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Molly Anderson's argument that irrespective of the US refusal to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR, 1966) it is time for federal food assistance programs such as SNAP mandated through the Farm Bill to adopt a right to food and nutrition approach is foresighted and significant. As is Anne Bellow's succinct and equally powerful proposal for widening the debate to include a system's-based human rights approach to a National Food Plan. Their timely advocacy is compelling given the few influential US food policy voices speaking from a food justice perspective about the dysfunctional industrial food system and the failure of the Federal Government to ensure access to healthy food and food security for all.

This article argues that hunger in Canada, while being an outcome of unemployment, low incomes, and inadequate welfare, springs also from the failure to recognize and implement the human right to food. Food security has, however, largely been ignored by progressive social policy analysis. Barriers standing in the way of achieving food security include the increasing commodification of welfare and the corporatization of food, the depoliticization of hunger by governments and the voluntary sector, and, most particularly, the neglect by the federal and provincial governments of their obligations to guarantee the domestic right to food as expressed in international human rights law. The interconnectedness of hunger, welfare, and food security issues in a first world society are explored from the perspective of progressive social policy and food security analysis and the development of alternative strategies. In terms of advancing the human right to food in Canada, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the state and civil society, and the social and economic rights of citizenship built on an inclusive social policy analysis and politics of welfare, food security and human rights.

First World Hunger: Food Security and Welfare Politics (Riches, 1997a) offered the first cross-national study of the emergence and entrenchment of food aid and charitable food banking from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s. It consists of five case studies from advanced industrial countries with developed ‘liberal’ welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. All of the countries were food exporters and food secure through national production and imports, suggesting that domestic hunger could not be caused by the failure to provide sufficient food and nutrition, but rather was a matter of distributional justice and human rights — that is a fundamentally political issue.

Economic restructuring and rising unemployment are creating a new context for social work practice. No longer can it be assumed that adequately paid employment will provide a foundation for rehabilitation and successful practice. The issues raised for social work are explored by examining the welfare policy and practice implications of the application of market ideology and increasing joblessness in Canada in the 1980s drawing parallels with economic and social welfare changes in Australia. The paper examines why social work has been slow to respond, why it should be responding and what is to be done.

The other day an economist friend told me that in Brisbane and commercial centres to the south, when discussion turned to financial and business considerations in the North, the key question asked was how to grow North Queensland? This market driven and profit seeking way in which southern entrepreneurs regard the beautiful and fragile environment in the north of this State, and its exploitation, was cause for concern but did not come as a surprise. After all, economic growth and international competitiveness is publicly endorsed by leading politicians and the captains of industry alike as the key to both material well being and social justice. Indeed it is central to today's conventional wisdom. Yet this belief must be challenged if there is to be creative discussion about social policy today.

We offer a critique of Canada's approach to domestic food security with respect to international agreements, justiciability and case law, the breakdown of the public safety net, the institutionalisation of charitable approaches to food insecurity, and the need for ‘joined-up’ food and nutrition policies. We examined Canada's commitments to the right to food, as well as Canadian policies, case law and social trends, in order to assess Canada's performance with respect to the human right to food. We found that while Canada has been a leader in signing international human rights agreements, including those relating to the right to food, domestic action has lagged and food insecurity increased. We provide recommendations for policy changes that could deal with complex issues of state accountability, social safety nets and vulnerable populations, and joined-up policy frameworks that could help realise the right to adequate food in Canada and other developed nations.

This book is about hunger and the politics of welfare reform and food security in affluent first world societies. It addresses the nature and causes of hunger, explores government and community responses and examines what can and should be done about it. Its focus is the re-emergence of hunger in five advanced industrial states with developed welfare states: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the USA, and how as the twenty-first century fast approaches the governments of each of these countries have sought to reform their public welfare systems whilst at the same time neglecting the growing issue of hunger and food insecurity. It is about understanding hunger as a political issue and the possibility of liberal welfare states being able to break their mould and guarantee basic human rights to food, adequate incomes and remunerative employment in the broader context of social justice and economic renewal. Essentially, the questions posed in this text ask whether the real litmus test for any welfare state is its capacity to guarantee the basic rights of its most vulnerable citizens.

The problem of hunger in Canada in the 1990s is persistent and seemingly intractable. Food banks brought the issue to public attention in the early 1980s. Yet a decade earlier poverty had been rediscovered in Canada (Senate, 1971) and in 1977 the People’s Food Commission was formed in response to escalating food prices and the suffering and misery of low-income Canadians. Yet despite all that has been written and said in the intervening years about unemployment, child poverty and welfare reform, hunger continues to grow. Indeed, to the extent that charity has attempted to meet the needs of hungry people, hunger has been depoliticized and ignored by the state. Federal and provincial governments have deliberately turned a blind eye.