[van-announce] {SATURDAY}Re-Open the Food Bank Now!

[Anti-Poverty Committee]

*please forward*

Re-Open the Food Bank Now!

Last month the only food bank in the Downtown Eastside was closed. Please
read the call-out below and if possible have your organisation endorse the
demand that the food bank be re-opened immediately.

There will be a Community Meeting featuring various organizations
struggling for economic human rights. Together we will organise to take
back what is ours!

Saturday April 5th
12 East Hastings @ 4pm
Free food and child care

The right to eat with justice and dignity must be fought for and won.
Hunger is a crime of capitalism. In this country, a million people are
forced to subsist from food banks. In Vancouver, food bank visitors number
25 000 weekly.  In a society of such extreme wealth, hunger is one of the
most vulgar contradictions.

Food banks are meant to prevent starvation. Most food banks are not
government-funded – rather, they are controlled by organizations that
function very much like the State they serve under. Although fundamentally
flawed, food banks distribute much-needed necessities to individuals and
families abandoned by their government. Donations include not only staple
foods but diapers, tampons and other over-priced essentials as well.

We struggle for the day when our communities will be sustainable and
healthy. Community gardens will flourish where once stood jails. We know
that in our capitalist society food is wasted while people are hungry. Our
government's economic policies directly dictate the amount of food that is
allowed into the 'free market' and how much is destroyed as surplus. These
actions are crimes against humanity.

In the Downtown Eastside (DTES), the poorest off-reserve neighborhood in
Canada, the one-and-only area food bank has been closed. The Vancouver
Food Bank Society has caved to the pressure of gentrification and is now
fully participating in the campaign of social cleansing. Working at the
behest of social planners, they have taken a 'starve 'em out' approach to
Olympic revitalization.

They claim that the people of the DTES are unable to cook for themselves
because they do not have a stove and that donated food will now be
distributed through networks of community kitchens and soup lines.

These remarks would be laughable, if not made at the expense of people in
need. Not having a stove is not an excuse to starve. So-called community
kitchens are relatively non-existent, and the few that are operating under
the guidance of NGO's are extremely limited and flawed. People who are
made sick by poverty are now expected to join food lines that stretch
blocks in order to pray so as to be fed.

The violent closure of the DTES food bank is racist and sexist. If one
were to believe the delusional explanations for the move, one would agree
that such justifications can be made against all food banks. But only the
one in the DTES was closed – the food bank in the neighborhood with the
disproportionately high numbers of poor women, people of color and
indigenous peoples.

Systematically, poor people are made to be at fault for their poverty. 
Food banks are charity, and the government is not seen as being
responsible for the gap in distribution that allows so many to go hungry.
Food banks are somehow portrayed as being natural the economic realities
and underpinnings of hunger are never addressed.

Hunger is not an accident and food banks are not a coincidence. Capitalism
flourishes so long as people starve, both locally and internationally.
Keeping people poor and hungry is imperialism's bread and butter.  This
profit-driven economic system keeps wages low and crime high; these
elements ensure that capital is accumulated while social control is
justified in protecting the stolen wealth.

The fight for the food bank to be re-opened is a struggle against
systematic racism and the oppression of poor people. For a movement of
poor people to organize to defeat this government it must be strong and
healthy. Although food banks are only crumbs, they are a necessity in this
starvation economy. And until this economy is overthrown the right to eat
with peace is an economic human right that must be won at all costs.

In this campaign we demand:
•	Re-Open the Food Bank Now!
•	Raise the Welfare Rates Immediately!
•	Homes for All Now!
•	Cancel the 2010 Game$ and Make Olympic Reparation$!

To get involved in this campaign please contact the APC or check out a
weekly general meeting on Tuesdays at 6pm at 524 Main St.

WE DON'T WANT A BIGGER PIECE OF THE CAKE, WE WANT THE WHOLE DAMN BAKERY!



-- 
The Anti-Poverty Committee is an organization of poor and working people,
who fight for poor people, their rights and an end to poverty by any means
necessary.  For more information on the Anti-Poverty Committee's on-going
campaigns, visit http://apc.resist.ca  Contact us by e-mailing
apc at resist.ca or phoning 604-682-3276.


                           UNITED WE WILL WIN!