OTTAWA - Food-bank use has risen sharply across Canada in the past two years and organizers are scrambling -- often unsuccessfully -- to stay ahead of the demand.
In a report that provides a window into how the recession has affected the poor, Food Banks Canada has issued its assessment on hunger and food-bank use for 2010. It found that almost 900,000 people used food banks in March.
That's the highest level on record -- 9.2 per cent higher than a year earlier and 28 per cent higher than in 2008. Almost 40 per cent of the recipients are children.
It's a sobering reversal of the declines in food-bank use between 2004 and 2008.
"We believe that it is unacceptable for anyone to go hungry in a nation as prosperous as ours," said Katharine Schmidt, executive director of Food Banks Canada.
"Nevertheless, in March of this year, 868,000 people -- nearly 900,000 separate individuals -- walked through the door of a food bank because they did not have enough food for themselves and for their families."
The survey of 1,978 food banks points to the lingering effects of the recession as the main cause. Low-income people who lost their jobs have not been able to find new ones or their new jobs don't pay enough to sustain them.
About half the people who use food banks are on social assistance, while about 17 per cent have some kind of employment income.
"When you have 20 people vying for a job, ours are really at the low end of the list," Kerry Kaiser, co-ordinator of the Centretown Emergency Food Centre in Ottawa, said as she watched over yet another hectic distribution. "We see them getting it at all angles."
Food-bank use rose in every part of the country in 2010, and among every demographic. But rural areas and seniors experienced especially large increases in food-bank use, the report finds.
That's because rural jobs in manufacturing and forestry have been disappearing, and have not been replaced by anything nearly as lucractive, said Schmidt.
Among provinces, Manitoba and Saskatchewan were slapped with huge increases of 20 per cent compared with a year earlier.
The number of immigrants and refugees seeking food handouts has stabilized, however. They accounted for about nine per cent of the food-bank population, about the same as in previous years.
For Jean Pigeon, who runs a food bank in Gatineau, Que., the surge is almost unmanageable.
He is able to find enough food through the generosity of grocery depots and donors. But the logistics of handling much larger volumes of food are daunting, he said. He has had to start building a giant, new food depot just to handle the influx.
"It's a daily challenge," he said.
Food banks are finding creative ways to deal with the increasing need, the report said. But 35 per cent of the country's food banks ran out of food at some point and 50 per cent needed to cut back on the amount they provided each household.
New Democrat MP Tony Martin fears for the worst. With stimulus efforts winding down, government support is being cut off when the need for it is growing, he says.
"Put that together with what we're hearing about extraordinary indebtedness -- you've got a tsunami coming at you," he said.
Although many provinces have adopted poverty-reduction strategies, the food banks' organization says federal government involvement is crucial, for both funding and organization. It is calling for a national poverty-reduction strategy, as well as an affordable-housing strategy, and an increase in support for vulnerable seniors.
But the federal government says it is already doing plenty.
"Our Conservative government believes that the best way to fight poverty is to get Canadians working, and our government's Economic Action Plan is doing just that," Ryan Sparrow, spokesman for Human Resources Minister Diane Finley, said in an emailed statement.
