![P.E.I. leads the country in food insecurity. Again.](https://i.cbc.ca/1.6832903.1683240227!/fileImage/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/16x9_620/norma-dingwell.jpg)
P.E.I. leads the country in food insecurity. Again.
CBC
Prince Edward Island is leading the country in food insecurity, and more than one-third of Island children live in homes without a stable source of healthy food, according to numbers released by Statistics Canada.
The University of Toronto compiled the data, indicating food insecurity on the Island has risen dramatically in recent years. The percentage of people not able to afford the kind of nutritious food they need rose to 23.6 per cent in 2022 compared to 17.3 per cent in 2019.
As for children, 35.1 per cent lived in food-insecure households in 2022 compared to 24.5 per cent in 2019.
In the four years between 2019 and 2022, P.E.I. led the country for food insecurity in all but one year, 2021.
Southern Kings and Queens Food Bank manager Norma Dingwell said she's not surprised at all. They've served just over 1,000 clients since the beginning of 2023, which is up 50 per cent compared to pre-pandemic numbers.
"It just breaks my heart, because nobody should be without food," she said.
"It's very difficult to make ends meet. We have a few families that have two and three income providers and they still can't make ends meet."
Many of their new clients have never used the food bank before, she said.
"It hurts. We live in such a beautiful place that nobody should really have to struggle," Dingwell said. "It's just really sad that more and more people are struggling."
Jennifer Taylor is a food and nutrition professor at the University of Prince Edward Island, and she studies food insecurity. She, too, found the numbers disturbing though not surprising.
"I'm rather horrified because it tells me that everything we are doing right now is not enough.… It's really clear that we need to go so much further to see those numbers coming down."
Taylor said inflation has driven up the cost of everything from rent to food, and that has pushed many people who were living from paycheque to paycheque into severe food insecurity. They have become people who skip meals and likely experience hunger for financial reasons.
But that's not the whole story on P.E.I.
"We've had this problem for decades. The first food bank opened in, like, 2001," she said.
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