Photo credit: CBC
A new report has found that the use of food bans in Toronto is creating new records.
CBC News reports that the report found 4.1 million visits made between March 2004 and April 2005, which is an increase of hundreds of thousands from the year before.
The annual Who’s Hungry report, released on Monday is a joint effort between Daily Bread Food Bank and North York Harvest Food Bank. It provides a yearly profile of food insecurity and poverty in the city.
Daily Bread’s CEO Neil Hetherington said the number of visits has been climbing up at an exacerbating and alarming rate in recent years.
“It took 38 years to get to one million visits, two years to get to two million, a year to get to three. And now we’re in another year and here we are at 4.1 million visits,” he said/
The figure comes straight from this year’s Who’s Hungry report, and represents an increase of 636,962 more visits than 2024. It’s also a 340 per cent increase since 2019.
One in four food bank clients are children and 18 per cent of households with children report their kids went hungry at least once a week.
The figures come from a survey of 1,890 food bank clients representing 73 member food banks between March 2004 and April 2005. Respondents completed a detailed questionnaire about their income, housing, employment, and experience of food insecurity.
96% of respondents said the rising cost of living is one of the top tree reasons they use food banks.
Hetherington pointed to a number of social issues contributing to the problem.
“The first is the lack of affordable housing. We get that solved, then we start to see a reduction iin the number of people that need the food bank.
“The second is income supports … we need to make sure that the Ontario Disability Support Program is appropriate and that the Canada Disability Program is wholly adequate so that if you’re living with a disability, you’re not legislated to live in poverty,” he said.
