Canadian Foodgrains Bank receives $100 million over four years to combat food insecurity

The Canadian Foodgrains Bank has once again received federal government funding with a grant for $100 million over the next four years.

Split into $25 million per year, that will go towards their programs which help Candian-produced food go to hungry mouths internationally.

Andy Harrington, the executive director of the Canadian Foodgrains Bank, says he's happy to be able to help more people over the next four years.

"We've had a long-standing relationship across different parties with the governments of Canada for over 40 years now. This particular funding goes towards emergency food assistance, humanitarian assistance in times of crisis for people who are in pretty severe situations, chronic and severe hunger, and potentially as well for some of them either on the edge of or in famine, so it's very important food assistance for hundreds of thousands of people each year."

Harrington says they work with a number of local and international groups to make that happen.

"The way we're structured, we have 15 members of the Canadian Foodgrain Bank. They each have partners around the world, so we have hundreds of partners around the world. The requests come from those partners in local communities, could be regional, it could be a number of communities joining together."

"It's generally, you know reasonably and sort of medium scale. It can be anywhere from a few hundred people to 10s of thousands. But it's all organised by the local communities and local partners and then that is then distributed to each individual person. So we have monitoring and evaluation on an individual person level."

Harrington is glad to receive that $100 million and is hoping to match that with $25 million in donations from Canadians over the four years.

They've put in a lot of work over the previous four years of the program.

"For example, the crisis in Lebanon which is taking place as a result of the invasion of Syria, created over five million refugees, and so these people fled from conflict in their own country. So throughout the term of the last one, and actually even from before then, we've been able to use this funding to put thousands of people who have no ability to purchase food for themselves and the real dire straits in Lebanon, so that would be one."

Harrington says they've also provided assistance to Ukrainian citizens during its war with Russia.

He says that in the upcoming four years, the Canadian Foodgrains Bank will be both reactive and proactive when it comes to food insecurity situations.