The dangers of rationalizing temporary foreign worker programs as a solution to food waste

Abstract

In this Forum piece, I argue that actors in Canada’s agri-food industry have begun to frame the employment of temporary migrant workers as a remedy to food loss and waste. This discursive shift threatens to further entrench Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs, which have been critiqued as enabling labour exploitation and facilitating the poor treatment of precarious racialized workers from the global South. I detail the limitations and violations associated with these temporary migration programs, and discuss how they have been criticized as neo-colonial tools of the Canadian state. I then discuss the increased policy attention paid to food loss and waste in Canada and other locales, suggesting that this is an emergent environmental issue that is still in discursive flux. As the framing of temporary migrant workers as a solution to food waste gains discursive coherence in Canada, it becomes important to attend to what is centred and what is discarded by this narrative. I argue that this emerging framing invokes a sustainability crisis in order to reinforce the status quo of exploitative migrant labour systems, and that such a discursive move is ethically problematic.