Guaranteeing a Place at the Table for Everyone: An Investigation of Food Insecurity, Poverty, and the Potential Benefits of a Guaranteed Basic Income

Abstract

Although widely used official poverty measures indicate that fewer people are experiencing poverty at the present time in Canada and other high-income countries than in past decades, measures of food insecurity and food bank use show the opposite: that the number of people experiencing poverty in wealthy countries has increased in recent years. Poverty reduction strategies in high-income countries have evolved over the past century into a complex system of programs that include a general income-support (social assistance or ‘welfare’) component along with an array of targeted programs such as disability benefits, housing subsidies, food vouchers, and basic healthcare coverage. In recent decades, social assistance programs have been reformed to incentivize work (i.e., through welfare-to-work or ‘workfare’ initiatives) by enforcing strict eligibility requirements with conditions such as intensive job searching and accepting any available paid work. The reforms also include sanctions for non-compliance in the form of benefit cuts or interruptions. Since these reforms have been implemented, there has also been a proliferation of food banks in high-income countries, which indicates that the reforms have not succeeded in their objective of reducing poverty by transitioning benefit recipients to paid work. An unintended consequence has been an increase in the number of ‘working poor’ due to more people being placed in low-paying and precarious jobs. The conditional social assistance programs have also been criticized for being costly to administer, overly intrusive, and stigmatizing. A guaranteed basic income (GBI), provided by the state without the conditionality of social assistance, has been proposed as a simpler and more efficient way to alleviate poverty but has also been criticized as being unaffordable and for disincentivizing paid work. This thesis examined food bank access in Ottawa, Canada, and the potential benefits of GBI with respect to alleviating poverty. Food insecurity, a fundamental aspect of poverty, is characterized by the lack of sufficient quantity or quality of food due to financial constraints. People who access food banks for assistance are a particular subset of food insecure people, having lower incomes and more severe levels of food insecurity. We conducted a quantitative 18-month study with 401 participants who accessed one of eleven food banks in Ottawa, to examine the effect of various food bank approaches on food insecurity. We also examined self-reported physical and mental health over time. We found that physical health scores did not change significantly, but there was a slight improvement in the mean mental health score (1.4 points, SD = 10 points, p < 0.001) between baseline and endline. Food insecurity improved significantly for participants who accessed food banks that used one of two novel approaches: integrating the food bank within a Community Resource Centre and offering choice to clients in selecting food instead of giving pre-packed hampers. The proportion of participants reporting moderate or severe food insecurity decreased from 73.0% at baseline to 63.8% at the end of the study, indicating that there was an improvement but that most of the participants still reported serious levels of food insecurity. We also conducted a qualitative study in which we carried out 18-month follow-up interviews with eleven of the participants from the quantitative study. We found that there was little change at endline and that all eleven participants had physical or mental health conditions (or both). To examine the effects of basic income interventions, we conducted a systematic review using Campbell review methodology to ensure that it was conducted rigorously. Our searches of academic databases and other sources yielded 24,556 records, which were screened for eligibility, resulting in the inclusion of 27 studies of 10 experiments in our review. Based on the characteristics of the interventions, we developed a typology of five general GBI approaches so that we could analyze the findings of the studies in a meaningful way. Four of the types were intended to replace social assistance benefits; one type provided a supplemental GBI that was given in addition to other income and benefits. Food insecurity was examined in two studies, both of which found significant improvements. One study found a large reduction in the prevalence of food insecurity (SMD = -0.57, 95% CI: -0.65 to -0.49), the other study found a large reduction in food insecurity scores (SMD = -0.41, 95% CI: -0.57 to -0.26). Several studies found improvements in subjective financial well-being, self-rated life satisfaction, and self-rated mental distress. GBI interventions that provided larger amounts than social assistance yielded more favorable results. Four studies examined self-rated overall physical health, but only one found an improvement. Five studies examined school continuation by youths after the compulsory school age, and all five found significant improvements (p < 0.05 in four studies, p < 0.1 in one). Researchers examining food insecurity have proposed a guaranteed basic income as a solution because food banks are limited in their capacity to alleviate food insecurity. The limited evidence on GBI interventions suggests that a cautious approach should be taken in revising existing social assistance systems. A supplementary GBI would be a safer approach than a replacement of existing programs, and if it led to improvements in poverty-related outcomes, GBI amounts could be gradually increased, and conditional social assistance programs could be gradually and cautiously reduced.