Reader wants subsidy extended to organic food

Nutrition North and Health Canada have undertaken a complete revamp of the food mail program in order to assure that Nunavimmiut will enjoy a healthy diet.

Unfortunately the burdensome conditions of compliance for both suppliers and retailers has effectively narrowed the bottleneck through which foods are funnelled to the north. This could have catastrophic results if contaminated food made into our very limited supply chain.

For example, almost all the chicken and meat birds we consume are raised in large facilities in Quebec.

According to CBC Marketplace research, antibiotics are routinely used in the farming of fowl.

Samples of the meat showed that bacteria on chicken can be resistant to six and even eight types of antibiotics essential to the treatment of human infections. Unlike other countries, Canada does not control the use of antibiotics in the farming of meat birds. It is left to the industry to self-regulate.

Nutrition North and Health Canada must do more than take the paternal role of telling us what we ought to eat to stay healthy. They must make sure that the limited supply line is not in the long run capable of creating a serious outbreak of antibiotic resistant infection in the north.

Here in Iqaluit there are only a few grocery sources and a handful of restaurants, all of which depend on suppliers licensed by Nutrition North. Effectively we are all eating the same foods.

We need the supply chain to be broadened and opened to accommodate alternative suppliers of food, such as organic growers and smaller independent producers.

There needs to be a way that northerners can order from the sources they prefer and then claim back the subsidy directly. Proof of purchase of foods remitted with a list to identify the described category for subsidy could be filled out by the buyer in a way similar to claiming paid out retail sales tax on goods purchased in the south and shipped here.

Sherry Shorthouse
Iqaluit

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