Climate Change in the Arctic and the Condition of Inuit’s Food Insecurity: the Case of Inuit in the Cambridge Bay of Canada
The aim of this research is to analyze the level of food insecurity of Inuit in the area of Nunavut territory in Canada. As a result, we were able to find out the following facts. First, nearly half of them felt hungry due to lack of food as of 2018. Second, the food situation was getting worse year by year. In the four years from 2014 to 2018, the growth rate of food insecurity households reached 22.0%. Third, proportion of children under 18 who lived in food insecure households reached 78.7%. Starving children had low self-esteem, suffered from depression and had a very high suicide rate. Fourth, most of Inuit’s food tables were filled with store-bought foods, rather than country foods. Fifth, the food sovereignty of Inuit community was seriously threatened with local capacity of self-sufficiency being low, market-dependent being high, and political exclusion from the policy decision being severe. Two things needed to be kept in mind in order to solve this Inuit’s food insecurity efficiently. First, in addition to environmental factors such as climate change, food issues are interconnected and affected by socioeconomic, cultural and policy factors. Second, policy intervention in the food issues should be centered on the Inuit party in accordance with human rights and food sovereignty perspectives.