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Food security sounds technical. It comes down to whether a household can reliably get enough food, of the kind it eats, without giving up rent or medicine. In Canada the answer differs sharply by race, and Black households are among those most often told no.

This section starts with the research: what national surveys measure, what they found before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, and what community-based studies add that a national survey cannot. It then moves to the ideas that have grown out of that gap: food sovereignty, which asks who controls food and land, and land-based healing, which treats time in the soil as care.

The last strand is history. Black growers in North America have organized around land and food for more than half a century, and several of their models are still in use.

Food security and food sovereignty are not the same

Food security, in the United Nations definition used since the 1996 World Food Summit, asks whether everyone has reliable access to enough safe and nutritious food that meets their needs and preferences. Food sovereignty, a term brought forward by the farmers' movement La Via Campesina, asks a different question: who decides how food is grown, distributed and priced. The first can be met with a well-stocked food bank. The second cannot.

Both ideas matter for African, Caribbean and other diaspora households in Victoria. A family can be food secure on paper and still unable to cook the food it knows, and a community can have land and skills but no say over how they are used.

Why the numbers come first

Statistics Canada measures household food insecurity every year through the Canadian Income Survey. Its tables show much higher rates for Black Canadians than for Canadians who are neither racialized nor Indigenous. The research article in this section sets out those figures, what the COVID-19 years did to them, and why British Columbia's numbers for Black residents come with a warning about sample size.

The other pieces look at responses: land-based healing practices, and the history of Black-led cooperatives, breakfast programs and urban farms that treated food as a matter of power as well as of hunger.

Throughout, the figures are given with their year and their source table, so they can be checked and updated when the next release comes out.

Produce boxes in Greater Victoria

The most direct local answer to the access problem is the produce box: a bag or crate of fresh vegetables and fruit, packed in bulk and picked up or delivered on a fixed day. Two programs show the range.

The larger one is the Good Food Box run by Fernwood NRG, a neighbourhood non-profit. It buys produce in bulk from local farms and suppliers, volunteers pack the boxes, and buyers collect them from pickup sites between Sooke and Saanich or take Wednesday home delivery. Some boxes go out free through partner agencies, paid for by an annual fundraiser, and in 2025 the program added a box filled only with produce grown in British Columbia.

The Palenke Produce Box started in January 2022 with a narrower aim: free boxes, every two weeks, of produce grown on Vancouver Island, for households in the Capital Region. Its organizers reported supplying more than 50 families in its first year, with over 2,000 pounds of produce sourced through South Island Farm Hub and over 1,000 pounds through the Fernwood Good Food Box. The name borrows the spelling Palenke from the free towns described in the piece on palenque greens.

The collective behind it, Iyé Creative Collective, received the Inspirational New Venture award at the 2022 Ecostar Awards, Greater Victoria's environmental leadership awards produced by the Synergy Foundation, for work advancing food justice. A produce box does not fix the income gap the surveys measure. What the small programs show is that a box can carry the ingredients a family actually cooks with, which a generic box rarely does.

Questions readers ask

What is the difference between food security and food sovereignty?

Food security is about access: whether people can reliably get enough safe, nutritious and acceptable food. Food sovereignty is about control: whether communities can decide how their food is produced and distributed. One is a condition, the other a political demand, and many local programs try to work on both at once.

How common is food insecurity among Black households in Canada?

Statistics Canada's Canadian Income Survey has recorded rates for Black people in recent years at roughly twice the rate for people who are neither racialized nor Indigenous. The research article on this site gives the exact figures by year, with the table they come from, and explains why figures for smaller provinces need caution.

What is community-based research?

Research in which the people affected by a problem help shape the questions, collect the information and interpret the results. In food security work that often means surveys, conversations and shared meals run together with community members, not simply about them. It complements national surveys, which rarely have enough local respondents to say much about one city.

Is this section only about Black communities?

It focuses on Black and African diaspora households because the research gap is largest there, but much of it applies to other racialized and newcomer communities in Greater Victoria, and the land-based healing piece deals equally with Indigenous relationships to the land the city sits on.