European social policy analysis of food charity

An increasing body of country-specific research demonstrates that the need for emergency food assistance is growing throughout Europe, and that rising numbers of people are being forced to turn to charitable food aid to satisfy their basic need for food. Studies on contemporary experiences of food insecurity and food charity have recently been conducted in Estonia (Kõre, 2014), Finland (Silvasti and Karjalainen, 2014), France (Rambeloson et al, 2007), Germany (Pfeiffer et al, 2011), Spain (Pérez de Armiño, 2014) and the UK (Lambie-Mumford, 2017; Loopstra and Lalor, 2017).

There is a long history of charitable food provision in Europe – the European Federation of Food Banks was established in 1986 and now has members from 24 European countries (FEBA, no date). However, the recent country-specific research suggests that the period since the year 2000 has been a particularly important juncture for both the development of the provision of food assistance and the rising need for it. Evidence suggests that the years following 2003 were particularly crucial for the development of food charity in Germany (Pfeiffer et al, 2011; see also Chapter 2 of this book), those following 2008 in Spain (Pérez de Armiño, 2014; see also Chapter 6 of this book) and those following 2010 in the UK (The Trussell Trust, no date; see also Chapter 7 of this book).

There appear to be some noteworthy parallels across these European experiences of rising food charity, in particular, relating to changing welfare states and neoliberal social policy across Europe over the last 20–30 years. Evidence suggests that the recent rise of food charity has occurred in the context of increased conditionality and reductions to entitlements in social security across the continent. In parallel, there appears to have been a delegation of responsibility for caring for those experiencing food insecurity from the state to the charitable sector (Pfeiffer et al, 2011; Silvasti and Karjalainen, 2014). These commonalities indicate that there may be important social policy dynamics at work across Europe:

• In Germany, the German Social Code II, introduced in 2005, represented a more workfare-oriented social security regime and saw a significant reduction in the buying power of the payments that people received (Pfeiffer et al, 2011).