Food insecurity, an issue among refugees and immigrants

While we often associate food insecurity with poverty, wars are becoming an important reason behind hunger in many parts of the world, as they destroy people’s livelihoods and continue to plague those who have escaped conflict, says Mustafa Koç, professor of sociology at Ryerson University.

In his research connecting sociology and agriculture, Koç looks at the social factors influencing why people suffer from food insecurity. “We wanted to understand why we have hunger in a world that is capable of feeding everybody,” said Koç.

After his trip to Iraq in January 2003, where he travelled with an international delegation to find out the potential impacts of war on children, Koç began to examine the relationship between food insecurity and armed conflict.

Through two projects funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), Koç is part of a team of researchers who have been looking at patterns of food insecurity among refugees. Their first project compared food insecurity among Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Iran, and Canada. The latest project focuses on food insecurity among recent Syrian refugees arriving in Canada. These projects not only provide insights into the plight of refugees around the world, but also show how the world can cope with and better manage global emergencies.

Koç remembers the World Food Summit of 1996, where the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization set a target to halve hunger globally from 800 to 400 million people by 2015. Despite significant efforts in some parts of the world, the number of people suffering food insecurity is still around the 800 million mark. Our inability to effectively address these global social and ecological emergencies is causing a crisis of legitimacy, argues Koç, creating an obstacle that reduces our ability to mobilize the public in order to progress toward better targets.  

Nevertheless, Koç has kept his optimism that the situation can be improved. He was one of the founders of Ryerson’s Centre for Studies of Food Security and is continuing to make contributions to research and training in this area. The Canadian Association for Food Studies, which was founded at Ryerson in 2005, will host its annual conference as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Ryerson in May 2017.

Koç is pleased that Ryerson researchers have spearheaded these global efforts and are being recognized in international and national policy platforms. “Our federal government is working on a national food policy — a first in our history — and we are part of these exciting developments,” says Koç.