Europe’s poor line up for food handouts

LISBON – Maria de Assuncao Cunha and her two small boys come out of a hilltop church carrying a handout of rice, cereals, milk and cookies.

‘It helps a little bit, but it’s not enough by a long way,’ says the 43-year-old, who has three children aged between five and 14. ‘Things are just really, really tight.’
The mothers, elderly people and middle-aged men standing in line at the Church of the Sacred Family offer grim evidence of how the economic crisis is hurting one of the world’s wealthiest continents.
The European Union, long a giver of aid to less-developed nations, is now turning its attention to its own needy citizens. The bloc’s farm ministers are considering a 67 per cent increase in internal food aid to €500 million (US$631 million) a year.
A decision is due this month.Officials estimate 43 million people in the 27-nation bloc – about 8,5 per cent of the total population – cannot afford a balanced nutritional meal, including fish, meat or chicken, at least every other day.’This is completely unacceptable,’ European Social Affairs Commissioner Vladimir Spidla said recently.
The Portuguese are especially vulnerable.Portugal is western Europe’s poorest country, where pay levels are lowest. The minimum monthly wage, taken home by several hundred thousand workers, is just €426 (Euro) before tax.Rising interest rates punished families with debt, which ran at 129 per cent of household income last year – the second-highest among the 15 countries using the euro currency.
And, according to the government, one million old people have to get by on pensions of less than €300 a month. Prices, meanwhile, are similar to those in wealthier EU countries.
Cunha, one of more than 150 people receiving relief in a parish stacked with tall apartment blocks, is unemployed and on welfare. Her husband works in the construction industry, where jobs are increasingly scarce. Together they bring home just under €700 a month.’How can a family of five live on that much nowadays? You can’t,’ she says. ‘Things have been getting worse and worse.’
The country’s economic woes began at the end of the past century. Portugal had stuck too long with an economic development policy based on cheap labour costs and failed to prepare for competition from developing nations.
Economic growth this century has averaged only around one per cent a year.Julio Paiva, a Portuguese who sits on the executive committee of the Brussels, Belgium-based European Anti-Poverty Network, says the crisis is being felt much more keenly here than in other western European nations.
‘It’s a very hard situation in Portugal,’ she says.An EU study in July found that 71 per cent of Portuguese had difficulty paying their monthly bills – a number surpassed only by Bulgaria.The government is digging deep to find extra welfare payments for the poor, including more than 160 000 elderly living close to the bread line. But the country is generating little wealth and there’s a crunch on state finances.
Charities are taking up the slack. Catholic organisations are among the main providers, but they say they are being engulfed by cries for help.Much of the aid they distribute comes from the country’s Food Bank, a Europe-wide volunteer organisation that collects unsold products donated by retail chains and wholesale markets.The Portuguese Food Bank is the largest on the continent. The Lisbon operation, one of 14 around the country, is run out of three warehouses converted from train sheds in a railway siding.
Each morning food is stacked up ready for delivery to more than 300 centres around this Atlantic port city. More than 60 other centres are on a lengthening waiting list.The centre provides help for 67 000 people in the Lisbon metropolitan area, sending out 35 tons of food every weekday, mostly to the suburbs where the economic downturn has exposed pockets of poverty.
When it opened in 1992, the Food Bank provided help mostly for old people. But now families squeezed by soaring prices and debt are joining the ranks of the needy, says head Isabel Jonet.’They’re the ‘new poor.’ These are people who have a job, a wage, but still can’t meet their family’s needs,’ she says.
Jonet says requests for help have increased ‘exponentially’ over the past six months. And she anticipates the plight will worsen as companies scale back their production and less surplus stock reaches the Food Bank.’Next year is going to be very tough,’ she says. ‘I don’t doubt that for a minute.’
– Nampa-AP