the CFGB’s incentive and support, adopted more productive ways of farming – and faces will light up at the mention.

For those who’ve not been let in on the secret – the Foodgrains Bank is a partnership of 15 Canadian churches and church-based agencies representing nearly 30 Christian denominations. The United Church of Canada has been a member since the CFGB’s earliest days. This year, the Foodgrains Bank is marking 40 years of Christian service and celebrating what it and its members, overseas partners, and supporters have accomplished in that timeframe: more than $1 billion allocated in food assistance, and collaboration with some 100 overseas partners in more than 70 countries.

It's my privilege to have been asked to pay tribute to the ecumenical CFGB’s four decades of Christian service. I was brought into direct contact with the Winnipeg-based CFGB in 2009 when I joined the United Church General Council Office as Program Coordinator for Southern Africa. At the time colleagues also asked me to serve as the United Church’s staff representative on the CFGB’s Board of Directors, which I did for 12 years.

With its primary goal of ending global hunger, the Foodgrains Bank primarily works in global majority countries where impoverishment and food insecurity are chronic and where conflict, human displacement, extreme weather events, and other precipitous calamities have placed communities at risk of famine and starvation.

The mainstay of the organization’s capacity to raise funds for its programming is literally hundreds of local community growing projects across Canada. They vary in size from a few acres to hundreds. Typically, charitable-minded farmers harvest a crop, sell it on the Canadian market, and then donate the earnings to the Foodgrains Bank. My wife and I hosted a growing project on our own farm in southern Ontario for eight years.

Federal government matching funds, a ratio of 4:1 in some instances, significantly increase the CFGB’s humanitarian assistance leverage and provide added incentive for farmers and others to donate their time, labour, and money.

Considering the extent of food insecurity in the world today and its complex, intersected causes, ending global hunger might seem a tall order for organizations like CFGB. And the more so at present. According to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), “The world is (currently) facing a food crisis of unprecedented proportions, the largest in modern history.” Some 783 million people are experiencing persistent hunger, a number that’s expected to grow. A total of 49 million people in 49 countries are teetering on the edge of famine, WFP says.

“Five years ago, we were seeing global hunger decreasing,” Andy Harrington, the CFGB’s executive director, told me recently. “The upward trend toward greater hunger in the world we’re seeing now – it’s alarming.” 

A visit to the CFGB’s 40th anniversary tribute wall is a feast of accolades and memories. I especially like a comment posted by former Foodgrains Bank chairperson, Donald Peters: “The Canadian Foodgrains Bank is a bank like no other. Its accounts are depleted in the service of others. It brings together churches that not only benefit by membership but also benefit each other by being in the 'same room’.”

Peters’ comment “same room” is a tongue-and-cheek plaudit for Foodgrains Bank members’ ability to gather and happily collaborate despite their different theological perspectives. In prayer around the Board table, I sometimes wondered what image of God the person sitting next to me was thinking of. But those moments were so infused with a unity of food security and food justice purpose that religious differences didn’t matter.

Food assistance is one of two main ways the Foodgrains Bank addresses global food insecurity. The other is an agriculture and livelihoods program focussing on long-term development. And there is no better example of the Foodgrains Bank’s commitment to global food security that its promotion of conservation agriculture, a program for which the United Church and its overseas partners can take some credit.

Most people facing hunger in the world today are farmers, and half of them, women. They rely on subsistence farming typically working two hectares of land or less. Their challenges include harsh and erratic weather conditions, drought, government instability, depleted soil, and lack of access to markets.

During a visit to Zimbabwe one year, I observed how United Church Mission and Service partner, Christian Care/Zimbabwe Council of Churches, was helping small-scale farmers become more food secure by adopting conservation agriculture. Back home I shared the astonishing success of the program, then called Farming God’s Way, and the rest is history. 

The core principles of conservation agriculture are designed to agroecologically harmonize farming patterns with the rhythms of nature. They include building the soil and improving its fertility, carefully rotating crops to prevent soil-borne diseases and pestilence, mulching crops to suppress weeds, and planting cover crops to fortify the soil and prevent erosion. All are measures farmers can apply by using resources available locally, thus sparing the cost of fertilizers, pesticides, and other expensive agricultural inputs.

The Foodgrains Bank has on file hundreds of accounts of how small-scale farming families have benefitted from conservation agriculture. Ethiopia farmer Asnakech Zema’s story is typical. After one year of practice, her yields of corn, wheat, beans, millet, taro root, and other staple food crops had significantly increased. Not only was there a continuous supply of nutritious food for the family table, there was also surplus – produce Zema could sell on local markets. Now, she says, her children don’t go to bed hungry, and she can better pay taxes and school fees, buy better clothes for her family, and make improvements to the family’s house.

A recent five-year project by the CFGB demonstrates the success of conservation agriculture writ large. From 2015-2020, the Foodgrains Bank worked with African partners in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania to scale up conservation agriculture in the east African region. The hope was to benefit 18,000 households across 241 communities. End-of-project results vastly exceeded expectations: over 51,000 households improved their food security and increased the quantity and quality of their foods.

As a learning organization, the CFGB understands that the poverty and food insecurity experienced by small-scale farmers like Zema are also the tragic consequence of hundreds of years of colonial domination and control resulting in political, economic, social, and cultural upheaval.

Under colonial rule in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, many farmers were coerced into growing a few crops for export. Roads, railways, and other infrastructure were built to freight these products to European countries. Export brought windfall economic benefits to the colonial powers but precious little gain to the producing countries. Local farmers-producers were paid pitifully low prices for their crops.

As the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development knows, many of the underlying causes of hunger in the world “can be directly linked, in part, to the colonial legacy of focusing on exports of a few staple crops, while importing food to feed local people.”

Canadian Foodgrains Bank members like the United Church recognize the complex interplay of factors that perpetuate global hunger today. As Andy Harrington told me, “We are trying to think more on a systems level and become more aware of some of the global context of hunger.”

For example, conservation agriculture is almost always now combined with other relevant project elements including gender empowerment, policy work, marketing strategies, and livestock production – measures to promote local, diverse, resilient systems especially important during this time of climate breakdown. “It’s a journey we’re on,” Harrington says.

Canadian Foodgrains Bank’s humanitarian sojourn also includes holding itself and its members accountable for the ways its own aid practices might be contributing to contemporary colonialism. In its new strategic plan, “Until All Are Fed (2022-2026), it pledges to work “with our members, their international partners and the wider church community in Canada to enhance understanding around the decolonization of aid practices.”

We look forward to leadership from our global partners on these issues, Harrington said. Consultation must be meaningful, “not top down from rich countries.”

See the Canadian Foodgrains Bank website for a virtualtour of the CFGB’s history, highlighting key moments and stages of its development.

— Gary Kenny is former staff with the United Church’s Church in Mission Unit and has also worked with KAIROS and the former Inter-church Coalition on Africa. He represented the United Church on the Canadian Foodgrains Bank’s Board of Directors for 12 years.

The views contained within these blogs are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of The United Church of Canada.