The poverty report: half a million families lived in food insecurity in 2021, 665 thousand children experienced hunger - voila! news

Citizens protest "The country is rich, the citizens are poor" (Maariv)

About 16% of the families and about 21% of the children lived in food insecurity, about half of them in severe food insecurity - this is what emerged from a National Insurance report conducted in the first half of 2021, in the midst of the Corona crisis, in which hundreds of thousands of workers in Israel were laid off or sent to sick leave.

According to the findings, during this period there were about half a million families in Israel who lived in food insecurity, 265 thousand of them in severe food insecurity. About 976 thousand people, including 665 thousand children, lived in food insecurity. In families with children, about 19% live in food insecurity, Almost half of them (8.5%) are severely food insecure, while about 12.5% ​​of the families of the elderly after retirement age live in food insecurity in 2021.

Despite the difficult findings, in 2021 a decrease in the rate of food insecurity was seen from previous years.

The proportion of families living in food insecurity decreased from 18.1% in 2016 to 16.2% in 2021.

The decrease in severe food insecurity was more moderate: from 8.9% of families in 2016 to 8.2% of them in 2021.

Among children there was also a significant decrease in nutritional insecurity between the two years under review, from 26.3% to 21.1%.

The rate of severe food insecurity among children also decreased considerably, from 14.5% to 10.1% between 2016 and 2021.

Half a million families experienced hunger.

Illustration (photo: ShutterStock)

The segmentation into populations shows that life in food insecurity is mainly concentrated in the Arab population - 42.4% of the families in this population are food insecure in 2021 - a rate almost three times higher than the general average.

The level of nutritional security in this population increased slightly between the two years - from 56.8% to 57.6%.

In contrast, for the Jews, the level of food security increased between 2016 and 2021 from about 86% to about 89%, so that only about 11% suffer from food insecurity at one level or another.

Among the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose poverty rates are similar to the Arab population, there was a marked improvement in the level of nutritional security, which rose from 77% to approximately 84%, a level approaching that of the population as a whole.

Of those who lived with severe food insecurity in 2016 - more than half, approximately 54% - remained at the same level, which indicates a high level of permanence in the phenomenon of severe food insecurity, which may have serious consequences for the health situation.

Between these years, 6.5% of them deteriorated to moderate food insecurity and about 4% of them even to severe food insecurity.

The geographic segmentation shows that the Jerusalem and North districts are "leading" in terms of the proportion of those who are food insecure, with about 27% in the North District and about 23% in Jerusalem living in food insecurity, including 14.4% and 9.5% in severe food insecurity, respectively, in 2021. After them is the southern district with a rate of about 19% of families in food insecurity.

That is, geographically, the problem is more concentrated in Jerusalem and the periphery of Israel.

The best situation is in the districts of Tel Aviv and the center where the level of severe food insecurity is about 5% of the families and a double level of both moderate and severe food insecurity.

The minister in the Ministry of Welfare and Social Security, Rabbi Yoav Ben Tzur said in view of the data that he will act immediately to provide a nutritional solution for the hungry children.

"Over half a million families in Israel live in food insecurity - this is a shocking and painful statistic that must be addressed urgently," he said.

"We see the weakened populations in society, in the periphery and in the cities, collapsing under the heavy burden of the cost of living and giving up basic meals due to severe economic hardship. Every day, hundreds of thousands of children in Israel go to educational institutions without a good lunch and this is a sad situation that separates me from rest."

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