Irish Examiner View: Already stretched food banks braced for huge surge
When the histories of this pandemic come to be written, most will follow a predicable path. Many will start with the moment the virus was identified and move on to the impact it had on an unprepared world. These histories will consider how medical, political, and social systems fared, whether they rose to the challenge or were swamped by it.
Some will, maybe in the third quarter of the book, consider local circumstances and individual countries’ responses. All of these will be revealing, many will be educational and worthwhile. Some will be too revealing, too painful for some countries where poor decisions unnecessarily cost lives. America, amazingly and sadly, is in that category.
Any American who cares about democracy and the credibility of that system will wonder how Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, came to be such a powerful figure in that superpower’s response to the pandemic. Kushner has no credentials, no matter how they are bigged up, to suggest he has any competence in crisis management. Indeed, the very opposite is the case, so any review will inevitably question his elevation over real, can-do experts only made possible by Trump’s narcissism and flagrant nepotism.
At the other end of the seriousness spectrum, some histories might touch on the fact that cancelling the British Grand National leaves a £500m hole in racing’s balance sheet. The sane world might ask how one race can be the pivot for half a billion pounds worth of business. Strange times indeed.
Those histories will also consider how the pandemic exacerbated the difficulties faced by social support systems struggling to match needs and resources even before the pandemic struck. Food banks are one of the places where that dynamic cuts particularly deeply. Already stretched, they are braced for an expected surge in need as the economic impact of the pandemic pushes more and more people out of work. Some of the grimmer estimates suggest that 25% of the workforce, around 500,000 people, will be out of work if the pandemic persists to the end of the summer.
Some services are already experiencing growing requests for food support. St Vincent de Paul Cork delivers 2,500 food parcels every week. “This is only the start... We expect to see an appreciable increase. We will be there and we won’t let anyone go hungry,” said one volunteer. Foodshare Kerry has echoed that warning and that reassurance too.
Foodshare Kerry also pointed out that panic-buying meant some people, the most vulnerable, were put in particular difficulty because stockpiling meant food in their usual price range had all been snapped up. Hamp Sirmans of Feed Cork told the same story. “We did see a change in what people were purchasing, which directly affected us, as well as the amount they were purchasing because we would survive on surplus.”
Panic-buying is one of the few aspects of the crisis we can control. Some countries have introduced a system to curb it. They charge X for the first, say, chicken, 2X for the second, 3X for the third and so on. If we cannot modify our behaviour then systems like this may be considered to protect the most vulnerable. One way or another it must be nipped in the bud.
