Life has led Leonor, Angélica, Mónica and Pamela to have to ask for help to eat, a situation they share with more than a million people in Spain to whom the rise in food prices has made it even more difficult. difficult.
These four women coincide in the commissary of the Humana SPES foundation in the Madrid neighborhood of San Fermín, where they approach with their empty shopping carts and a card with points that they must calculate very carefully how to spend to cover part of their needs.
In the middle of the electoral campaign, you don't hear anything about the elections; there what matters is to know how the family is doing, what bureaucratic procedures are missing and, above all, when their employment contract has ended.
Being in search of employment and having dependent minors are the main requirements met by the 60 families currently cared for by the foundation after being referred by the social services.
"For six months I have been receiving food because it is not enough for me," Leonor Cubas told Efe, a single mother of a child with Down syndrome who has just become unemployed and watches with despair how "everything goes up in the supermarket" every week .
Take advantage of the visit to take bread, fruit, vegetables, oil, tuna and rice, basic products to which he sometimes adds meat and fish when they are available in the commissary.
What her Peruvian compatriot Pamela Risco most urgently needs is milk and diapers for her ten-month-old baby, while she awaits the homologation of her nursing title to practice in Spain.
Like the other beneficiaries of the association, he helps to restock the merchandise, clean the premises, take care of the paperwork and organize the delivery, among other tasks.
"I have stopped buying vegetables, meat and fish," says Mónica Herrero, a woman from Madrid who has begun to accompany an elderly woman two hours a day and only hopes that something more stable will come out at her 50 years.
That fear of being left out of the labor market after a certain age is shared by Angélica Pureta, 63, who takes care of her grandson with the little income that a temporary contract in a residence gives her. "With current prices, it doesn't reach me," she admits.
The Humana SPES Foundation provides each of these people with basic products from what they receive from the Madrid Food Bank, the European Aid Fund for the Most Deprived (FEAD) and private donations.
"This has always been a neighborhood with very vulnerable families, but the influx has tripled. The pandemic was a very hard point and now with the rise in prices and the lack of work it is seen much more," explains the person in charge of the commissary, Mónica García, for whom the biggest current problem is evictions, the order of the day.
The so-called "hunger queues" that do exist in other parts of the capital are not observed there, because the organization does not serve street people, but rather people who are part of its program.
García says that they advise them to try to improve their situation, but for that it is essential that the card holders come to speak directly with them.
In Madrid and Barcelona, the number of people serving food banks through charities has risen since the end of 2022, while donations and surpluses have been reduced due to rising prices.
According to the Spanish Federation of Food Banks (Fesbal), food poverty continues to become chronic in Spain in 2023, with more than 1.2 million people still in need of food aid.
It is estimated that one in four people in Spain is at risk of poverty or social exclusion, with material deficiencies or low employment intensity.
The Cáritas Española study coordinator, Raúl Flores, points out that, when the population has a very low income, the first thing they do is pay the rent and basic housing expenses, and immediately they are left with "absolutely no money."
It is then that the strategy of seeking food for the rest of the month is activated, with alternatives such as food in kind from banks or the cash cards that entities such as Cáritas give to families so that they can purchase products according to their needs.
The beneficiary profile has been extended in recent times to that of mothers with children, part-time workers or families with a job and two or three children who cannot make ends meet.
With inflation, "we have to invest much more so that families have access to the same or even less than two years ago," adds the coordinator of Cáritas.
And he points to a recipe beyond tax cuts, salary increases or social benefits: "Housing has become a bottomless pit that ends up swallowing most of the family budget. If we are not capable of controlling the price of the housing, everything else is going to be useless"
