The making of a European Social Union: The case of food banks and the right to minimum income protection

With the Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived (FEAD), the European Union (EU) is involved in the field of last resort social protection, mainly by subsidising food aid. This working paper examines (a) to what extent FEAD funds are geared towards poor Member States with greater social needs, (b) how important food aid in general, and FEAD in particular, is to supplement insufficient minimum income protection for the poor, (c) to what extent food aid is embedded in and supported by (welfare) state institutions, (d) how important FEAD accompanying measures are to strengthen individual power resources. The paper builds on primary and secondary data and includes case study research covering eight European countries and four European cities. Our results show that FEAD organises an – albeit very limited – form of pan-European solidarity. Although FEAD budgets are very small, in some poorer countries they are not trivial compared to national unemployment and social exclusion spending. However, FEAD’s share in food aid packages is small. Moreover, compared to the efforts needed in order to lift minimum incomes to the EU-wide poverty threshold, the funds are relatively smaller in poor countries than in the richer ones. Our findings also suggest that on the one hand, FEAD could strengthen power resources of European citizens through its accompanying measures, but on the other hand, it seems to support the increasing penetration of food aid into welfare state institutions. Nonetheless, FEAD might be used as a stop-gap measure in a political strategy aimed at the implementation of the right to adequate minimum income protection.