How meals is weaponised, from Gaza to Canada
By Charles Z. Levkoe, Martha Stiegman, Sarah Rotz and Tammara Soma
For greater than a yr, the Israeli state has been engaged in an enormous incursion into Gaza following the October 2023 Hamas assault towards Israel.
In March 2024, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Particular Rapporteur on the scenario of human rights within the Occupied Palestinian Territories, introduced: “There are cheap grounds to imagine that the edge indicating the fee of the crime of genocide… has been met.”
A core component of this obvious genocide contains meals militarisation and weaponisation, a tactic that has additionally been utilized by Canada to exterminate, dispossess and management indigenous populations.
We’ve got come collectively as a bunch of essential meals methods students to look at the parallels between the weaponisation of meals in Gaza and Canada to convey concerning the systematic destruction of indigenous peoples. However we’ve additionally noticed that meals has been a robust software of resistance and resurgence.
All through fashionable historical past, meals has been deployed as a weapon by colonial regimes to manage and displace indigenous populations. The present disaster in Gaza has introduced this into sharp focus because the Israeli state has engaged within the systematic destruction of Palestinian meals methods, with devastating penalties.
Israel’s blockade of Gaza, in place since 2007, has minimize off entry to important agricultural areas and restricted fishing actions. Gaza farmers are sometimes unable to entry their land, whereas fishers are consistently barred from accessing the coast, harassed, intimidated and even killed by Israeli forces.
This blockade, mixed with navy operations that destroy farmland, timber and infrastructure, has resulted in additional than 95 per cent of individuals in Gaza dealing with extreme meals insecurity and a famine declared by the United Nations consultants in the summertime of 2024.
All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Canadian authorities employed comparable techniques to limit indigenous peoples’ entry to land, meals and water. Colonial insurance policies just like the Indian Act, the Homesteading Act and the Move System confined indigenous peoples to reserves, prohibited looking and fishing and compelled reliance on insufficient authorities meals rations.
This led to malnutrition and hunger, notably in response to indigenous resistance to settler growth. Using meals as a weapon was a part of a broader challenge to get rid of or in any other case undermine Indigenous identification and self-determination, a course of that continues right now.
From ongoing boil-water advisories to environmental degradation attributable to mining, oil and fuel extraction, forestry, agriculture and chemical manufacturing, settler governments and industries proceed to dispossess indigenous peoples from their lands and undermine their livelihood.
These practices have severely and disproportionately impacted indigenous well being and wellbeing, in addition to their meals methods.
Within the occupied Palestinian territories, Israeli management over land and sources displays an identical colonial dynamic. Legal guidelines just like the Absentee Property Legislation of 1950 facilitated the expropriation of Palestinian land.
In the meantime, the Israeli navy has systematically focused Gaza’s meals infrastructure and used hunger as a weapon of conflict, in accordance with Human Rights Watch. Satellite tv for pc imagery exhibits that 70 per cent of Gaza’s tree cowl has been eradicated or broken, and about one-third of greenhouses have been demolished.
Tanks and vehicles have decimated orchards, discipline crops and olive groves.
An estimated 800,000 tonnes of asbestos among the many particles of destroyed buildings will lead to asbestos-related illnesses for generations to return. Beneath the Geneva Conventions, destruction of civilians’ technique of survival and hunger as a software of warfare is strictly prohibited.
Meals has additionally lengthy been mobilised as a robust software of resistance. Amongst Palestinians, struggles for meals sovereignty have performed a essential position in self-determination.
Palestinians proceed to domesticate their land underneath the rubble, develop olive timber regardless of ongoing violence and keep meals practices that join them to their lands and their cultural heritage.
Equally, indigenous nations and communities throughout Canada have used meals as a type of resurgence. Alongside land again actions, efforts to revitalise indigenous meals methods – akin to looking, fishing, rising and gathering – are central to actions for indigenous sovereignty.
Studying about and enacting conventional meals practices are essential acts of resistance, as these practices maintain communities, strengthen connections to land and assert rights over the unceded territories indigenous peoples are preventing to reclaim. By reclaiming and rebuilding their land and meals methods on their very own phrases, they proceed to problem colonial buildings.
The destruction of meals methods in Gaza and Canada is an element of a bigger effort of land dispossession and capitalist accumulation. By severing indigenous peoples’ connection to their meals methods, settlers and colonial regimes have sought to manage not solely the land but in addition the individuals who rely upon it.
But, via meals sovereignty actions, these similar populations are reclaiming their proper to self-determination and constructing world networks of solidarity.
The wrestle for meals sovereignty is inseparable from broader struggles for land, justice and self-determination.
Connecting the dots between the Palestinian territories and Canada offers highly effective examples of worldwide colonial relations and struggles for justice and self-determination. It challenges us to critically study the position of meals in these struggles and demand authorities accountability.
Charles Z. Levkoe is Canada Analysis Chair in Equitable and Sustainable Meals Programs, Lakehead College, Martha Stiegman is Affiliate Professor, Environmental and City Change, York College, Canada, Sarah Rotz is Assistant Professor, Environmental and City Change, York College, Canada, and Tammara Soma is Affiliate Professor on the College of Useful resource and Environmental Administration, Simon Fraser College. This text is republished from The Dialog underneath a Artistic Commons licence
