Abstract
To increase donations of nutritious food, Ontario introduced a tax credit for farmers who donate agricultural products to food banks in 2013. This research seeks to investigate the role of Ontario’s Food Donation Tax Credit for Farmers in addressing both food loss and waste (FLW) and food insecurity through a case study of fresh produce rescue in Windsor-Essex, Ontario. This research also documents the challenges associated with rescuing fresh produce from farms, as well as alternatives to donating. Interviews with food banks, producers and key informants revealed that perceptions of the tax credit, and the credit’s ability to address FLW and food insecurity, contrasted greatly with the initial perceptions of the policymakers who created the tax credit. In particular, the legislators did not anticipate the logistical challenges associated with incentivizing this type of donation, nor the limitations of a donation-based intervention to provide food insecure Ontarians with access to fresh, nutritious food.
Highlights
One third of all food produced in the world for human consumption is lost or wasted (Gustavsson et al 2011)
In Canada, new research estimates that the value of avoidable food loss and waste from farm to fork per year is $49.5 billion; this equates to 3% of Canada’s GDP in 2016, or 51.8% of money that Canadians spent on food from retail stores that year (Gooch et al 2019)
As Robert Bailey, the Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) from the Progressive Conservative Official Opposition who introduced the idea of a tax credit for farmers, proclaimed: My proposed legislation will provide a financial incentive for producers to donate, that will provide producers, at minimum, with a tax credit which will help to offset some of the costs associated with growing and harvesting fresh produce, while in many cases it will provide producers with a net financial benefit for the donation of those surplus food products
Summary
One third of all food produced in the world for human consumption is lost or wasted (Gustavsson et al 2011). It is estimated that the environmental impact of food waste in Canada is equivalent to 1.8 million hectares of wasted cropland per year and biodiversity loss equivalent to $26 million USD per year (Commission for Environmental Cooperation 2017a). Notwithstanding these statistics, food waste is a difficult concept to define. We use the umbrella term ‘food loss and waste’ (FLW) to refer to any wholesome edible material produced for human consumption that is discarded, lost, degraded or destroyed at any stage of the food supply chain (FAO 1981; see KC et al 2016). There is a moral tone to current discussions of the scale of wasted food, there are diverse individual, institutional, and economic causes of
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