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As a pediatrician in Iqaluit, Sindu Govindapillai sees the effects of malnutrition every day.
“We are seeing things like mothers not being able to continue to breastfeed their infants,” she said. “So in my own practice I’ve had moms come to me asking for assistance for grocery support for themselves.”
Govindapillai is the director of Qupanuaq, which helps people with their Inuit Child First Initiative (ICFI) applications. Since 2018, the ICFI program has been a temporary measure to ensure Inuit children have access to essential supports and services while an Inuit-specific framework is being developed.
According to data CBC received from Nunavut’s Department of Health, hospitalizations related to malnourishment at Qikiqtani General Hospital in Iqaluit ranged from eight in 2022 up to 21 visits in 2024.
Out of territory hospitalizations ranged from 12 to 21 over the same period.
The GN says full data for 2025 is not yet available, and that these numbers don’t reflect the total number of people who are experiencing malnourishment as “rates of malnutrition and nutritional deficiencies may be changing over time, particularly in the context of shifts in community food-support programs.”
The ICFI funding stream that provided Nunavummiut with monthly food vouchers distributed by hamlets ended last March.
Malnutrition has gotten worse since hamlet food voucher program ended
Vandna Sinha, an associate research professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, is part of a study reviewing the effectiveness of the hamlet food voucher program.
She said since the program ended she’s heard from people who are down to one meal a day.
“People are talking about a lot of hunger,” she said. “I’m talking to people, mothers who say, ‘Very often when we get to that time we don’t have food in the house, I send my children to someone else’s house to eat,’ and it’s only when I ask, ‘Well, what do you do?’ that I hear that they’re just going without food.”
Though GN data shows Iqaluit malnourishment hospitalizations have doubled from 2022 to 2024, Sinha agrees the data doesn’t show the full picture of what is currently happening. She expects the numbers to be even higher in 2025.
“It would be useful to see the 2025 data once the hamlet food voucher program (was) phased out and once the approvals of individual grocery supports were sharply restricted just to see if they got even worse,” she said.
Like Sinha, Govindapillai agrees malnutrition has only gotten worse with the end of the hamlet food voucher program. She said most of the acute malnutrition happening is going undocumented and can be life threatening, but it doesn’t always land someone in the hospital.
“In order to get admitted from malnutrition directly, things have to be quite serious,” she said. “The vast majority of malnutrition that we’re seeing especially after the hamlet food voucher program is invisible suffering and people are trying to make ends meet… I think we are yet to see actually the majority of the impact of this.”
Govindapillai said there are lots of secondary impacts of malnutrition, like infections, that could lead to hospitalization, but that may not be coded as a malnutrition admission at the hospital.
“Say this number of children were admitted for the consequences of malnutrition, [it] does in no way capture the scope and scale of hunger in the territory,” Govindapillai said. “It is a slice.”
She said Qupanuaq is asking the territorial government to consider increasing the Nunavut child benefit to address the cost of living crisis and give people more money to feed their children.
