Open    Access



Access to Healthy Food Stores for Residents of Aboriginal Reserves in Rural British Columbia



Author(s)

Amirmohsen Behjat¹, Aleck Ostry², Christina Miewald^{2, 3} and Bernie Pauly⁴

Full-Text PDF XML     923 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5828/2017.07.002

1. College of Science and Humanities, Husson University, Bangor 04401, Maine, United States
2. Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8P5C2, Canada
3. Department of Geography, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, V5A1S6, Canada
4. School of Nursing, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC, V8P5C2, Canada

The rate of food insecurity has increased tremendously over the past decade in Canada. This increase has been more pronounced in rural and remote areas especially among Aboriginal peoples. Substantial studies indicated that nearly half of the on-reserve Aboriginal households in British Columbia (BC) suffer from some degree of food insecurity. Despite the valuable research about obtaining traditional food, the issue of access to market food has been less discussed in the literature. The aim of this study was to assess the local food environment of on-reserve Aboriginal peoples by using a proximity-based approach tool in terms of access to healthy food stores such as supermarket and grocery stores. In the first stage, the addresses of all healthy food stores were geocoded into a map layer. Then the locations of Aboriginal reserves were geocoded to a separate map layer. In the second stage, using “Closest Facility Analysis” tool in ArcGIS Version 10.3, the distance based on a 15-minute driving time was measured from each reserve to the closest healthy food destination on CanMapRouteLogistics network. The results indicated that 25% of Aboriginal reserves did not have reasonable access to healthy food stores. We concluded that Aboriginal peoples in low access rural reserves with lower socioeconomic status are at potential risk of perpetuate food insecurity.

Food security, rural aboriginal reserves, network analysis, ArcGIS.