Akash Sama­roo

With ris­ing costs of ba­sic food items, the gov­ern­ment is be­ing asked to in­crease its Food Sup­port Card’s mon­e­tary al­lowance.

As the pan­dem­ic’s death toll leaves wid­ows and wid­ow­ers in its wake, many sin­gle-in­come house­holds are strug­gling to put food on the ta­ble. One non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tion, Wid­ow Sup­port T&T, saw a rise in its mem­ber­ship as it wel­comed over two dozen new mem­bers just re­cent­ly - women, who among oth­er things, are try­ing to cope with be­com­ing the sole bread­win­ners of their fam­i­lies.

“Be­cause of the ris­ing food prices, it is very dif­fi­cult for them to make ends meet,” said Wid­ow Sup­port T&T Pres­i­dent, So­rya Nanan.

Ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices, the Food Sup­port Card has three amounts based on the size of the fam­i­ly unit: 1-3 peo­ple ($510), 4-5 peo­ple ($650) and 6 peo­ple and more ($800).

But Nanan says from her work on the ground, those al­lowances do not stretch like they used to.

“Dur­ing the Christ­mas hol­i­days, some of them said that they had to cut out items that used to be an an­nu­al tra­di­tion.”

It’s why she feels it is time the Gov­ern­ment re-eval­u­ates the al­lowance.

In Au­gust 2021, Guardian Me­dia put to­geth­er a bas­ket of ba­sic food items.

Com­par­ing it to six months pri­or we found a 15.6 per cent in­crease over­all. How­ev­er, much has changed since then, par­tic­u­lar­ly with the on­go­ing sup­ply chain is­sues which have caused Na­tion­al Flour Mills, Nes­tle and a few oth­er sup­pli­ers to an­nounce fur­ther in­creas­es.

Armed with a fresh shop­ping list that caters to ba­sic food items for a fam­i­ly of four, Guardian Me­dia went shop­ping once again.

The ta­ble shows the cur­rent price against prices in Au­gust 2021, fac­tor­ing in the re­moval of Val­ue Added Tax (VAT) on cer­tain items:

This shows a 9.25 per cent in­crease com­pared to the prices four months ago.

In some cas­es, we went with the least ex­pen­sive brand of items.

Speak­ing anony­mous­ly with Guardian Me­dia, su­per­mar­ket em­ploy­ees said the biggest price shocks come from cook­ing oil and now flour.

But it’s not on­ly sin­gle moth­ers who are try­ing to find that ex­tra dol­lar to buy their gro­ceries, fa­thers say they too know the bur­den.

Pres­i­dent of the Fa­ther’s As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go (FATT) Rhon­dall Fee­les said the is­sues go be­yond what’s in their wal­lets.

“This strug­gle to buy food has cre­at­ed a lot of is­sues that has caused a lot of psy­choso­cial stress­es, it’s been hard, ex­treme­ly hard.”

When Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed Min­is­ter of So­cial De­vel­op­ment and Fam­i­ly Ser­vices, Don­na Cox, for a com­ment on the re­quest to in­crease the food card al­lowance, she in­di­cat­ed that she will re­spond lat­er to­day.