Food has been the single most common thing Cayman families have been given Government help within every year covered by the official record, which begins in 2013/14. In 2024, 909 families were assisted with food vouchers, 26% more than the year before and the sharpest rise since the pandemic. That is nearly one in three of the 2,817 families the Government helped that year. Behind the figures are people the island's meal charity describes as choosing between groceries, rent and medication, and a budget line that ran out of money before the middle of 2025.

The Caymanian Journal (TCJ) obtained the figures through a Freedom of Information request e-mailed on 27 August 2026. The response pointed to the Economics and Statistics Office's Compendium of Statistics 2024, whose Tables 4.06 and 4.07 set out, category by category, what families and individuals have been helped with since 2013/14: food, rent, electricity, water, propane, school costs, burial expenses and more. One note matters when reading the series: the 2016/17 financial year ran for 18 months, to 31 December 2017, as the Government moved to calendar-year reporting.

Eleven reporting periods, one pattern

Food comes first in every one of the 11 periods. In 2024 the 909 families helped with food compared with 577 helped with rent, 233 with electricity and 149 with water. The number peaked at 1,551 in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, fell to 643 in 2021 and has risen every year since, to 650, then 721, then 909. Over those two years the number of families helped with food rose 40%, while the population rose 9%.

Two lines in the tables raise questions the documents do not answer. A catch-all category, "Supplement (other)", jumped from 61 families in 2023 to 299 in 2024, and the Compendium does not say what it covers. Free school lunches, which reached 688 children in 2013/14, dwindled to 13 in 2022 and are recorded as none at all in 2023 and 2024.

Choosing between food and the rent

Cayman Islands Meals on Wheels, a registered non-profit which delivers meals to seniors and homebound adults across Grand Cayman, told TCJ it is seeing "continued and growing pressure" among the people it serves. Jennifer West, the charity's General Manager, said in an e-mail to TCJ's newsdesk on 11 September 2026 that the cost of groceries, housing, utilities and medication "can place significant strain on older adults, particularly those living on fixed incomes", and that referrals are increasing even for people who have family or community support but "still cannot consistently meet their nutritional needs".

Day to day, West said, that means "having to stretch a limited income further and make difficult decisions about what they can afford". Some clients live alone, have limited mobility or cannot safely prepare a meal, she said. The charity meets seniors who "have to carefully balance food with other essential expenses, including housing, utilities and medication", and "when income is fixed and the cost of necessities continues to rise, food can become one of the areas where people try to cut back". For older adults, eating less or less well "can have consequences for their overall health and wellbeing".

Demand "continues to exceed" the charity's capacity, West said. It serves about 330 to 350 clients each weekday and keeps a waitlist of eligible people it cannot yet take on, because its ability to respond is "directly connected to funding, staffing, vehicles, volunteers and delivery capacity". The daily delivery also serves as a wellness check. "For some clients, our volunteers may be one of the few people they see that day," she said.

What groceries cost

The Government's own price data show why food sits at the top of the list. According to the ESO's Consumer Price Index, food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose by about a third between 2020 and 2025, on TCJ's calculation from the annual averages, while prices overall rose by about 23%. The worst year was 2022, when food prices rose 9.2%. The pressure has since eased: the ESO's report for January to March 2026 puts food prices 1.8% higher than a year earlier and falling over the quarter, and the 2026 and 2027 Plan and Estimates forecasts "a continued easing in imported price pressures over the near to medium term".

The money behind the vouchers

The budget that pays for food, rent and utility assistance, appropriation TP 41, was set at CI$12 million for 2025 in the 2024 and 2025 Plan and Estimates, less than half the CI$26.2 million actually spent on the line in 2024. It ran out by June. Rolston Anglin MP, the Minister for Finance and Economic Development, told Finance Committee on 6 June 2025 that the Minister of Social Development and Innovation "has confirmed that the 2025 appropriation for TP 41 - Financial Assistance is fully exhausted", and that without a further CI$14.4 million "over 1,700 households will not receive financial assistance, starting the end of the month". The committee approved the money that day; the top-up was larger than the whole of the year's original budget for the line.

For 2026 the line is CI$24 million, and on 30 June 2026 Finance Committee added CI$3.5 million more, described in a Government release as "additional support for vulnerable Caymanians". Rolston Anglin MP told the June 2025 sitting that allowances for accommodation, food and utilities had been increased in February 2024, and that one-off payments of CI$400 and CI$500 went to long-term and food-assistance recipients later that year. The maximum food allowance itself has been CI$850 per household a month since the Financial Assistance Act, 2022 and its Regulations came into force on 10 October 2024, and the accommodation maximum CI$3,000; both were unchanged in the Regulations as revised at 31 December 2025.

Why food, and what is next

TCJ e-mailed Isaac Rankine MP, the Minister for Social Development and Innovation, and Nellie Pouchie, Chief Officer of the ministry that oversees the Department of Financial Assistance, on 14 September 2026, asking why food has led every category since 2013/14, what the rise in "Supplement (other)" represents, why the free-school-lunches line is empty, whether the CI$850 food maximum is under review, and why the 2026 budget for the line is below what was spent in 2024. Neither responded to the e-mailed request sent on 14 September 2026. The Government's own first-year update lists a working group launched "to review Department of Financial Assistance eligibility criteria"; it does not mention the payment maximums.

Whether the spending is reaching the people it is meant to help had already been put to the ministry from another direction. Pouchie told the Standing Public Accounts Committee on 8 September 2026 that the ministry's budgets are measured on outputs, and that assessing outcomes, and the impact of its spending on the people it is trying to help, remained a work in progress, according to the Cayman Compass's report of the hearing published on 10 September 2026. The Government's summary of the hearing confirms she appeared but does not record those remarks, and TCJ has not been able to check the wording against the Committee's webcast. What is driving the rise in families helped with food, and what the ministry plans to do about it, are questions it has not yet answered.