Community food provisioning efforts across the city are struggling to keep up with unprecedented demand for support this winter due to sever shortages in the supply of ambient food, fresh fruit, and vegetables.

While community groups have seen an explosion of new requests for emergency parcels in the last six months, ongoing supply issues have meant that volunteers are increasingly faced with the heartbreaking choice between cutting back on essential parcel contents and turning some people away empty-handed.

They are now appealing to Oxford residents for help.

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The OX4 Food Crew, an alliance of nine local grassroots organisations working to fight food inequality in the city, have come together to collectively raise funds and coordinate an emergency bulk purchase of essential and culturally appropriate staple foods at wholesale rates to plug the gap between demand and supply in the immediate term.

They hope that working together and pooling resources will allow the groups to purchase, store, and distribute essential supplies at scale, allowing them to meet the growing demand for food support in the most deprived areas of Oxford.

Most community-led food support efforts in the city rely primarily on surplus food redistribution charities like Oxford Food Hub (OFH) and SOFEA for their supply.

These organisations procure unsold surplus from large retailers and redistribute it to partnering organisations across the county – reducing waste and ensuring food support charities can access food affordably.

However, ongoing supply chain issues mean that there is much less surplus leftover in the system for redistribution.

Hassan, one of Oxford Community Action’s lead organisers, said: “While we used to receive 975-1000 kilos of surplus food from SOFEA every week, we have been getting less with every passing month.

“We get more and more people coming but don’t have enough food to share. We have tried to keep providing our usual 320 parcels every week by cutting back on contents, but we only received 643 kilos of food last Wednesday which forced us to reduce service to 220 parcels,”

The shortages are adding further strain to the tightly-resourced grassroots groups at a time when the cost of living crisis is causing the largest jump in first-time and in-work food bank use in the UK’s recent history.

Groups like Oxford Mutual Aid (OMA), which emerged from local people taking action on rising local food poverty at the start of the pandemic to respond to urgent local need, report that the situation today is far worse than it ever was at the height of the covid crisis.

“The phones won’t stop ringing” says Phil, one of Oxford Mutual Aid’s coordinators, “and we have such a shortage of supply that there are large sections of the hall we use for storage where we are seeing the bare floor for the first time because there’s so little coming in and so much going out.”

 

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This story was written by Matthew Norman, he joined the team in 2022 as a Facebook community reporter.

Matthew covers Bicester and focuses on finding stories from diverse communities.

Get in touch with him by emailing: Matthew.norman@newsquest.co.uk

Follow him on Twitter: @OxMailMattN1