The solidarity initiative “No home without food”, promoted by the “la Caixa” Foundation and CaixaBank, closes its third edition with a total of 1.6 million euros raised for Spanish Food Banks. This amount translates into 1,718 tonnes of basic foodstuffs that the 54 Food Banks associated with the Federación Española de Bancos de Alimentos (FESBAL) will distribute through almost 7,500 collaborating social entities throughout Spain. With these results, a total of 34,700 people are guaranteed a basic food supply this summer. The aim of the initiative is to help the most vulnerable groups in the new social emergency scenario marked by a triple crisis: the pandemic, inflation, and the war in Ukraine. Aware of the urgency of responding to the people who need it most, the “la Caixa” Foundation has contributed an additional one million euros to the initiative, making a total of 1.6 million euros collected.
To the more than two years of pandemic (2020 and 2021), we must add the events of the last few months, in which the generalised increase in prices and the great loss of purchasing power are aggravating the situation of many families. In fact, nearly 1.5 million people in Spain are still in a situation of food poverty due to the rise in the CPI and the increase in the cost of the shopping basket. This scenario is also reflected in the recent Living Conditions Survey conducted by the National Statistics Institute (INE), which places the at-risk-of-poverty or social exclusion rate (AROPE) at 27.8% in 2021, compared to the 27% recorded in 2020 in Spain, almost one point higher.
The new crisis is also having a direct impact on the Food Banks themselves throughout the country and on the entities in charge of distributing food in the neighbourhoods. The rise in prices suffered in this 2022 has caused a reduction in donations and surpluses to supply the supply warehouses, which have been forced to reduce by more than 10% the amount of food they distribute.
