By Martin Kerin
AS I write, news has come in that, for the first time in history, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) will help feed children in the UK. For the first time in its 70 year history, UNICEF will respond to a UK ‘domestic emergency.’ Given recent events and following the Food Foundation’s findings that 2.4 million (17%) children are living in ‘food insecure households’, it was only a matter of time before an international agency was forced to step in.
2020 will down as a terrible year for our country and for the world. The pandemic has had an impact on all of our lives, but it has impacted the poorest of our society disproportionately worse. The simple reason for this is that rising poverty and inequality was already a major issue before the pandemic. The pandemic has simply turned the crisis of poverty and inequality into a catastrophe.