KEY POINTS:
Food banks are reporting a sharp jump in demand for food parcels in the wake of recent rises in the price of food and other living costs.
Food parcels handed out by the Salvation Army in Manukau jumped by 20 per cent in the five months to April
from the same time a year before.
Auckland City Mission food parcels rose by 4 per cent in the first four months of this year, including a 55 per cent jump in April.
Hamilton's combined Christian foodbanks handed out 167 parcels last month, up 35 per cent from April last year.
But April figures last year were unusually low, both in Hamilton and at the Auckland mission, because of increases in family support at that time. Family support payments have not increased this year.
Manukau Salvation Army services manager Ross Richards said the demand for food parcels was now as high as it was after the National Government raised state house rents to market levels in the 1990s.
"It's mainly due to petrol and food prices," he said.
"Although some of the families don't have cars, most do, and they all face higher food prices."
Auckland City Missioner Diane Robertson said beneficiaries had been struggling to cope even before food prices went up, but the mission was now starting to see growing numbers of working families needing food.
"We are getting people on low incomes who maybe were making it before and are now falling into that group of living in poverty," she said.
Rotorua People's Advocacy Centre manager Paul Blair said he talked to 15 people seeking emergency food grants outside Rotorua's Work and Income office on Wednesday.
He backed a recent call by Wellington's Downtown Community Ministry for the Government to lift the limits for food grants of $200 a year for single people, $300 for couples, $450 for families with one or two children and $550 for larger families.
"It's been like that for 10 or 15 years, so it's something the Government could do immediately with the stroke of a pen," he said.
A Work and Income spokesman confirmed that the limits had not changed for at least 10 years, but noted that officials had discretion to pay above the limits in "exceptional circumstances".
Work and Income figures on the numbers of special needs grants show that they have fluctuated between 21,000 and almost 34,000 a month in the past year, with no clear trend.
