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

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.

Automated summary

This Forum piece discusses the framing of temporary migrant workers as a solution to food loss and waste in Canada's agri-food industry. It highlights the limitations and violations associated with temporary migration programs, which have been criticized as neo-colonial tools of the Canadian state. The emergence of food loss and waste as an environmental issue is still in flux. The author argues that framing migrant workers as a solution to food waste reinforces exploitative labor systems and raises ethical concerns.