It comes as no surprise to those who have been anxious for a long time in front of grocery stalls: The annual food price report, released on Thursday, indicates that in 2021, in Canada, the price of food has increased. by 3.8%, and in the next year the increase could reach 7%. So to feed a family of four, it will cost an average of $ 14,767.36 in 2022, or $ 966.08 more than last year. That’s a lot, while, unsurprisingly, wages are not experiencing the same growth.
Worsening food insecurity is not a phenomenon confined to Canada. In the spring of 2021, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) noted that the year 2020 had precipitated at least 155 million people in a situation of “acute food insecurity” across the world. A significant proportion of these people were in a “catastrophic” or “urgent” situation, that is, they were at risk of starving to death. This is the worst record in the past five years.
To explain this, we mention the conflicts, the economic shock induced by the pandemic, as well as the intensification of extreme weather events, which have disrupted both agriculture and the processing and transport of food. The climate crisis is set to accentuate this trend – and 2021 has shown us that we already have both feet in the coming catastrophe.
The food price report predicts that Quebec will be less affected than the average for the Canadian provinces by the increase in the grocery bill. Despite everything, the HungerCount 2021, unveiled in October and bringing together data from the network of Quebec food banks, reveals that more than 600,000 Quebecers have requested food aid in the past year. This represents an increase of 21.6% compared to 2019. We also note, and this is undoubtedly what is most worrying, an increase of 40% of people who have a job and who must nevertheless apply for a basket of provisions for proper nutrition.
Not surprisingly, the strongest growth in food insecurity was observed during the first months of the health crisis. Except that the return to life before the pandemic did not calm things down. The organizations that offer food aid have reminded us at each step towards near-normality: there are people, more and more people, for whom distress has set in to last. At the end of 2020, food banks were already claiming to be overwhelmed by demand, and their staff worn out by the workload. Inflation only worsens a situation that was already critical; a problem that charity alone cannot solve.
It is no coincidence that life is appearing less and less bearable for many citizens, even though people are worried everywhere about the shortage of manpower and that considerable financial incentives are offered. to train workers in different fields. This reflects a very clear conception of the economy, where we focus above all on employment to meet social needs, without worrying about those who do not have the minimum necessary to even consider training to to get a job that would allow them to improve their living conditions.
As proof, throughout the pandemic, the Collective for a Quebec Without Poverty and other groups defending the interests of people in difficulty insisted that the government assistance offered completely ignored the reality of people receiving social assistance. While there was a rare agreement to help workers, providers of last-resort help were left out, as if they felt their hardships were more tolerable than those of workers. penalized by COVID.
In its November economic update, the Quebec government announced that it would distribute, in January 2022, an “exceptional cost of living benefit”: a generous 400 piastres for low and middle income families, to offset the rising cost of groceries and lodging.
Let’s say that there is nothing to improve the situation of households that suffer the most from the increase in the cost of living in the long term. But since we are talking about housing, we should not see the housing crisis, which has been talked about a lot for a year, as an issue independent of food insecurity. the Hunger Check indicates in this regard that 62% of food bank users rent accommodation on the private market – where rents are soaring and where speculation puts pressure on tenants. This suggests that until solutions that do not go through the private market to resolve the housing crisis are promoted, food insecurity is likely to gain ground.
We talk about inflation and the increase in the cost of living as an unchanging weather phenomenon, which must be suffered in the hope that it passes without causing too much damage. However, we have all the policies we need to avoid leaving people behind. You just need to have the will to use them.