Off-Reserve Moms Going Hungry To Feed Kids: Prof
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 14:07
An Alberta professor says she believes many Aboriginal mothers who live off-reserve are going hungry at times to feed their children.
Noreen Willows of the University of Alberta recently crunched some survey data collected in 2004.
Willows says the data shows that 14 per cent of Canadian Aboriginal households off-reserve didn’t have access to proper food security.
She says that includes families who weren’t sure where their next meal would come from, couldn’t eat the food they wanted, or saved it in case they went hungry later on.
Most of these households, she says, belong to single women raising three children or more.
“We actually found that in total, one-third of Aboriginal respondents were ‘food insecure’, and of those, 14 per cent were severely ‘food insecure’, which suggests me to that at least one member of that household would have been going hungry, or going without food,” Willows says.
Willows suggests raising welfare rates and creating more poverty alleviating measures to help fight the problem.