Conclusion: food charity in Europe

This edited collection provides the first comprehensive study of the rise of food charity across Europe. This concluding chapter pulls together the findings of all the individual case studies to analyse what comparisons can be drawn regarding the growth of this type of charitable provision across the continent over the last few decades. The aim of this book is to use food charity as a lens through which to examine changing responses to poverty in the context of shifting social policies, and the data provided by the case studies have demonstrated just how important a lens food charity is in.. [continues] peerReviewed

Giving up Farming as a Precarious Decision

‘Precarity’ is a novel noun that is widely recognized and applied in timely political discourses and socioeconomic diagnoses of the present. It refers to fixed-term, temporary, low-paid, insecure, unpredictable, and often risky work. The occupational position of precarious people has been characterized as flexible or flexploitative, informal, casual, intermittent, non-standard, exceptional, often outsourced, or subcontracted. ‘Precarity’ is typically seen to characterize young people, women, immigrants, and service sector workers; but particular segments of creative and immaterial ‘new labour’ are also identified with the ‘precariat’. However, in spite of all these groupings, lists, and clu…

The Precarization Effect

What’s in the name ‘precarization’? Such a question can always be asked when we are dealing with a highly contestable concept (Gallie, 1956) or a family of concepts — as is definitely the case here, where it is also customary to speak about ‘precariousness’, ‘precarity’, and even ‘precariat’. This is a family of concepts or terms that has been defined in so many different and often incompatible ways that the answer to the question seems to greatly depend on the perspective or approach adopted. This is not as big a problem in the case of ‘precariousness’, which can be used to describe a variety of situations and events quite generally; but it makes all the difference when one refers to ‘prec…

Food Assistance

Food assistance and food charity refer to practices where public, private, or third sector actors provide food (or resources to acquire food) to individuals or households that face hunger or food shortage. The food is provided for free or for a minimal cost and the provision is conducted through varying services like food banks. Domestic food assistance practices are realized in relations between a collective (the provider or donor) and individuals (the recipients of the assistance). For those international practices of food aid that take place between collectives, typically nations or global food aid organizations and recipient countries, see the entry for Food aid. Currently, approximatel…

Insights into food system exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the concepts of exposure, coping capacity and adaptive capacity as a multiple structure of vulnerability in order to distinguish and interpret short-term coping responses and long-term strategic responses to food system vulnerability. Design/methodology/approach This paper applies an abductive approach for qualitative analysis of data, which were collected through 18 semi-structured interviews among Finnish food system actors. Findings The findings suggest that coping capacity and adaptive capacity are indeed two different concepts, which both need to be addressed in the examination of food system vulnerability. Public and private food syste…

Participatory alternatives for charity food delivery? Finnish development in an international comparison

[Introduction] Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; show him how to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. First and foremost, hunger as an extreme form of marginalization is a problem of developing countries. It is interesting, though, that food insecurity is also increasing rapidly in the developed world. This article deals with the particular phenomena of marginalization in forms of hunger and food insecurity in rich Western countries. Participation is discussed here as a promising option to deactivating and, at the worst, humiliating charity food delivery. The starting point of the article is that welfare services or policies have not been able to solve the problem of hu…

The Making and Unmaking of Precarity : Some Concluding Remarks

We live in societies in which the making and unmaking of precarity has a structuring power. In the labour market, precarity is created through laws and practices that reduce protections and benefits; but the labour market itself is also the place where precarity can be unmade through (at least partial) de-commodification and re-regulation. Precarity also penetrates people’s lives and mechanisms of identification, with practices of producing stigma but also of resisting it. Not by chance, the making and unmaking of precarity has become a central focus for contentious politics through the definition of the new subject of the precariat, and the struggles against precarity as a stripping of fun…

Hunger and Food Charity in Rich Societies: What Hope for the Right to Food?

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.

Ruokajärjestelmän haavoittuvuus koronaviruspandemialle

Charitable food aid in a nordic welfare state : A case for environmental and social injustice

Introduction:

This chapter sets out the key issues with which the book engages. It highlights the range of disparate evidence which is emerging on the rise of food charity from various academic sources across Europe. It discusses the urgent need for a comprehensive and rigorous comparative study of this phenomenon. It sets out the comparative concepts used by authors throughout the book notably food charity, food and poverty. It goes on to examine debates around social and human rights and the role of food waste in food charity, before discussing of the utility of understanding food charity as part of the ‘charity economy’. It ends with an outline of the rest of the book including the methodological appr…

Measuring Vulnerability in the Food System

Food system vulnerability is an emerging concept for food security policies and food supply chain management. Hence, measuring food system vulnerability is necessary for developing appropriate food security policies and managing food supply chain vulnerabilities. In this paper, we aim to clarify the development process of food system vulnerability indicators. We conducted an abducted qualitative content analysis based on public documents of various Finnish organizations, including ministries and administration, interest organizations, NGOs, food sector enterprises, and a church. We analysed the engagement level of various organizations in food security and identified vulnerability aspects i…

Vulnerability matrix of the food system : operationalizing vulnerability and addressing food security

Food security is the major desired outcome of any food system, but its realization may be prevented by vulnerabilities in a food system. By shifting the focus of their vulnerability analysis from the discrete components of the food system to the food system as a whole, the authors of this article were able to develop a qualitative food system vulnerability matrix. The objective of the research was to make the concept of food system vulnerability operational by identifying vulnerability drivers, vulnerable systems and vulnerable subclasses in light of food security. The vulnerability matrix was set up with five classes of vulnerable systems (‘Vulnerability of what?’) on the horizontal axis a…

Ilmastokriisi ja kansanterveys : on tekojen aika

Non peer reviewed

New frames for food charity in Finland

This chapter forms the land case study for Finland. As with all empirical chapters it explores several key themes in relation to food charity in Finland: • the history of food charity in the national context and the relationship between the welfare state and charities; • the nature of and drivers behind contemporary food charity provision; • key changes in social policy and their impact on rising charitable food provision; • and the social justice implications of increasing need for charitable assistance with food. The chapter concludes with critical reflections on the future direction of food charity provision in Finland and the implications of this.

Faith based organizations as actors in the charity economy : A case study of food assistance in Finland

In recent decades, charitable food assistance has grown into a prevalent way to respond to hunger as a manifestation of severe or absolute poverty that persists even in the affluent European Welfare States. By severe poverty we refer to an economic condition of life, which leaves an individual or family not only physically hungry but also in a situation where the basic need for nutritious healthy food is unmet to such a degree that it seriously violates the chance of sustaining socially accepted membership of society. Throughout Europe, nongovernmental organizations, and faith-based actors in particular, have taken up the task of alleviating the immediate food needs of the most deprived peo…

Onko hyväntekeväisyys aina hyvästä?

Manoeuvring between regulations to achieve locally accepted results : analysis of school meals in Latvia and Finland

Rather than having a consistent food policy, countries often tend to regulate food from the margins of other policy domains such as agricultural, environmental, welfare or educational policies. Regulatory interventions perceive food as an instrument rather than a domain with its own specific set of policy issues and view food provision as an activity to achieve certain economic, social and environmental objectives. This fragments the food policy into disintegrated points of interventions from various policy areas and leaves unregulated voids that can be exploited either to improve or to reduce the effectiveness of the interventions. This article explores interlinkages between fragmented pol…

Reilua ruokaa tänään ja huomenna : suosituksia kestävän ruokajärjestelmän luomiseksi

Tulevaisuuden ruoka- ja ravitsemusturva – mitä siitä?

Onko jo aktiivisen ruokapolitiikan aika?

Food security during climate change : the challenge of European diversity

Towards sustainable farming practices and food security: study about vulnerability of Finnish farms

The aim of this paper is to discuss food security in the context of sustainable farming practices in Finland. There are two research questions: 1) How are the Finnish farms vulnerable from the viewpoint of food security? 2) How could they increase their resilience for guaranteeing food security in the future? The paper is based on a qualitative study for which 15 Finnish food system specialists were interviewed in 2015. According to the results, three types of vulnerabilities are discovered: 1) market vulnerabilities, 2) continuity of farms, and 3) environment changes. For reducing vulnerabilities, the re-evaluation of policy instruments is needed. At the same time, new knowledge and skills…

Haavoittuvuusmatriisi

Matriisi liittyy 2020 julkaistavaan Elintarvike ja terveys -lehden artikkeliin. peerReviewed