Food insecurity in Europe: Who is at risk, and how successful are social benefits in protecting against food insecurity?

Abstract

Food insecurity in Europe has recently received increasing research and political attention. Yet, considerable gaps remain in our understanding: the demographic groups most at risk, the role of social benefit receipt, and whether higher-value social benefits protect against food insecurity among recipients all remain unknown. Multilevel models were used to examine food insecurity in 63,168 adults from 27 countries included in the European Quality of Life Survey in 2007 and 2011. Food insecurity was more prevalent among people with lower incomes, women, older people, renters, one-person and lone-parent households, those with lower education, people with disabilities, and those outside the labour market. Although food insecurity was concentrated at low incomes, income and food insecurity were imperfectly associated. The role of social benefit receipt was equivocal: food insecurity was not associated with pension or child benefit receipt, but was significantly more prevalent among out-of-work and all social benefit recipients, which may reflect eligibility rules and benefit conditionality. Furthermore, higher-value social benefits were not associated with lower risks of food insecurity across the different recipient groups, either because their value is insufficient, or because social benefits are unable to fully mitigate the individual and structural risk factors for food insecurity in Europe.

Assisting Towards a Healthy Diet for the Most Deprived in Post-Crisis Greece: An Evaluation of the State Food Provision Program

“…Previous analysis in Europe has highlighted the clustering of food insecurity among those less privileged (lower income, older age, unemployed, single-parent households and persons with disabilities) and its link with social benefits and general material deprivation (11). The 2008 Recession resulted in 23.5% of the European population (118.0 million people) living in households at risk of poverty or social exclusion in 2016 (12) and at the same time in some countries like Greece the risk of poverty was 1.5-fold higher than the European average and unemployment rates were as high as 23.6% (5,13,14).…”

Subsidising rice and sugar? The Public Distribution System and Nutritional Outcomes in Andhra Pradesh, India

“…This action is in contrast to the recent, much-criticized approach in many high-income countries (e.g. Great Britain), where food insecurity is framed as an individual problem rather than a structural issue, and charitable organizations are left to fill the gap (Garratt, 2019;Lambie-Mumford, 2013;Loopstra et al, 2018). India's framing of food security as an entitlement is in principle consistent with the right to food established in Article 25 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations, 1948) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OHCHR, n.d.).…”

“…Taken together, the economic burden of malnutrition in India is estimated to be between 0.8 and 2.5% of the GDP (Crosby et al, 2013), with longterm implications for the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Notably, however, extant research demonstrates that malnutrition and food insecurity are not exclusively problems of poverty, neither in India (Aurino et al, 2019) nor elsewhere (Garratt, 2019).…”

Social Supermarket and Sustainability

“…The "food paradox", generated, on the one hand, by food waste, and on the other hand by poverty and food insecurity was the subject of several studies in the field, but also the attempt to identify new social policies by governmental and non-governmental organisations (Pfeiffer, et al, 2015;Garratt, 2020). Generally, food insecurity has been identified as a response to low incomes and, most often, as a characteristic of the unemployed or those with social assistance (Dobre, et al, 2020).…”