EXCERPT:
Sep 29, 2010 (IPS) – “Sometimes, for a day or two we don’t even have bread, nor flour to make bread. There’s a store nearby that, when we are truly desperate, lets us take a bag of bread or something simple, on credit. I owe them a lot of money for the food I’ve brought from them, but I still can’t pay them.”
Umm Khamis Khattab, 52, lives in a single, bare-bones room in central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. Khamis, her disabled son, 30, is married but has no source of income.
“Our situation is very bad. We used to receive financial support because my son is disabled. Now, we get nothing. After my husband died five years ago, his family tried to help us, for a short while. But they can’t take care of themselves, let alone us,” says the widow. “So we get by on hand-outs from neighbours now and then.”
Umm Khamis tries to generate an income selling eggs from the handful of chickens she tends. “We are three people living off 20 shekels (roughly five dollars) per week from the eggs.”
The World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) define food insecurity as people not having “adequate physical, social or economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs.”
Palestinians vulnerable to food insecurity are further defined as “households with both income and consumption below 5.6 dollars per adult equivalent per day.” Actual food insecure households are defined as having “an income and consumption below 4.7 dollars per adult equivalent per day.”
In the Gaza Strip, where unemployment levels soar up to 65 percent, and more than 80 percent people are food aid dependent, the average income per day per person is just two dollars. According to the WFP and FAO, the food insecure in Gaza are an alarming 61 percent, with another 16 percent vulnerable to food insecurity.
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