Advocates call for action as N.L. leads country in severe food insecurity

The CEO of Food First N.L. says Newfoundland and Labrador is leading the country in a statistic that no province wants.

"We are now the province in the country that has the highest rate of severe food insecurity. So 8.5 per cent, roughly, of people in this province are severely food insecure. That means they're going hungry," said Josh Smee. 

Smee said there's been a sharp increase of severe food insecurity over the past year. At that end of the spectrum people are missing meals, reducing food intake and at the most extreme going a day or more without food. 

Smee made the comments as part of a panel discussion on CBC Radio's The Signal where guests talked about the rates of rising poverty and food insecurity across the country. They also examined the functioning of emergency food systems with a look at rethinking how they function.

But an underlying point from guests was that there is not enough political attention and action for a solvable problem. 

An indicator of where things are at locally can be found when looking at the shelves of the McSheffrey Resource Centre's food bank in St. John's.

"So our shelves are bare. It's not looking too good," said East End Food Banks Coalition coordinator Alison Hollahan. 

She said the number of people coming through the doors has doubled since 2020.

"We have so many more people who are using the food bank that it's flying off the shelf so quickly. We just reach out, look for donations, you know," said Hollahan. 

Hailey Pudan is a member of Food First N.L.'s Lived and Living Experience Advisory Group and has also witnessed the ramp up of demand. 

"Watching everybody's hampers or monthly parcels get smaller because the demand, the need, is higher but what's coming in is barely scratching the surface of the food insecurity or affordability that people are facing," said Pudan. 

According to the University of Toronto's household food insecurity research program PROOF, which uses Statistics Canada data, 22.9 per cent of people in all ten provinces lived in a food-insecure household in 2023.

"That amounts to 8.7 million people, including 2.1 million children, living in households that struggled to afford the food they need," said the April 26 blog post.

It said for Newfoundland and Labrador, 26 per cent of people lived in food-insecure households – which translates to 134,000 people.