So long as so many people, young and old, remain caught in poverty, the fight against it needs to be relentless. The effects of COVID and the Ukraine war are exerting new pressures on those living on the fringes of society because of financial deprivation. At the extremes, this sometimes manifests itself as malnutrition and homelessness.

Those caught in this depressing situation often rely on NGOs to help them survive with a little more dignity, for a regular square meal or a roof over their heads.

It is also these NGOs, with their direct experience of the problems caused by poverty, that regularly lead in showing how the scourge can be tackled. The latest valuable contribution to this effort is by Caritas, based on research conducted by Suzanne Piscopo and Andre Bonello.

The headline news from their research is that the yearly cost of a typical food basket for a family of two adults and two children has gone up by nearly 18 per cent over the last two years and the cost of medicine by nearly 16 per cent.

Elderly couples have suffered even more. Their food bill has gone up by about 25 per cent in two years and their medicine bill by nearly 37 per cent. These rises are stratospheric to people of little means.

Beyond giving us a picture on the ground, the value of this excellent study goes beyond quantifying the greater burden being carried by deprived families.

It lies in the imaginative and practical advice it gives the government on how to tackle the increasingly worrying spread of poverty.

The first recommendation is that support to the poor needs to be more structured to ensure they get effective help. By setting up special hubs in different locations to collect food from wholesalers and supermarkets, food banks can provide a reliable service to the poor as and when needed.

No one likes to resort to food banks if they can avoid it but when hunger is a reality the government has an obligation to help NGOs get the logistical support they need.

Caritas also recommends that low-income families be identified so that food available for distribution is delivered to them on time. Some supermarkets already donate a lot of food but others, as well as wholesalers, still waste valuable food supplies near their expiry date.

With food prices likely to continue to rise in the coming months, if not years, it is crucial that the local agriculture sector’s supply chain of vegetables and fruit is made more efficient. Caritas’s recommendation for public transport to be made available from every town or village to locations of farmers’ markets is a practical suggestion that can help low-income families procure essential fresh food.

Ultimately, direct financial support from the government to the most distressed families will be needed. Any financial support given to such families must be used to procure essential requirements like food and medicine. Caritas’s recommendation is to introduce targeted digital food vouchers to enable the poor to procure essential products.

Like all other European countries, Malta is facing the tough challenge of inflation because of the present geopolitical situation. The rationalisation of fiscal measures is an inevitable and realistic approach to managing the inflationary crisis. The government needs to show that protecting the poor is a high priority in its policymaking.

Caritas has ably proposed how this can be done. The government must look seriously at implementing its recommendations.