The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 presented significant challenges to Canada’s food systems, from disrupted supply chains to business closures and heightened demand for emergency food aid (Hobbs, 2020; Holland, 2020). The situation of individuals and communities that were already precarious within food systems, such as temporary foreign labourers and those already experiencing food insecurity, worsened (Arrell Food Institute and Canadian Agri-food Policy Institute, 2021; Polysky and Garriguet, 2022). A range of funding and policy measures were rolled out, with the pandemic prompting debate about how Canada’s food system should be rebuilt and renewed to enhance resilience to similar disruptions in the future (James et al., 2021; Regnier-Davies et al., 2022).

While various studies over the past several years have synthesized trends and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canada’s national food system, less research has been devoted to characterizing the effects of COVID-19 within regional and provincial food system contexts. However, doing so is crucial to a fuller understanding of the place-based impacts of the pandemic and informing future efforts for food system resilience. This scoping review responds to this gap by examining how the pandemic affected food systems in the province of Manitoba, Canada. Specifically, this review synthesizes peer reviewed and grey literature to provide a picture of pandemic impacts and responses in the province’s food systems. Questions guiding this review include: How have food systems in rural, urban, and Northern/remote communities in Manitoba changed due to the pandemic? What were the impacts for food access among households and vulnerable populations? What policy, programming, and funding responses took place?

By food systems, we are referring to all the steps involved in feeding a population, including the stages through which foods pass and are transformed as they move from field, water, to plate, and beyond (Tansey and Worsley, 1995). Food systems are thus necessarily complex, involving interactions among economic, social, political, and environmental components (Tansey and Worsley, 1995). Manitoba’s food systems are characterized by high levels of industrial agriculture development, alongside a large Indigenous population, many Northern and remote communities, and a strong and growing network of local food policy actors and community-based food security initiatives. While these features make Manitoba’s food systems complex, these diverse characteristics also make the findings from this scoping review relevant to other jurisdictions across Canada and North America that share similar structural attributes and policy environments.

Although we are arguably in a post-pandemic period, we believe this scoping review remains timely in a context of pandemic recovery and ongoing pressures, such as food price inflation, supply chain disruption, climate change, extreme weather events, and global geopolitical instabilities, that continue to affect food systems in Manitoba and Canada. We discuss the significance of our findings in Manitoba in the context of existing food systems scholarship and national trends and conclude by proposing priority areas for research and practice to support equitable and resilient food systems in Manitoba.

A scoping review research method was used to synthesize research about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems in Manitoba covering the period from March 2020 to the end of March 2023. A scoping review was an appropriate method for our study which sought to “map” the characteristics and volume of available research on this topic (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005, p. 20). It also provided the flexibility to include a breadth of peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed sources (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005). We followed the general steps for a scoping review outlined by Arksey and O'Malley (2005) with additional guidance on searching grey literature from Godin et al. (2015). See Figure 1 for an overview of the scoping review process.

We started by gathering relevant sources. Peer-reviewed articles were identified by searching Google Scholar and Academic Search Complete (Ebsco) databases. Key terms searched were Manitoba AND COVID-19 or pandemic AND “food security” or “food systems.” Given our emphasis on broader food systems, we did not use “food insecurity” as a key search team. A total of 384 peer-reviewed sources were identified.

Grey literature (e.g., reports, websites, policy documents) was identified through a Google search using the same search terms as above as well as directly searching the websites of the Manitoba government, provincial food-related organizations including Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (Manitoba Office), Harvest Manitoba, Food Matters Manitoba, Northern Manitoba Food, Culture and Community Collaborative, and Migrante Manitoba, as well as Statistics Canada and PROOF (Food Insecurity Research Institute) as key web sources for food security data. Media articles were not systematically searched but are drawn upon to contextualize findings from other sources. Recognizing it is impossible to review all grey literature results from the Google search, we relied on the “relevance” ranking of Google to identify a total of 129 sources (Godin et al., 2015).

We then screened all sources for inclusion. Only sources that focused on Manitoba or included Manitoba as a key component of a larger study were included. Sources that did not focus primarily on food security and COVID-19, such as those looking more generally at health and social-economic conditions during the pandemic, were excluded. This resulted in the vast majority of sources initially identified not being retained. For peer-reviewed articles, titles and abstracts were screened first; if it was unclear from the abstract if the study should be retained then the full text was screened.

Altogether, 34 sources were retained for review including ten peer reviewed articles and 24 grey literature sources. Table 1 provides an overview of all sources by citation, category and key themes, and geographical focus. All sources were categorized according to the three key elements of the food security landscape previously elaborated by Lowitt et al. (2022) in their literature scan on food system pandemic impacts in Canada. These are: food security policy, funding, and programming; food security for individuals, households, and vulnerable groups; and food systems. Table 2 provides definitions of these categories. We used these categories as they were sufficiently broad to capture the range of sources and types of information included in our scoping review while also helping to promote thematic comparability of our findings with this previously published national literature scan. Within these categories, specific themes covered by the sources were identified from keywords in titles and abstracts and are also indicated in Table 1.

In this section, we present our findings according to the key categories of: (1) food security policy, funding, and programming; (2) food security for individuals, households, and vulnerable groups; and (3) food systems.

Emerging from this scoping review, we conclude by identifying priority areas for research and practice that may support equitable and resilient food systems in Manitoba. These priority areas include: (1) undertaking evaluation of food system policies, programs, and funding implemented during the pandemic (2) enhancing food security monitoring for vulnerable populations (3) further exploring community experiences and responses to food security; and (4) examining opportunities for local food systems development.

First, research and analysis will be important to evaluating the impacts of pandemic policies, funding, and programming on different sectors and populations of the food system. While our review has documented the funding that came online and programming and policy changes that occurred within food security organizations and sectors, we found very little literature evaluating the impacts of these pandemic measures in Manitoba. This evaluation is crucial to informing what worked well, less well, and to what extent programs and policies effectively met their stated objectives and effectively reached those in need of support. This evaluation is important not only to strengthening resilience to future pandemics but learning from COVID-19 responses for other stresses like climate change and food inflation (Biosffi et al., 2021).

Second, there is a need for enhancing food security monitoring for vulnerable populations. There are known data gaps in national food security surveys that exclude on-reserve Indigenous populations and this is particularly significant in Manitoba because of the high proportion of Indigenous people in the population. Further, while data exists for the province as a whole, food security data for Manitoba stratified by characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender, and age would paint a fuller picture of food access in the province. This would include how food insecurity overlaps with other potential markers of socio economic disadvantage (Tarasuk et al., 2022). A survey of adolescents in Manitoba conducted pre-pandemic showed a 20% incidence of food insecurity; however, this was almost double (37%) in the northern region of the province (Canadian Institute of Health Research and University of Manitoba, 2023). Recent food price volatility and inflation point to the need for ongoing surveillance and monitoring of food security rather than the current patchwork approach.

Third, there are opportunities to further explore community experiences and responses to food insecurity during the pandemic. There is some evidence from our review of the importance of community partnerships and place-based connections in enhancing local resilience in the face of crisis. Future strength-based research that centres community assets and engages community members in articulating their perspectives and visions will be important to developing holistic understandings of food security and ensuring the fit of policies and programming with community assets and needs (Soma et al., 2022). A specific opportunity for future research building on this scoping review is to systematically examine news and social media that may offer further insights into community strategies for resilience building during the pandemic.

Finally, examining opportunities for local food systems development is a recommendation emerging from this review. There is some evidence from our review of high public support for local food systems in Manitoba during the pandemic with some authors positioning local food systems as a key component of regional economic development and stability in food supply. These findings are reinforced by a recently published “snapshot” of Winnipeg’s food system, outlining immediate and long-term goals for local food systems development (Winnipeg Food Council, 2022). Attention to the poor working conditions of food system labourers, and especially Temporary Foreign Workers in meat processing, also gained greater public attention during the pandemic. Addressing precarious work for the province’s food system labour force will be a critical step in more equitable regional development and food systems stability.

To what extent increased interest and awareness in local food systems during the pandemic, including innovations in online local food purchasing and increased urban gardening, may translate into long term practice will be important to follow. Also of significance to local food systems is the pressing need for culturally appropriate and community-driven solutions for northern Indigenous communities as highlighted by NMFCCC (2022) and Sousa et al. (2020). For these communities, inequities in food access were further exposed by the pandemic underscoring the need for decolonizing food systems as long called for among Indigenous scholars and food security advocates in the province (Wendium et al., 2018) and being increasingly voiced nationally (Levkoe et al., 2021; Mashford-Pringle et al., 2021).

In sum, our scoping review has synthesized the impacts of COVID-19 on food systems in Manitoba and identified some priority areas for research and practice that we hope can inform efforts towards resilient and equitable food systems in a period of COVID-19 recovery and ongoing food system stresses.

KL and JS contributed to conception and design of the study. ER organized the scoping review materials. KL wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.