Ontario A coalition of hunger relief organizations said Monday that residents are visiting food banks in greater numbers and more often than they have been in six years.
The findings come in a new report from Feed Ontario, a group of 1,200 direct and affiliated food banks and other organizations that work to address food insecurity.
The annual hunger report, subtitled “Deep Cracks in Ontario’s Economic Foundation,” found that 587,000 adults and children visited the province’s food banks a total of 4.3 million times between April 1, 2021, and March 31, 2022. FEED Ontario said it represents 15 per cent. Percent increase in the number of people turning to food banks for assistance and a 42 percent increase in the number of visits compared to the number recorded in 2019.
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The report said the findings, which mark the sixth straight year of increasing food bank users and visits, also highlight the stresses the system is facing.
“This is the largest number of people accessing our services on record since we started collecting data and writing these reports,” Carolyn Stewart, executive director of Feed Ontario, said in an interview.
“The pressure that … low-income Ontarians and marginalized groups are feeling today with unaffordability is extraordinarily concerning. The fact that so many people are now having to rely on emergency food assistance should be a concern for all of us, not just Feed Ontario.”
The organization is calling on the provincial government to tackle the rise in low-quality work, invest in government-assisted housing, improve social assistance and center people with lived experiences in the design of public policy and programs.
“There is concern in the food bank network that donations will not be enough to meet the need, that we will not have enough food resources to meet the growing needs of people,” Stewart said.
The report found that one out of every three visitors was a first-time food bank user.
It attributed the spike to long-standing issues such as precarious employment, inaccessible unemployment aid and inadequate support for people with disabilities, as well as more recent factors such as rising inflation and rising costs of living.
“Social assistance rates are falling far below the low-income measures,” Stewart said. “This, coupled with unaffordable housing, is making it virtually impossible for many individuals to afford even the most basic necessities.”
Those who visited food banks in the past two years cited the cost of food and housing, low wages or insufficient working hours as driving factors behind their visits.
“Imagine you already had a budget that was stretched too thin. You already made the impossible choice between keeping a roof over your head or keeping your lights on, buying winter clothes for your child, or paying for more medicine. Making choices,” Stewart said, adding that those who turn to food banks are facing similar dilemmas every day.
He noted that 30 percent of food bank clients are children and youth under the age of 18, a number that has remained consistent in recent years. He said that more than 50 per cent of the people who reach such centers are on some form of social assistance.
Stewart said food banks are now being asked to play a role they were never designed to fulfill.
“We were developed in the ’80s as a stopgap measure and we never intended to be a social safety net,” Stewart said.
“We should have changed in case of emergency. But now that more and more Ontarians are unable to afford their most basic needs, at what point is it enough?”
© 2022 The Canadian Press