With grocery prices still climbing, food bank in P.E.I. cuts back on service

A food bank in eastern P.E.I. reduced its service last month in the face of rising demand and falling donations.

The Southern Kings and Queens Food Bank in Montague has been operating since 1988. Norma Dingwell took over as its manager two years ago, just as inflation was starting to spiral across the country — and nowhere more than on P.E.I.

"I've seen the demand for food banks increase, the donations unfortunately decrease," Dingwell said.

"Aug. 1 we went back to [clients] just being able to come once a month. We were allowing people to come up to twice a month if they needed to, but because of the increase and the decrease in donations we just had to scale back."

It is not just that donations are down, it's that the cash isn't going as far as it used to. The prices of food bank staples such as sugar, cereal, and juice boxes are all up significantly, Dingwell said.

The change came at a bad time, she said, with parents facing extra bills as they prepared their children to head back to school.

Climate change and war

Consumer price index growth has eased on P.E.I., with the annual inflation rate in August at just 1.2 per cent.

In 2021 and 2022 the annual inflation rate was regularly hitting double digits.

Those price increases are now locked in, and the consumer price index for groceries is still rising faster than total CPI. It was 3.1 per cent in August.

Ellen Goddard, a professor in agricultural and resource economics at the University of Alberta, said there are sources of international instability that continue to drive up prices.

"California has been pretty devastated by weather, by fire, by drought, and there's no way that's not going to affect the price of some of the things that we import," Goddard said.

On P.E.I. there is evidence of that in the cost of vegetables, which leads the table of grocery commodities with a 7.2 per cent increase in price.

Drought induced by climate change in the Mediterranean has hit olive trees, bringing higher prices for olive oil.

Dairy has seen the second-highest increase, up 5.6 per cent.

Dairy in Canada is locally supplied with prices set by marketing boards. The price increase there is driven by inflation across the economy, as the boards put up prices to cover rising costs for equipment and feed.

Goddard noted dairy product prices did not rise as quickly as other food prices during the height of inflation.

"The dairy industry chose to hold off some of those price increases over the last couple of years when things were really bad, so we may be seeing a little bit of catch-up," she said.

Back on the international front, the continuing war in Ukraine has reduced output in that country, said Goddard, lowering world supplies of grain, livestock fed by those grains, and certain oils, and forcing prices up.