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February 13, 2009

The Working Poor Diet

Posted by Lindsay Kneteman at 06:59 PM ET | Comments (0)

Think you're tough? Think you're frugal? Think you could live on only $80 worth of food for an entire month? That's what three Edmontonians are doing; spending a mere $80 on groceries throughout February as part of an experiment called the Working Poor Diet (the $80 figure was calculated using Alberta's minimum wage rate of $8.40 and an assortment of cost-of-living studies and surveys, including this one).

Oh, and if you're thinking you could do it, you'd just eat at your friends' houses or survive on bulk candy, think again. Like any diet, this one comes with some rules, including no free food and perhaps the most challenging one, following the Canadian Food Guide's daily recommendations as closely as possible.

The Working Poor Diet started as a way to draw attention to "the connection between poverty, nutrition and health" as well as raise funds for the Edmonton food bank. Over the past week, it's proven to be a particularly relevant experiment given the Heart and Stroke Foundation's recent annual report that revealed the high cost basic food items in some parts of this country and how these discrepancies are impacting our nation's health.

According to that report, you might be paying six times more for basics such as apples, milk and lean ground beef than someone living in another part of the country. The report also found that 68 percent of those surveyed said that the price of an item was "extremely" or "very" important when choosing what product to buy, which only makes sense when you're watching your pennies, as many people are these days. Unfortunately, cheap foods tend not to be healthy foods, the stuff we should all be eating more of. This is something that the Working Poor Diet participates have noticed first hand.

"In two days we will reach the halfway point of this project and I have about $15 to spend on fruits, vegetable and dairy," participate Tracy Hyatt tells me over email, "Am I scared I'm not going to make it? You bet. I won't starve but I won't be eating a healthy diet in the remaining days." I don't believe she's exaggerating one bit. A mere $15 wouldn't even cover what I spend on milk every two weeks.

Her experience, along with that of follow participants Jeff Gonek and Jennifer Windsor, is currently being documented over in the Working Poor Diet blog, a great look at not only this experiment, but at our relationship with food in general.

More entries on: Poverty

January 12, 2009

Please sir, can I have some more minutes?

Posted by Melissa Wilson at 09:10 AM ET | Comments (0)

Last fall, I broke my cell phone (a.k.a., alarm clock/voice recorder/little black book/lifeline) and in the two days it took to get a new one, my life stopped. I fell behind on assignments, scrambled to find phone numbers and slept with my laptop next to me because 1) I needed it to act as a pseudo alarm clock and 2) I was convinced that a burglar would pick that night to break into my apartment (which, in reality, is pretty safe) and without a landline, I wanted my computer close by so I could Facebook 911.

Now, I'm a student, not Ari Gold, but suffice to say I cannot live without my cell phone, even for two days.

So the question is this: if they are so necessary, should Canada be doling out cell phones like food stamps and free mittens to those who can't afford them? No? But the Joneses are doing it!

According to a Toronto Star feature, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has introduced a program--Safelink--to provide eligible Americans with 68 minutes a month on a free cell phone with all the bells and whistles (voice mail, caller ID, call waiting and texting).

The Star's Lynda Hurst writes, "In the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. has increased the drive to ensure all citizens have basic phone services and access to help in times of emergency."

Safelink, provided by TracFone Wireless Inc., is currently available in Florida, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee and Virginia and, according to the website, will soon be available in 10 additional states, including New York, Connecticut and DC.

Judging by the comment's on Hurst's article, the public is less than thrilled about the new initiative, the main complaint being that (surprise, surprise) a cell phone is a luxury and should be reserved for those who work hard to pay for it.

I think an interesting point is that while no one would argue that access to a landline isn't important to any person's success and safety, many seem to have a hard time swallowing the notion that cell phone access carries the same importance, that it is more necessity than luxury. Now, if one already has a landline, I might agree, but the program is meant to give phone services to the 7 million Americans without it, not to give cake to starving peasants.

Let's not forget that in 2009, it's not uncommon for an individual to forgo landline service in favour of a cell phone.

Aside from the obvious benefits of a cell phone over a landline (a cell could be accessible 24/7, in case of an emergency; the owner is much less likely to miss an important call, possibly from an employer, etc.), a landline requires a permanent address, not always a guarantee for those in the low-income bracket who might often be moving from one cheap apartment to another. Secondly, the cost of a basic landline is comparable (especially in the U.S. where cell phones are much cheaper than they are here) to that of a cell phone. Providing landline service on principle would be like giving someone a tambourine for entertainment when for the same price you could have given him an iPod.

On the other side of the coin, behind all of the philanthropy and good intentions is a cell phone company. Is it impossible that they saw dollar signs in FCC subsidies or considered the millions of potential customers when they signed on to help the less fortunate? When the free cell phones run out of their allotted 68 minutes, it's up to the user to pay for extra.

What's that saying? Nothing in life is free?

Regardless of all the pro and con arguments, the richest irony is that a nation that's committed to putting a cell phone in every pocket for safety still hasn't made it a priority to put a universal health care card in every wallet.

More entries on: Poverty

January 03, 2008

Canada's top CEOs already made your salary

Posted by mason at 01:17 PM ET | Comments (3)

How long will it take the country's top 100 CEOs to make as much as the average Canadian does in a year? Whoops, it's already happened. According to research by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, "Canada's best paid 100 CEOs make the average Canadian wage by 10:33 am January 2."

And that's the average. If you're unlucky enough to be a minimum-wage earner, your entire year's income will have been pocketed by those 100 dudes (and maybe a few dudettes) by 1:04 pm on New Year's Day. In a new site called GrowingGap.ca, the CCPA has underscored this inequality with a tool that calculates how long it will take any salary to reach the best-paid CEOs.

As report author Hugh Mackenzie says in a news release, "We have to ask ourselves, are those at the top of the income heap really worth so much? And are those at the bottom really worth so little?"

More entries on: Poverty

July 05, 2007

Roadtripping

Posted by aaron at 10:35 PM ET | Comments (0)

A week ago, my friend and I left Vancouver, planning to hit Seattle, Portland and the Oregon Coast.
One interesting thing about driving through rural America is the way the war manifests itself in the endless stream of bumper stickers, pins and billboards. In coffee-crazy Washington state, even the smallest hamlets have three or four drive-through espresso stands. The stereotype of Latte Liberals and Seven-Eleven-drip Republicans doesn't have much currency here. One stand we went to, in the parking lot of the "Faith in Action Thrift Store," dished out Cappucinos to guys in pick-up trucks. It's wall of local soldiers' names had turned into a shrine of sorts, flowers adorned with those little flags Americans love so much.

In the tiny town of Drain, Oregon, every filthy little thrift store was covered in "Support the Troops" stickers. A bridal boutique display had dresses in red, white and blue and the old man outside wore a stars and stripes singlet. Fifteen miles down the road, we arrived in a considerably different town: one with vegetarian cafes, a freshly painted pub/bakery/bookstore celebrating it's monthly Art Walk. Baby boomers and some even older dressed in the rural ideal (immaculate leather boots and LL Bean hats) waved large rainbow peace flags as they marched down the block with placards reading "Bring the Troops Home Now." We were the only audience.

The next day, in a suburb south of Tacoma on the edge of a highway on-ramp there was another flag waving ceremony, this one "in support of the troops." It's where I took this picture.

Another striking part of driving through the states is the trailer parks. Although we certainly have them in Canada (see The Trailer Park Boys), they're less apparent than the large fields of cheap siding and rust glimpsed from the interstate.

Jokes abound about bad weather and trailers, the most common is calling trailer parks, "tornado magnets" or "tornado bait." This is nonsense of course. Bad weather hits other buildings too, but it's the trailer parks usually suffer complete devastation. These are homes with no foundations, built from the flimsiest of materials and completely at the mercy of the weather.

I'm guilty myself of using the saying "attracted to him like a tornado to a trailer park." The implications of such quips never occured to me until this trip. I mean, all kinds of attention is given to the shanty-towns of the underdeveloped world, even the dilapidation of American inner cities; but I've never thought about the sheer number of rural and suburban North Americans who live in substandard housing. There aren't a lot of tornadoes here in the Pacific Northwest but there's consistent flooding. Images on local TV of mobile-homes being washed away is common. Outside the staggeringly wealthy centres of Seattle and Portland one can see whole towns, endless subdivisions of mobile and manufactured homes.

More entries on: Poverty

June 14, 2007

Vulture funds undermine African debt cancellation

Posted by mason at 12:51 PM ET | Comments (0)

Behind the G8 leaders’ photo ops and trumped-up commitments to cancel African debt, the dirty business of so-called “vulture funds” are making real debt relief impossible. As reported by investigative journalist Greg Palast on the BBC and Democracy Now, companies have been allowed to buy debts owed by African countries at a discount, and then sue those countries for more than the value of the debt:

In February, BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast exposed on Democracy Now! how one vulture fund, Donegal International owned by US resident Michael Sheehan, was trying to collect $40 million dollars from Zambia after buying one of its debts for $4 million dollars. Soon after, Congressman John Conyers and Congressman Donald Payne brought this up with President Bush, and urged him to ensure that the G-8 summit would close the legal loopholes that allow vulture funds to flourish.

See (or listen to) a transcript of Palast’s interview on Democracy Now here.

PHOTO OF GREG PALAST: FROM HIS FLICKR PAGE

More entries on: Poverty

June 07, 2007

Inside Toronto's social housing action

Posted by mason at 10:30 AM ET | Comments (4)

On Sunday, This Magazine writer Jennifer O’Connor participated in a march for social housing leading up to the takeover of an abandoned house in Toronto. Here is her account of the action.

(PHOTO: KRISZTINA KUN)

"How would you like to live with roaches, no heat, no water and no money to cover basic necessities?" asked one of the signs clothespinned to a fence in Toronto's Cawthra Park.

Hundreds of people came here on Sunday for a rally before marching through downtown Toronto and arriving at an abandoned house on Howard Street (near Bloor and Sherbourne streets) that had been taken over by the Women Against Poverty Collective.

The collective, a group of women and trans people, organized the takeover to provide "safe and affordable community spaces where women can live." A tent city was also set up in the park across the street from the house. WAPC's eight demands include federal right-to-housing legislation, universal childcare and a 40 per cent increase to social assistance rates. (The complete list of demands is available here.)

The facts connecting violence and women's poverty are shameful. According to the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, one in seven women in this country is living in poverty. Plus, recent research from Statistics Canada states that women report just over one-third of physical assaults to police. The CRIAW has also found that the early death rate for homeless women is 10 times that of women with housing. "Any plan to reduce or eliminate violence against women," reads one of the institute's fact sheets, "must deal with the issue of creating safe, affordable, accessible housing."

At the housing takeover, I joined in the chants: "Housing by women, for women, now!"; "Our housing, our right, we want a place to sleep tonight!"; "Poor women under attack, what do we do? Stand up! Fight back!" I grooved along when "Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves" was played. I tried to figure out the answers to the speculative questions: Did the police just take the horses in the trailer up the street or come back down? The police had blocked the house as soon as we'd arrived, and I waited to see what was going to happen.

Just after 7 p.m., in the middle of a rainstorm, the police began moving those of us in front of the house back onto the sidewalk across the street and the horses were brought in. "Many, many of the women that were there yesterday were injured," WAPC member Anna Willats said on Monday. We shouted and cheered for the four women who were arrested when they came out. (Another woman was arrested outside of the house; they were all released.)

Those of us in tent city were going to move out of the park, as we'd been invited to another location, but I found myself scrambling to get my tent and my belongings out of the way of the horses as we were chased through the park and out to Sherbourne Street while most of the demonstrators were being forced straight down Howard to Sherbourne. We walked back to Cawthra Park, with the police following us on bicycles, before disbanding.

On Monday, the WAPC held a lunch/press conference at the 519 Church Street Community Centre. The idea was to keep the focus on the demands, and the collective has promised to "demonstrate for change until it happens."

More entries on: Feminism | Human rights | Poverty

March 15, 2007

Drugs into bodies, money into pockets

Posted by shawnsyms at 03:06 PM ET | Comments (0)

When Big Pharma doesn't get its way, it takes its toys and goes home. When the "toys" in question are life-saving medications, the results can be grim. People with HIV in Thailand are finding this out first hand.

Most medications are protected by 20-year patents that allow a drugmaker the exclusive right to produce them and profit from them— but exceptions can be made for urgent medical situations in poor countries. A country can issue a "compulsory license" to allow for the generic manufacture of drugs its people urgently need but cannot afford.

That's what Thailand has done in the case of Kaletra, one of the new generation of HIV meds. Prior to that, the government in the developing nation had been trying without success to get Abbott Laboratories to lower its hefty annual $2,200-per-patient pricetag.

The Thai government's move was assailed by the Wall Street Journal, who called it a "seizure of foreign drug patents." Abbott responded by pulling its wares off Thai shelves. They have rescinded a request to register a new heat-resistant version of Kaletra in Thailand, along with several other Abbott products. This effectively prevents the government from allowing anyone to make a generic copy of the drug, because they will have no legal access to the original in order to test and assure they are equivalent.

Activists argue that this demonstrates putting profits over people's lives. The heat-resistant drug formulation was desperately needed in Thailand because there is no guarantee of refrigeration at all points in the drug's supply chain.

American law professor Brook K Baker, member of the advocacy group Health GAP, was particularly scathing. In a release, he described the withholding the registration for life-saving medicines "a new variant of pharmaceutical apartheid."

Baker assailed the notion the drug companies need to protect their patents because of R&D costs. He described Abbott as "a company which has been subsidized through NIH and university research for most of its discoveries, which gets huge taxes breaks for its research and development expenditures, and which earns monopoly profits on all its sales in rich country markets that collectively comprise 90% of global pharmaceutical sales."

The battling over profits in poor countries certainly appears greedy. Médecins sans Frontières also criticized the drug company, noting that in Thailand, newer "second-line" HIV drugs like Kaletra (which many patients need to turn to when older medicines no longer work for them), can cost up to 22 times more than first-line drugs, specifically because of patent protection.

In Thailand, where AIDS has become a leading cause of death, that's money most people just don't have.

More entries on: HIV/AIDS | Pharma | Poverty

March 08, 2007

International Women's Day Special Report: Women's Health in Haiti

Posted by shawnsyms at 04:09 PM ET | Comments (0)

The poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, Haiti has suffered as a result of international intervention for over five hundred years. The damage continues to this day, in the form of desperate poverty and extreme brutality. Some of those at greatest risk are women.

Last year, the medical journal The Lancet estimated that in the year following 2004's armed insurrection against the Haitian government, 8,000 murders and 35,000 acts of sexual assault occurred in the area surrounding the capital Port au Prince alone. More recently, the BBC reported that some UN troops deployed in the distraught nation have been accused of sexual violence against children.

And with Haiti's for-profit healthcare model, the most vulnerable suffer. In the dozens of slums surrounding Port au Prince, women were forced to give birth at home in unsanitary conditions, without the benefit of electricity, latrines or even running water. Until Médecins sans Frontières got involved, that is. MSF opened Jude Anne Hospital one year ago, strategically locating it so the poorest women in the capital city could easily travel there. The hospital offers emergency obstetric care to poor pregnant women, for free. It also offers support for those who have been sexually assaulted, and provides anti-retroviral treatment to deter mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

The hospital has just over 50 beds—but hundreds of women seek help there every day. So a fast turnaround is essential. About 4 hours can be devoted per standard birth; women who undergo Caesarean sections can recuperate there for two days. Still, the efforts of the hospital staff greatly increase the odds for women and children in a country where, the MSF points out, there are 523 maternal deaths for every 100,000 childbirths (compared with 20 deaths on average in Western nations).

Jude Anne Hospital saves lives. Many of its patients experience high-risk medical complications where an attempt at home birth would likely kill the mother, or child, or both. Still, even managing to get to the hospital can be a fateful risk. In the slums of Port au Prince, random violence such as shootings and kidnapping are daily occurrences. A lot of the births take place in the hallways or even in the parking lot. As Sarah Senbeto, one midwife working at Jude Anne, told MSF: "Sadly enough, we can only help a small portion of the women in Port au Prince. We can only save those who make it this far."

MSF is on a mission to let the world know the struggles facing the poor women of Haiti. Find out more here.

More entries on: Feminism | Healthcare | Poverty | Sexual Health

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