Antonio Torres del Cerro

Grigny, France, Feb 26 (EFE).- Almost a year after the outbreak of the pandemic, residents in the poorest suburb of Paris, particularly the young, are being forced to rely on food banks to survive.

Just 30 kilometers south of Paris, which has some of the highest per capita income neighborhoods in Europe, poverty and hunger have found fertile ground in suburban towns like Grigny, which is home to 30,000 people.

Forty-five percent live below the French poverty line (set at 900 euros per month) and 25 percent are unemployed, more than double the national average. These figures do not factor in the full impact of Covid, which has forced many sectors to shut down for almost a year.

The damage caused by the pandemic is visible at the local food bank, run by the national charity "Restos du Coeur" ('Restaurants of the Heart').

The establishment has seen a 14 percent increase in its membership since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.

The charity estimates that 2,500 people now come daily to its facilities, prefabricated cabins set up next to high rise apartment blocks.

Most of them are foreign - there are 90 nationalities represented in the town. And among them, there are those without documents, like Moroccan Zineb Mediouni, a 32-year-old mother of two.

"I have no job, I earn nothing and I thank the 'Resto du Coeur' because it has helped me a lot. There are people who are not even lucky enough to be helped," Mediouni, who also works as a volunteer at the food bank, tells Efe.

Housed in a local social shelter with her two children and divorced from her husband, she relies on charities to survive.

"I've been in France for three years, without papers. I'm waiting for my turn (to be legalized), but I can tell you that I'm fine, I have a warm place to sleep, my children are healthy, so am I," adds the woman, who hopes to become a social worker.

Reine Lasry, a volunteer at "Resto du Coeur" for the past three years, notes the increase in the number of young people who don't have enough food and basic supplies.

"There are new people who used to work for a few hours. And with this crisis they have lost those hours. What shocks me the most is that some of them tell us that their only meal of the day comes from here."

Grigny, where the vast majority of the population lives in rented low-income council housing, is the flagship of the so-called Parisian "banlieue" or suburbs, which grew exponentially in the 1970s and 1980s with the arrival of millions of immigrants from the former colonies in Africa.

"Poverty here affects children first and foremost. Fifty percent of the residents are under 30 years of age. We face the pandemic of poverty, which already existed, but which is worsening with Covid", mayor of Grigny for nine years, Philippe Rio, tells Efe.

Rio has asked the central government for help, and in January Grigny was chosen as the location for the announcement of an ambitious national plan to fight poverty through a series of investments in sectors such as housing, education, health and infrastructure.

"It is an insult and it is immoral and dangerous that there are poles of misery in the richest region of Europe," he says.

Grigny is used to being in the national spotlight for being the hometown of Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered five people in a Jewish supermarket in 2015, or for being a hotbed urban riots in 2005, but Rio is fighting the stigmas associated with the "banlieue."

"We, the suburbs, are the youth of France. This country cannot only be happy about our youth because of people like Kylian Mbappé (a football star and native of the nearby town of Bondy). France must reconcile with its working class areas," he concludes. EFE

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