More Ontarians relying on food banks and visiting them more frequently: Feed Ontario
Global News
The findings are laid out in a new report from Feed Ontario, a collective of 1,200 direct and affiliate food banks and other organizations that work to address food insecurity.
Ontario residents have been visiting food banks in greater numbers and more often for six years running, a coalition of hunger relief organizations said Monday, noting the troubling trend appeared to escalate during the most recent year on record.
The findings are laid out in a new report from Feed Ontario, a collective of 1,200 direct and affiliate food banks and other organizations that work to address food insecurity.
The annual Hunger Report, subtitled “The Deepening Cracks in Ontario’s Economic Foundation,” found 587,000 adults and children visited the province’s food banks a total of 4.3 million times betweenApril 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022. Feed Ontario said that represents a 15 per cent spike in the number of people turning to food banks for aid and a 42 per cent surge in the number of visits compared to numbers recorded in 2019.
The report said the findings, which mark the sixth straight year of increasing food bank users and visits, also illustrate the strain the system is facing.
“It is the largest amount of people accessing our services on record since we’ve started collecting data and writing these reports,” Feed Ontario Executive Director Carolyn Stewart said in an interview.
“The pressures that … low-income Ontarians and marginalized groups are feeling with the unaffordability of today is exceptionally concerning. The fact that so many people are now having to rely on emergency food support to get by should be worrying all of us, not just Feed Ontario.”
The organization is calling on the provincial government to tackle a rise in low-quality work, invest in government-assisted housing, improve social assistance and centre people with lived experiences in the design of public policy and programs.
“There’s concern in the food bank networks that donations will not be sufficient to meet the need, that we won’t have enough food resources for this continuing growing need of people,” Stewart said.