An Iqaluit resident protests high food prices in the summer of 2012. The Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency has announced nine applicants, including five from Nunavut, will help develop strategies to improve food security in the territories as part of its Northern Food Innovation Challenge. (File photo)
5 Nunavut projects picked for Northern Food Innovation Challenge
CanNor selects 9 applicants to improve food security in the territories
Five Nunavut organizations will receive up to $250,000 from the federal government to test their ideas for how to address hunger and malnutrition.
It’s part of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency’s Northern Food Innovation Challenge, which aims to support community-led projects to help improve food security in Canada’s territories.
CanNor, which launched the initiative in 2021, announced on Jan. 28 it had selected nine projects from nearly 50 applications to be in the first phase of the contest.
In Nunavut, the successful applicants are:
Iqaluit’s Qajuqturvik Community Food Centre — The Inuliqtait Country Food Program will provide opportunities for hunters to make a living supplying country food, provide storage and food processing capacity and will introduce a sliding scale pricing system for customers to buy country food at affordable prices.
Clyde River’s Ilisaqsivik Society — The Strengthening Food Harvesting Capacity project will employ hunter-instructors to provide traditional country food year-round to communities and will hire instructors to teach youth hunting and harvesting skills.
The Hamlet of Cambridge Bay — Kitikmeot Inuit Food System Programs and Knowledge Hub is a project focused on developing educational and training programs for growing crops in the North, butchering country food and promoting nutritional health in the Kitikmeot region.
The Qikiqtaaluk Business Development Corporation — The Qikiqtani Food Sovereignty Implementation Solution will invest in community harvesting infrastructure such as storage and processing facilities and will test a model for supporting a professional harvesting industry by piloting a living wage for harvesters in the Qikiqtani region.
Arviat’s Aqqiumavvik Society — The Kanuq Goose Product Development project will assess the health of the local Arviat goose population, create and test new goose products to grow the local economy, and educate the public on the health benefits of goose consumption.
During the first phase of the competition, contestants will be funded up to $250,000 to test and develop their ideas. Workshops will be held to provide an opportunity for applicants and experts to exchange ideas and provide guidance on innovations.
“These groups have worked hard to address food insecurity issues and, through this challenge, our government is working with them to develop their ideas and support new advances in delivering long-term help for individuals and families in their communities,” said Northern Affairs Minister Daniel Vandal in a news release.
The second phase of the contest will see three projects chosen, which will each be eligible to receive up to $1 million to scale up their work. These finalists will be announced in 2023.
In sum the answer to food insecurity problems appears to be more hunting. This might be a workable short term solution, but I can’t be alone in my concern that it is not a viable long term strategy.
With that in mind it feels like we are not looking at the bigger picture nearly as much as we should be. Can we talk seriously about economic development, beyond subsistence hunting?
Its our culture, substance hunting , most talk about losing ones culture.
I strongly support the initiatives to give hunters a living wage and pride in their culture. However, the amount of harvestable animals is inversely proportional to consumption, and with a rapidly growing population this cannot be sustainable. If indigenous protein is a concern, I think we have to experiment with ranching, even if it is not a cultural practice.
Northerner, I appreciate that, but we still need to address population growth and sustainability over the long term. Also consider that the greater the infrastructure built around hunting (from administrative costs to paying hunters a living wage) the higher the costs for the consumer will eventually be. I’m not opposed to hunting, but its hard not to sense that there is no bigger picture thinking going on here.
Lack of caribou or declination there of appears too be over protection or lack of wolf hunting, thousand of caribou are killed caribou every few days, at least this was a case when I was a child in the mainland interior, I thinks it’s still the case today; food insecurity in parts of country food diet due to declination of caribou population. Even at ten thousand wolves per year, but this would not even dent the carnivore population. Food insecurity will only worsen with on going Covid 19 on-going chaos. Over protection of s[species is very bad for wildlife, i.e. lesser snow geese…
How many of those programs have we seen over the years ?
Remember the community freezer program in the 80s and 90s ?
How about the sausage and other contry food programs processing at the community level ? great programs and great products for a couple of years then the interest fades and they vanish.
What is going to be different this time ?
Good luck I guess.
Thanks
Good luck
Made-in-Nunavut solutions in the forms of gift cards, freezers, snowmobiles, cabins, qamotiqs, and greenhouses provide nothing but short-term relief. Without real long-term economic development that acknowledges that the subsistence lifestyle is no longer a realistic option, Nunavut will never achieve food security.
Why not start caribou farms and harvest like cattle in the south. Start raising and slaughtering live stock caribou
They tried in the past at kuujjuaq and inukjuaq , rounded up wild caribou into fences , didn t work
Maybe if we imported the semi-domesticated Reindeer from Fennoscandia we might have better luck?
The Sàmi have been herding caribou for thousands of years, maybe ITK should send a few Inuit to Norway and Sweden to learn their traditional methods and practices through knowledge-sharing. I’m sure they could learn a lot from Inuit as well. They are a very successful people and still live a relatively traditional lifestyle.
The Kuujjuaq project was a success. It was a research study to see if caribou could be kept in a captivity safely, and whether they put on weight over time. The result was affirmative for both foci – indeed, not one caribou died after being brought into the pen.
It was never meant to be an economic initiative.
Amazon and other similar sites provide free shipping to some (or most) communities. Perhaps a partnership/agreement with them will levitate the cost of dry goods and house supplies since the price of these items are considerably cheaper than local stores. The savings will allow more money to be spent on produce?
Amazon only provides free shipping to Iqaluit. The free shipping to all Nunavut communities was changed after a short time.
Free shipping is also to Rankin, Kugluktuk, and some other communities. There is some things you need to do when registering your address on Amazon that I wont get into detail here. But, it is free shipping.
I been using amazon (free shipping) for a year now.
You have to lie and misprint your postal code… we all know, lol
I think these are ingenious ideas and smart for CanNor to choose. Look at the sustainability in Greenland and the different access to country foods & the success with hunters.
An adult living in Nunavut needs a home and a kitchen to live very comfortably for $800 per months. That amount covers high-quality, nutritious food plus cleaning supplies and toiletries.
If somone who has a home and doesn’t know how to live comfortably on $800 per month, that person is entitled to training
If somone doesn’t have a home and a kitchen, that problem must be addressed.
Just expand the Mary River mine
1- recovery all cardboard , wood , ectt for burn all stoff
2- construction small incinerator working 24/24 7 days
3- make electricity whit incinerator for lighting de green house inside
4- recovers all the heat to heat the greenhouse for free
5-built two green house 40’x60’x26’ heights
6- firts floor all is heavy whit tank of whater
7- sec floor laitue,cucomber ,rasebary,etccc
No one is dying from starving. People are dying because of housing. This is very serious