Hunger amid plenty

September 16, 2026

key points from this story:

• Sunny fall Sunday during Saskatchewan harvest
• Prairies long grew hard red spring wheat
• Canola now the dominant Prairie crop
• World grows enough food for everyone
• Hunger persists in Canada and abroad
• Wealth imbalance blamed, not food shortage

It’s a sunny Sunday, not warm exactly, but it’s fall in Saskatchewan, so a sunny day is just fine on its own. It is a time when farmers want to be out in the field bringing in the crop and so it is perhaps the time we most think about how we live in what was at one time known as the breadbasket to the world.

Farmers of the Canadian Prairies have long been good at producing hard red spring wheat which is appreciated by bakers as its flour makes fine bread. What farmers grow today is more diversified with a shift from wheat to canola as the main crop and a host of niche crops in the mix as well, but in the end most acres are devoted to growing crops to feed people.

Farmers here, and frankly around the world generally do their very best to grow as much food as possible asking only that when it comes time to sell that production they realize a price that covers their reasonable costs and a profit for the future. Collectively there is food for all, even as the world population continues to grow – that is the positive side of things.

So why then are there still people going hungry? It’s a question where the answer really comes down to people – in the broadest sense of a world collective – not making the effort to ensure everyone is sufficiently fed. It is simply not seen as a priority, and that is the reality not just in Third world countries but in communities right here in Canada and other countries where hunger simply should not be a concern.

It is difficult to understand how in the year 2026 we live in a world where a baseball player in Toronto can sign a $500 million dollar contract, at the same time that player could walk to the stadium past homeless and hungry? Or, how the United States gets embroiled in a war in Iran on the whim of their president, firing off missiles that can cost millions each, often killing civilians while people in the US struggle to stay fed and housed.

At some point you would hope humankind would find a way to balance wealth at least enough to have everyone fed and housed. It is certainly not a shortage of food or finances, only a lack of will to make it happen. Imagine a world where farmers hit the field in the fall knowing they were truly feeding everyone – an idyllic vision which needs to be a reality.