Quebec's food bank network is sounding the alarm, citing a perfect storm of factors that make it challenging to meet a demand that has skyrocketed since 2019.

The network now helps 671,000 people a month, up 33 per cent from three years ago and 9 per cent since last year, according to the 2022 Bilan-Faim (Hunger report) released Thursday.

In just one year, the number of monthly requests for food assistance has jumped by 375,000, from nearly 1.9 million to more than 2.2 million, an increase of 20 per cent.

And these figures probably underestimate the true extent of the situation, says Martin Munger, executive director of the food bank network Banques alimentaires du Québec.

"This data was collected in March," he said. "From what I'm hearing on the ground, it's still going on. These are peaks in demand that have never been reached in the past. Our network has never responded to such demand in its history."

About two-thirds of the 1,200-plus agencies in the network report running out of food in the past year.

In general, the food bank network runs on food donations or supply agreements, Munger explained.

But faced with the current supply chain problems, the network's usual donors, such as food producers and processors, set out to better manage their inventories, which meant they had less surplus to give away.

"So, on the one hand, demand is increasing in a big way, and on the other hand, we're having a harder time getting supplies," Munger summarized.

Even after expanding its supermarket recovery program, the network was forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy food -- an extremely rare occurrence that is less than ideal in the current inflationary environment.

Inflation also hurts the hungry, specifically when it comes to households on fixed incomes.

34 per cent of food aid recipients are children; roughly 40 per cent of those seeking emergency food assistance are households containing kids (18 per cent are single-parent households and 24 per cent are two-parent households).

But at the very heart of this perfect storm, Munger reiterates, is the rise in demand.

"We've never experienced this in the past," he said. "The effect of inflation, the effect of the pandemic, it's beyond the means of the food bank network." 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Oct. 27, 2022.