Fight for the scraps…

Lack of access to quality food as food for thought

According to Eurostat statistics, in prosperous Germany, almost 16 percent of citizens — 13 million people — are considered poor. We are talking about one of the ‘locomotives of the EU’. In simpler countries the problems are much more serious. Incredibly, the lack of access to good food in the EU
is on the rise, and this provides plenty of food for thought.

Sources: Eurostat, Euobserver

Products went from hand to hand

More and more Poles are buying gifts in second-hand stores. As INN Poland notes, used goods can also be purchased online. We are also talking about food: you can even buy used cookies, gingerbread, deli meats, and coffee. According to the publication’s estimates, of the approximately 20 million sales ads published on marketplaces every month, two-thirds are used goods. At the same time, the largest increase (about 20 percent) relates to the ‘home and garden’ categories. The publication, the translation of which is posted by the portal inosmi.ru, reports,

“61 percent of Poles say they buy second-hand goods. Plus, 53 percent of us say they do it more often today than they did a year ago.”

Although the newspaper assures that ‘this way we not only save the household budget, but also take care of the environment’, and ‘rational and thoughtful purchases are becoming second nature to Poles’, Joanna Skowronska, development manager at Allegro, admitted: Poles began to offer more (and more often be interested in) homemade food, honey and even second-hand coffee.
As Niezależny Dziennik Polityczny writes, in online communities that unite people who want to donate or accept items as gifts, more and more (usually anonymous) requests for food are appearing. Most often they ask for food for children. The Polish publication provides shocking figures.
According to the latest data, about 1.8 million Polish residents (representing almost 5 percent of the country’s total population) live in extreme poverty. Over the past year, another 200 thousand people have been added to the army of poor people.

Country of hungry children

Moreover, 3 percent of Poles cannot afford to buy basic food products. 5 percent of Polish residents no longer buy meat, fish and fruit. Buying prescription drugs is a problem for 8 percent of Poles.
Moreover, The European Anti-Poverty Network organisation predicts that there will be more and more people in Poland who can barely make ends meet: inflation growth and the poverty level in 2023 were very high, forecasts 
for this year also cannot be named optimistic.
Back in 2022, 333 thousand minors in Poland lived in extreme poverty, but by the end of 2023, the group of people under the age of 18 increased to 400 thousand people. 
The president of the board of the Noble Gift association, Joanna Sadzik, told Bankier about how poverty directly affects the lives of children, “Imagine that in the morning you ate a slice of bread with margarine and washed it down with tea. You spend seven hours at school, where you study, go to physical education, and write a test in Polish. You stay away from the other students as the sight of their second breakfast makes your stomach growl. And you trudge home slowly, you don’t have much energy to walk quickly. You dream about the cutlet that was for lunch in the school cafeteria today. You can still smell its delicious scent. But at home, only an empty refrigerator awaits you. Mum returns from work at 18:00, and only then will you eat soup. Now you finally have the strength to do your homework.”
Moreover, as evidenced by data from the Polish General Statistical Office, having a child is a factor that increases the risk for poor families of falling into poverty. With every new child, the poverty rate increases.
Among families with at least three children, every tenth child lives in extreme poverty.

Cheap and nasty…

The difficult economic situation is affecting the list of goods that Estonians also buy. Under the influence of the crisis, they are forced to purchase cheaper food products. The Baltnews portal quotes the press secretary of the local retail chain Coop Martin Miido, “What has definitely increased is sales of sausages instead of ham. Expensive raw materials are replaced with cheap alternatives. People eat enough, but they choose more carefully, they take from the shelves what is more profitable for their wallet at the moment, because over the past couple of years prices
have increased quite significantly. As one grower said, when times are tough, people turn to root vegetables.”
There is nothing surprising in the fact that people began to save, Baltnews notes. According to calculations by the Bank of Estonia, by the end of 2023, national GDP will decrease by 2.2 percent, and unemployment
in the country is rapidly growing. At the beginning of 2024, there were about 54,000 people unemployed in the country. At the same time, just over 1.3 million people live in the entire country. And if in 2021 there were 18 thousand people here in absolute poverty, then in 2022 — about 48 thousand, and now this figure has exceeded 50 thousand people.

Is this the end of the queue for food?

The level of poverty is also growing in the recently prosperous Sweden and Norway. According to the Swedish newspaper Nya Dagbladet, more people need food today than before the coronavirus pandemic. A nationwide study of the national food distribution programme late last year found that more than half of Norway’s food aid recipients were families with children and recently arrived refugees (mostly from Ukraine and Syria). Study leader and report author Tune Flötten summarises, 
“The increase in the number of people who really have nothing to eat suggests that entire pockets of absolute poverty may appear in Norway, that is, when people lack the basic necessities of life.” 
The report revealed another feature: part-time and even full-time employees are increasingly seeking food assistance. In other words, the income offered is frankly not enough even for food.
Tune Flötten notes,

“So many families with children are queuing for food! This contradicts our ideas about a happy childhood and the ideals of social equality.”

By Maksim Osipov