Overburdened Food Banks

UBC student walkout protesting food insecurity, October 27, 2022

Food banks throughout the country say they are strained beyond their capacity to deliver food to the growing numbers who need their service. Food Banks Canada (National Network) counted 1,935,911 visits to food banks across Canada in March of 2023 alone, which represents a 32.1 per cent increase from March 2022 and a 78.5 per cent jump from March 2019. In Ontario, visits surged 36 per cent -- to 5,888,685 -- for the year between April 2022 and March 2023 compared to the previous full year, according to a November release from Feed Ontario.

Food bank spokespeople across the country say demand is so high that they are unable to build up food reserves. Food being donated to them is almost immediately distributed. "Every year we seem to be feeding more and more people," a spokesperson said.

Food Banks of Quebec executive director Martin Munger says in 2023 his organization distributed fully twice the number of aid packages it handed out in 2019. It gave out tens of thousands of food baskets in the run-up to Christmas alone, he said. Now, stocks are low. Demand, he said, has "been high all year long and it's also been higher during the holiday season than in previous years." Food banks now serve one in 10 Quebeckers, he added.

One in 10 people in Toronto as well are now relying on food banks, twice as many as the year prior, a new report finds. Food bank usage across Toronto smashed another record in 2023, with more than 2.5 million visits between April 2022 and March 2023, a 51 per cent increase, and there are no signs of slowing down, according to this year's Who's Hungry report from Daily Bread and North York Harvest food banks.

Dan Huang-Taylor, executive director of Food Banks BC, said 2023 has seen the highest level of demand for food banks since they started operating in British Columbia in the early 1980s. One in ten households in Vancouver is struggling with food insecurity along with homelessness. He reports the number of new clients accessing services across the province rose 62 per cent in 2023 compared to the previous year.

The Fraser Valley Regional Food Bank in BC typically sees about 25 more families register for help during the holiday season, according to director Matthew Campbell -- but the records show that during the 2022 holiday season and into the first weeks of 2023, the number ballooned to about 75 more families. "We're worried and very concerned," Campbell said. According to him the weekly number of families coming to the food bank has gone up dramatically from roughly 200 a week to nearly 600. "This is almost an overwhelming increase," he said.

Food Systems Lab at Simon Fraser University says food insecurity is widespread not only in Vancouver, but across the country. The latest full report from 2021 puts the number of Canadians affected in some way from food insecurity at 5.8 million, including 1.4 million children.

Food banks started in Canada 40 years ago as a response to a recession and the beginning of the deliberate destruction of the post-war social welfare system. The ruling elite pushed the ending of post-war reforms without the people's say or consent. The absence of economic and political control of the people over issues that directly affect their lives is a feature of the ruling elite's party-controlled parliamentary system where representatives of the elite rule. The people are excluded from any direct control over decisions and blocked from developing modern forms of government where they could directly have a say and control over the affairs of state and the economy. The people are resisting being limited to waging extra-parliamentary pressure campaigns and lodging complaints. The people did not agree to end the post-war social welfare reforms, which in effect worsened the lives of everyone except the rich. They are speaking out in their own name and demanding a say.

Gisèle Yasmeen, a senior fellow who researches food insecurity at the University of British Columbia's School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, says food banks were meant to be a temporary "Band-Aid solution" during the crisis, not a permanent phenomenon. "If we don't get to the root of the issue, and we still go back to this idea that somehow charity is going to solve this conundrum, we're dreaming in technicolour," Yasmeen added. For years the primary reason people were coming to food banks was illness and injury, she said. Now the primary reported reason is the high cost of housing.

Other reports point to the stupendous inefficiency of the current food production and distribution system for money-profit, which relies on commodities being purchased in a marketplace. A 2019 study by Second Harvest, a Canadian food rescue organization, found that around 58 per cent of all food produced in Canada -- about 35.5 million tonnes -- is wasted before it even hits grocery store shelves.

"Food manufacturers are having to do everything. They are doing all the collecting, processing, grading at their facilities, which is very costly for them and thus it's cheaper for them to simply throw waste away," Second Harvest said.

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This article was published in

Volume 54 Numbers 1-2 - January - February 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/M5400113.HTM

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