Policy from Above, Solutions from Below: Unpacking the Paradoxes of Food Security Interventions in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, BC

Abstract

Following decades of neoliberal governance since the 1970s and 1980s, the food security interventions offered by the nonprofit industrial complex (NPIC) have become paradoxical. Based on five weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at the Pacific Community Hub (PCH), a grassroots nonprofit organization in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES), this paper reveals their efforts and struggles with combating food insecurity while facing various systemic obstacles. A closer look at the limitations of charitable and tokenistic interventions to food security, situated within a broader historical and socio-economic context, shows how the responsibility is continuously shifted away from the government. Hence, contrasting top-down policies with bottom-up initiatives can provide critical insights into equitable solutions to food insecurity for vulnerable populations in the DTES. I argue that grassroots and asset-based community development approaches to equitable food security are more effective than neoliberal policies that systematically fail to address structural root causes.