53 percent of registrants are from two-family households
NASSAU, BAHAMAS – The National Food Program is expected to resize its food parcels from four to two people, said the task force’s chairman Susan Larson, who said 53 percent of registrants are from two-family households,.
In an interview with Eyewitness News yesterday, Larson assured that families of four will still receive adequate food parcels.
“We’ve analyzed the data and we can now say with confidence that [53] percent of the households that have registered for assistance have registered as households of one or two people only,” she said.
“From the beginning, you may have heard us say our packages were engineered for households of four.
“So now that 53 percent of registrants are for one or two, what we are going to do is we are going to resize the package.”
Larson said this enables the task force to stretch the budget to provide more assistance and make sure everyone is getting as equitable a food parcel as possible.
“So, if you have two people in your household, you are going to get a parcel now that’s engineered for two people and if you have a household with four people in it, you will be given two of those parcels.” she continued.
“We are able to get more efficiency out of the budget by changing the parcel size.”
Larson added that this will be a first step in the task force’s strategy to continue to accommodate the growing numbers.
The task force will then look more closely at the levels of vulnerability and assisting people according to those levels.
The prime minister had announced that the task force will move to restructure aid into three categories: most, moderately and least vulnerable; with assistance to be distributed weekly, bi-weekly, and once a month, respectively.
But Larson said that has not been implemented as yet, because they first want to make sure that everyone is getting the same value of parcels.
The number of new registrants last week had seen a significant number of people requesting food assistance, with some 3,000 households registering in just 24-hours. The number of households seeking food assistance was nearly 140,000 people.
Larson noted that those numbers continued to grow throughout the week.
“The scope of this program is unprecedented, she said.
She furthered that the uptick in registrants have come from throughout The Bahamas, and not just New Providence.
Among those islands to have seen an increase in registrants is Eleuthera, she said.
Larson encouraged people that are registered to follow the system that is in place in terms of picking up packages to help with the flow of distribution.
Social media negativity
Larson said as the task force continues to do its work of successfully feeding tens of thousands of people, there has been some negativity from people on social media.
“We have interesting posts being made that are coming across as official and yet we didn’t create them,” she said.
“We encourage people who are not part of the task force formally to stop making posts on social media because it’s creating a lot of confusion and we also just hope that everybody will really try and rally around the task force”.
She insisted that if residents have any “constructive suggestions” on how the task force can approve on certain things, then want to hear them.
She further appealed to the private sector to make donations as the task force looks at ways to help as many people as possible.
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