Food insecurity is a prime concern, especially now

Taiba reflects on how the COVID-19 outbreak makes light that access to affordable and healthy food is and always has been a human right.

Covid-19. Coronavirus. The C-word. It seems there is only one thing on people’s minds these days, and I don’t blame them. A worldwide pandemic demands this level of concern and should dominate every single conversation since it’s completely altered how we live our lives on a daily basis. From working from home, social distancing, self-isolating and changing our day-to-day behaviours, we’ve had to re-think how our current day society operates. Some have had to stop working to safeguard their health, many others have lost jobs, and this has led to concerns about being able to pay rent and afford food. Food has become a hot topic – everyone and anyone is talking about it.

Food, in general, dominates a large part of my life. From the small and silly, like enjoying the (frequent) brunch and having a ‘to-go-to’ list of restaurants the length of my arm, spending five years working in a supermarket, to the more onerous, like writing my master’s dissertation on social and economic rights, with an explicit focus on food insecurity and volunteering at the North Glasgow Community Food Initiative (this link will take you away from our website). This initiative aims to empower individuals in communities across the north of the city to participate in sustainable and practical food-related activities.

Food dominates all lives. Can people access food? Can they afford food? Is there enough to go around? I may be lucky in that I know I’ll not have to worry about my next meal, or the next, or the next… but many aren’t so lucky. Yet, food insecurity is not something new.  The situation before the spread of Covid-19 was one that was unacceptable. Individuals, over the last decade, were turning to foodbanks in greater numbers. A report released by the Human Rights Watch (this link will take you away from our website) last year highlighted that the Trussell Trust, the UK’s largest foodbank charity, saw a rise of 5,146% in emergency food parcels being issued between 2008 and 2018. The growth in people turning to foodbanks, charities and other organisations to access food has been unprecedented, and something that should never have happened.

Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the UK in 2018 to conduct a fact-finding mission on poverty and inequality in the UK. In this UN report (this link will take you away from our website) he recounted numerous stories of people, including children, speaking of how food insecurity meant to them. A young boy in Scotland told his story to the Guardian (this link will take you away from our website): “I got hungry because I was smelling the other food. I had to take my eyes away from it. The most unfair thing is the government knows families are going through hard times but they decide not to do anything about it.” Stories like these were common across the country, and still are. Alston blamed the political choices of the Conservative government, namely through their austerity policies, for the rise in poverty and emphasised that Brexit was only going to worsen the issues he had highlighted. However, he couldn’t have predicted a worldwide pandemic further exacerbating these problems.

With the fear of Covid-19 and what it could mean in terms of lockdown and social isolation, supermarket shelves are being emptied at rates unseen before. Food insecurity isn’t just about being able to afford food, but to have enough for future meals, to access it, and many are seeing their access to it being interrupted, or completely stopped. Supermarkets have begun to limit how many packets of pasta or tins of beans customers can buy, but is this too late? Foodbanks and charities which provide food for the vulnerable are struggling, basic necessities such as pasta, long-life milk, tins of soup are becoming hard to come by and they can’t provide people with basic food essentials. And with more becoming food insecure, due to uncertainty in jobs, more and more vulnerable people need these vital lifelines.

The public’s response has been great. We can see all over social media (this link will take you away from our website) that people are stepping up and trying to do their best to help others, but this is all anecdotal and as individuals, the public can only do so much. What we need is a co-ordinated government response, and one that extends past the Covid-19 timescale (however long that may be). Access to food and eliminating food poverty should be at the top of the governments agenda, as it should’ve been always. Access to food is a human right, and no one should ever go without.

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