In the electoral campaign that has already ended, hardly any mention has been made of the price of food, but the situation is suffocating for thousands of Spanish families. The increase in the price of the shopping basket affects all consumers, but especially the most vulnerable, and has also reduced the reserves of food banks, which continue to serve 1.2 million people in a precarious situation.
Food stores that help alleviate hunger saw their users increase by 50% during the pandemic, going from 1,050,684 beneficiaries in 2019 to 1,560,000 in 2020, including 267,079 children between the ages of 3 and 15 and 53,123 infants 0 to 2 years. Now the figure has stabilized, details, in statements to the EFE agency, the director of the Spanish Federation of Food Banks (Fescal), Francisco Greciano, who stresses that the profile of users is increasingly "normalized". Long-term unemployed and single-parent families are the most common profiles.
Now, due to inflation, food banks have been forced to reduce the amount of food they buy and distribute per family due to rising prices. In 2022 they went from distributing a national average of 128 kilos per person per year to 122 kilos, an amount that will continue to drop in 2023, they advance.
Greciano lists obstacles such as the decrease in the cereal harvest and the increase in the price of basic foods such as fruit due to the drought, which impacts even more strongly on the users of food banks. Milk, infant nutrition foods, oil and canned fish are some of the most demanded products and with which more availability problems are being encountered in stores.
Added to the rise in prices is the decline in donations from the distribution chains since the law against food waste came into force last January, since much of the fruit and vegetables that are not in perfect condition ended up in food banks and now it is sold under promotions in supermarkets, says the organization.
The situation is delicate for the more than one million people in Spain for whom the rise in food prices has made it even more difficult. EFE has spoken with several of them. “For six months I have been receiving food because it is not enough for me,” explains Leonor Cubas, a single mother of a boy with Down syndrome who has just become unemployed and watches with despair how “everything goes up in the supermarket” week after week. She goes to 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. She takes bread, fruit, vegetables, oil, tuna and rice, staples to which she sometimes adds meat and fish when they are available at the commissary.
Her Peruvian compatriot, Pamela Risco, is more interested in milk and diapers for her ten-month-old baby. She awaits the homologation of her nursing title to practice in Spain. "I have stopped buying vegetables, meat and fish," says Mónica Herrero, a woman from Madrid who has begun to accompany an elderly woman for two hours a day and only hopes that something more stable will turn out for her at 50 years of age. 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.
In Madrid and Barcelona, the number of people serving food banks has risen since the end of 2022. 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 able to control the price of housing, everything else is going to be useless."
