GOP lawmakers eye SNAP cuts, which would scale back benefits that help low-income people buy food at a time of high food prices

  Congress may soon consider whether to cut spending on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the main way the government helps low-income Americans put food on the table. The Conversation U.S. asked Tracy Roof, a political scientist who has researched the history of government nutrition programs, to explain what’s going on and why the effort to reduce spending on SNAP benefits, which can be used to purchase groceries, could falter.

The good news that Gov. Kay Ivey didn’t share

  Gov. Kay Ivey did something good last year. And as far as I can tell, she never told anyone about it.

  As Alander Rocha recently reported, the governor’s office used a plan submitted to the federal government to increase the monthly benefit paid to recipients of Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) in Alabama from $215 a month to $344.

‘For Cruelty’s Sake’: State of Alabama diverts $400 million in COVID funds to build prisons, leaving many in dire straits

  Jenny Eisenberg is an unemployed writer – but not by choice. The market she writes for has “dried up,” and her husband, who holds a doctorate in literature, also cannot find work due to a saturation of academics pursuing few opportunities. Their financial situation is “not the best,” and providing for a family of six has led them to live off food stamps.

  At the same time, states across the country are using their share of the $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds from the American Rescue Plan Act to support families and businesses struggling from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, to maintain vital services, and to invest in communities.

  But in Alabama, rather than focusing on poverty, education equity, or affordable housing, the Alabama Legislature directed $400 million of its $2.2 billion in COVID relief to help fund the construction of three new mega-prisons, further embracing a failed system of mass incarceration that for generations has disproportionately harmed communities of color and people living in poverty.

A shrinking fraction of the world’s major crops goes to feed the hungry, with more used for nonfood purposes

  Rising competition for many of the world’s important crops is sending increasing amounts toward uses other than directly feeding people. These competing uses include making biofuels; converting crops into processing ingredients, such as livestock meal, hydrogenated oils, and starches; and selling them on global markets to countries that can afford to pay for them.

  In a newly published study, my co-authors and I estimate that in 2030, only 29% of the global harvests of 10 major crops may be directly consumed as food in the countries where they were produced, down from about 51% in the 1960s. We also project that, because of this trend, the world is unlikely to achieve a top sustainable development goal: ending hunger by 2030.

The federal poverty line struggles to capture the economic hardship that half of Americans face

  Michael Chase works two jobs in southeast Ohio: one as a hotel night clerk and one as retail support – sorting through donations, setting new merchandise out, cleaning – at a nonprofit.

  His schedule is not fixed in either job, and his hours are not guaranteed. Some weeks he works back-to-back eight-hour shifts. Some weeks he works fewer than 30 hours. Neither job offers sick leave, vacation time, or health insurance.

  Chase shares an apartment with three other people, something he finds stressful. And he is not always confident that he can make his portion of the rent. Between the two jobs, Chase earns less than US$16,000 a year. While it may not sound like a lot, that places him well above the federal poverty line for a single person: $12,760.

The US is taking a bite out of its food insecurity – here’s one way to scrap the problem altogether

  The U.S. Department of Agriculture is set to permanently increase the value of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits by 25% above pre-pandemic levels in October 2021.

  It’s the biggest change since 1979 to this anti-hunger program, commonly known as SNAP, which currently helps over 40 million Americans.

Forget the American Dream – millions of working Americans still can’t afford food and rent

  The Biden administration is likely celebrating a better-than-expected jobs report, which showed surging employment and wages. However, for millions of working Americans, being employed doesn’t guarantee a living income.

  As scholars interested in the well-being of workers, we believe that the economy runs better when people aren’t forced to choose between paying rent, buying food, or getting medicine. Yet too many are compelled to do just that.

3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet

  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused price spikes for corn, milk, beans, and other commodities, but even before the pandemic, about 3 billion people could not afford even the cheapest options for a healthy diet.

  Recent analysis of global food price data reveals that as of 2017, the latest available year, around 40% of the world’s population was already forced to consume poor-quality diets by a combination of high food prices and low incomes. When healthy items are unaffordable, it is impossible for people to avoid malnutrition and diet-related diseases like anemia or diabetes.

The pandemic recession has pushed a further 9.8 million Americans into food insecurity

  The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed hardship on millions of vulnerable Americans through unemployment and reduced work hours. And this has increased food insecurity across the nation.

  There is no official figure yet for how many more families are struggling to provide regular meals around the table – the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s next annual report on food insecurity, defined as a lack of access to sufficient food due to limited financial resources, won’t be out until the fall.

Living with a disability is expensive – even with government assistance

  Edward Mitchell is 34 years old and lives in Jackson, Tennessee with a spinal cord injury caused by a hit-and-run accident that happened when he was 17. He has plenty of expenses that all Americans have, like groceries and utilities. But to maintain his independence, he also has to pay for home modifications to accommodate his wheelchair, personal nursing care, dictation tools to help him write, and adjustments to his car so he can drive himself to work.

  He is just one of the 20 million working-age adults living with disabilities in the U.S. for whom it takes more money to make ends meet because of the additional expenses they face every day.

How urban planning and housing policy helped create ‘food apartheid’ in US cities

  Hunger is not evenly spread across the U.S., nor within its cities.

  Even in the richest parts of urban America, there are pockets of deep food insecurity, and more often than not, it is Black and Latino communities that are hit hardest.

  As an urban planning academic who teaches a course on food justice, I’m aware that this disparity is in large part through design. For over a century, urban planning has been used as a toolkit for maintaining white supremacy that has divided U.S. cities along racial lines. And this has contributed to the development of so-called “food deserts” – areas of limited access to reasonably priced, healthy, culturally relevant foods – and “food swamps” – places with a preponderance of stores selling “fast” and “junk” food.

The Biden administration can eliminate food insecurity in the United States – here’s how

  The Biden administration faces many challenges, some of which may prove to be intractable. But in one key area affecting tens of millions of Americans, it is well-positioned to attain a truly monumental achievement – the near-total elimination of food insecurity in the U.S.

  This may at first glance seem a little far-fetched. After all, despite numerous efforts from the administration of John F. Kennedy through that of Donald Trump, the achievement of a hunger-free American has been elusive.

Why are SNAP benefits so confusing that even social workers can’t figure them out?

  Crystal Ortiz, a master’s student studying social work at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, has been receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance (SNAP) benefits since 2017. The $200 a month she received made it possible for her to buy more fresh produce, especially bagged salad kits that made it easier for her to eat a healthy lunch when she didn’t have a lot of food prep time.

  This January, that was threatened when she received a letter stating that her benefits would be canceled if she did not fulfill a 20-hour-a-week work requirement.  When I first met with Ortiz, she stated that “I would have to make major cuts to the food that I get” if she lost her SNAP benefits.

Energy is a basic need, and many Americans are struggling to afford it in the COVID-19 recession

  Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, lower-income families are struggling to pay their energy bills. That’s a big concern during extreme events like summer heat waves, which can be deadly – especially for elderly people, young children, people of color, and the poor.

  We ran a nationally representative survey in May 2020 of U.S. low-income households to measure energy insecurity. We found that 13% of respondents had been unable to pay an energy bill during the prior month, 9% had received an electricity utility shutoff notice and 4% had had their electric utility service disconnected.

To reduce world hunger, governments need to think beyond making food cheap

  According to a new United Nations report, global rates of hunger and malnutrition are on the rise. The report estimates that in 2019, 690 million people – 8.9% of the world’s population – were undernourished. It predicts that this number will exceed 840 million by 2030.

  If you also include the number of people who the U.N. describes as food insecure, meaning that they have trouble getting access to food, over 2 billion people worldwide are in trouble. This includes people in wealthy, middle-income, and low-income countries.

Life on welfare isn’t what most people think it is

  When Americans talk about people receiving public assistance – food stamps, disability, unemployment payments, and other government help – they often have stereotypes and inaccurate perceptions of who those people are and what their lives are like.

  Statistics can help clarify the picture by challenging false stereotypes of undeserving people gaming the system, but people’s stories about their own experiences can be more memorable and therefore more effective in changing minds.

What it tastes like to eat what you want for the first time

  All my childhood grocery shopping memories center on being poor: Walking 10 minutes from our two-bedroom home in the Malden Housing Authority’s projects to the local Stop & Shop and filling the cart with juice, eggs, and bologna. There was the joy of adding the small amount of treats we could afford — at the time, that meant fresh bakery chocolate muffins, apple turnovers, and Gushers fruit snacks — and the embarrassment of putting some of the food back at the register when it rang up over our limit.

I ate lobster on food stamps and it was delicious

  I was a food stamp kid for a few years in the early 1990s when my mom started college. I remember the first time we went to the H-E-B grocery store on the south side of San Antonio with our stamps. We always drove to a store in the next neighborhood over to shop. My mom had worked at the closest H-E-B when she was pregnant with me. People she went to high school with shopped there and so did her former in-laws. There was no way my mom was going to walk into that store with a wad of food stamps. We felt enough shame that we needed the help without adding in other people’s judgment.

Scaling back SNAP for self-reliance clashes with the original goals of food stamps

  Trump administration officials are trying to cut enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP but still sometimes called “food stamps.” They say that too many people are getting this aid in a strong economy.

  The program helped about 35 million low-income people buy food in 2019. The average recipient gets US$128.60 a month, about $1.40 per person per meal.

Trump’s newest budget would take food away from working families

  There are dozens of programs on the chopping block in the Trump administration’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal. Yet the administration’s most blatant attempt to gut the programs on which American families depend comes in the form of additional cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation’s largest nutrition assistance program. The proposed budget contains a devastating $182 billion cut to SNAP over the next decade, a reduction of approximately 28 percent compared with the baseline level estimated by the Congressional Budget Office.