25% of RI Households Lacks Adequate Food Due to Pandemic, Says New Report
GoLocalProv News Team
25% of RI Households Lacks Adequate Food Due to Pandemic, Says New Report
New research released Monday by the RI Community Food Bank finds that the pandemic has been devastating economically for one-quarter of Rhode Island families.
The Food Bank calls the situation an economic crisis.
“The pandemic recession left an unprecedented number of Rhode Islanders without the means to feed their families. During July and August 2020, a random sample of 2,100 households were surveyed as part of the RI Life Index, an initiative,” according to the report. “Researchers found that 25 percent of households were worried about having adequate food.This is the highest level of food insecurity recorded in Rhode Island in twenty years.”
Before the pandemic, food insecurity was on the decline, from a high point of 14.7% in 2010 down to 9.1% in 2019, decreasing gradually as the economy recovered from the Great Recession. The pandemic drastically reversed this positive trend.
Source: RI Community Food Bank ReportRace a Factor
The current health emergency is also deepening longstanding racial and ethnic disparities. Black and Latino Rhode Islanders have been hard hit by the Coronavirus and are overrepresented among cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19. At the same time, they are experiencing higher levels of food insecurity, as demonstrated in results from the RI Life Index. Where 21% of White households lack adequate food, 36% of Black households and 40% of Latino households are food insecure.
