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Foodbanks – national disgrace, or Grace in action?

Cromer foodbank shelves 348Regular columnist James Knight offers his insight into the rapid rise in the use of Foodbanks over the last few years.

In last week’s opinion article on Network Norfolk, Andrew Bryant believed that the Church should rage that so many people are dependent on food banks and soup runs, amongst other inequalities that he felt underpin too much of our society.

 
Of course, we can all agree that we wish people weren't poor. But I think the rage we often see against food banks is part of a misunderstanding about what is really happening. Hardly a day goes by without some uncritical politician holding up food banks as a sign of doom and gloom in our country, and using them as a stick with which to beat their political rivals. It's incredibly lazy thinking, because it misunderstands the journey from no food banks to food banks, and how and why it happened.

 
The first obvious point these politicians miss is that by and large the increased demand for food banks is caused by increased supply - that is, by people's increased ability to donate food and the charity infrastructure to facilitate this. Food banks are an example of Say's Law in action - "Supply creates its own demand", which very often isn't true, but is in this case.
 
Ask yourself a profound question: why weren't food banks around sooner? I mean, we've traded food for centuries, and we've given to charity for decades, so why weren't there food banks except very recently?
 
One thing to say is this: Clearly there is no question that food banks are an indication of short-term hardship for many, often for complex reasons. However, they are far less an indication that suddenly half a million people can no longer afford to eat, than they are an indication of increased prosperity overall, because the fact that nearly half a million people use them each week means that there is increased financial ability for people to afford food donations. I wonder if it ever struck Andrew Bryant as strange that in a time when state spending is at a record high, suddenly 0.7% of the entire population could no longer afford to eat?
 
Irrespective of whether poverty is on the increase, the number of food bank users is not the right metric to use to determine the number of people in poverty. Increased food bank use does not necessarily mean increased hardship - it probably means increased help for those in situations of hardship, and this is where we must be careful as a church about raging against them - because food banks are one of the best examples of Christ-like qualities in action.
 
Let me offer an illustration that will show why food banks are not necessarily a sign of increased hardship, but rather a sign of increased help and less hardship. Imagine a village called Poppellville consisting of 100 people. Ten years ago, 30 of the people in the village were below the median line and only 2 of them were getting help from food banks, as the food bank scheme was still in its infancy. Fast forward to the modern day, 18 of them are below the median line, and 16 of these 18 are receiving help from the foodbank scheme.
 
Clearly this increase in people using the food bank scheme in Poppellville is not coinciding with an increase in poverty. In absolute terms, there has been an 800% increase in the number of people in Poppellville now benefiting from food banks over those ten years, while poverty has dropped by 40% in that same time period.
 
Or if you prefer, here's another. Before Paracetamol was invented, people still had headaches - they just had no Paracetamol to buy at the chemist to make headaches better. The introduction of Paracetamol caused lots of people to buy them to cure headaches, but it would be absurd to argue that once we started to see lots of people buying Paracetamol, that is evidence that people are now getting more headaches. Headaches existed long before Paracetamol, just as hardship existed long before food banks - and neither Paracetamol nor food banks made the thing they were trying to cure more widespread - they just gave people an additional helping hand.
 
Those illustrations sum up what's probably the case in the UK. Rather than food banks being an indication of increased economic hardship, they most likely are a demonstration of our increased ability to respond to economic hardship with donations of food for those that need it, and a demonstration of how more and more people's rise in living standards has helped them to be able to buy food specifically for the purpose of donating it to food banks.
 
Moreover, food banks show how voluntary charity work in the local communities is doing a better, more cost-effective and more efficient job of helping people who have fallen on hard times than equivalent services would be if they were state-provided with the additional costs of the extra layers of state-bureaucracy on top, and party politicians publicly squabbling over it like they do with the NHS.
 
And this is exactly what we should expect to see in a world in which the church is the most powerful instrument of God's grace in action. Food banks are one of the world's great sign of organised compassion and kindness, and in a time when (despite what the media will have you believe) there is less poverty and hardship in the world than at any point in human history.

 



James Knight is a local government officer based in Norwich, and is a regular columnist for Christian community websites Network Norfolk and Network Ipswich. He also blogs regularly as ‘The Philosophical Muser’, and contributes articles to UK think tanks The Adam Smith Institute and The Institute of Economic Affairs, as well as the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity (LICC).

 


The views carried here are those of the author, not necessarily those of Network Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. 


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