US Food Banks Overwhelmed as Americans Seek Charitable Handouts Amid Surging Gas & Grocery Costs
07:12 GMT 15.07.2022 (Updated: 11:22 GMT 05.03.2023)
© AP Photo / Ross D. Franklin
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Inflation in the US has hit a 41-year high of 9.1%, with the Federal Reserve responding by raising interest rates. Economists point to factors such as increased spending through pandemic-related economic stimulus, broken supply chains and increased production costs, mostly due to surging energy costs, as the driving factors.
Food banks across the US are struggling to meet demand as increasingly more Americans are driven by inflation to join long lines of those seeking aid, reported AP. Furthermore, 10% of the people are first timers, and a growing number are showing up on foot rather than in cars to save gas after the average cost of fuel nationwide briefly hit $5 a gallon in June.
After initially seeing some relief last year, which saw many people return to work after the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic, now the food banks are overwhelmed with demand. Furthermore, federal programs are providing less food to distribute and grocery store donations have been dwindling, added the report.
‘Caught Off Guard’
As hundreds of families were lined up in cars outside St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, Arizona, the food bank was reported as saying its main distribution center had provided packages to 4,271 families during the third week in June. This amount of handouts is a nearly 78% increase over the same week in 2021, said St. Mary’s spokesman Jerry Brown.
Brown was cited as saying that over 900 families queue at the distribution center every weekday to receive food boxes with goods such as canned beans, peanut butter and rice. St. Mary’s itself also adds products purchased with cash donations, as well as food offered by local supermarkets. The combined package containing goods like bread, carrots and pork chops is typically worth around $75.
A similar surge of demand for charity products has been reported by California's Alameda County Community Food Bank and Texas' Houston Food Bank, with the latter now giving out an average of 610,000 pounds of food daily. That is up from about 500,000 pounds a day before the pandemic, spokeswoman Paula Murphy said.
The Los Angeles food bank in Southern California had distributed around 30 million pounds of food during the first three months of this year.
According to food bank executives, this skyrocketing demand has caught them off guard.
“Last year, we had expected a decrease in demand for 2022 because the economy had been doing so well. This issue with inflation came on pretty suddenly,” Michael Flood, CEO for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank said.
“A lot of these are people who are working and did OK during the pandemic and maybe even saw their wages go up… But they have also seen food prices go up beyond their budgets,” Flood added.
📣 One out of every six of our neighbors needs help right now. 📣
— Feeding America (@FeedingAmerica) July 9, 2022
Nearly every food bank in the country has reported increased or steady demand for food and essentials. Every meal makes a difference. You can help us end this crisis. https://t.co/lZVa8IJACA pic.twitter.com/VSAN4FiQgV
In response to the growing demand, Feeding America has been calling on the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Congress to reinstate several temporary food programs.
Several hundred million dollars-worth of aid had relied on projects such as the “Food Purchase & Distribution Program.” One of three USDA trade mitigation programs, it was aimed at assisting farmers “suffering from damage due to unjustified trade retaliation by foreign nations,” but has since ended. Another temporary USDA “Farmers to Families” program used to provide more than 155 million food boxes for families during the pandemic, but was scrapped in May 2021.
"There is a critical need for the public sector to purchase more food now," Katie Fitzgerald, president and chief operating officer for the national food bank network, was cited as saying.
The nation's largest domestic hunger-relief organization said more than 53 million people had received help from food banks in 2021. This number is one-third more than before the pandemic.
Amid surging food prices in the past months, a Feeding America food bank survey carried out earlier this year showed that 80% of the food banks were reporting rising demand for emergency food services.
In response, the USDA said that food from local producers was being bought using $400 million from the Build Back Better initiative. These products were subsequently distributed among food banks, schools and other aid programs.
While executives claim there is enough food to distribute at the moment, the situation might change dramatically in the future, said Michael G. Manning, president and CEO at Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank in Louisiana.
28 June 2022, 17:56 GMT
The dire forecasts come as the consumer price index (CPI) - a broad measure of the price for everyday goods like gasoline, groceries, and rent - surged to a new 40-year high of 9.1% in June, the Labor Department announced on July 13. Meanwhile, adjusted for inflation, workers’ hourly wages were revealed to have fallen 1% during the month - down 3.6% from a year ago.
The bulk of the inflation rise was driven by gasoline prices, which increased 11.2% on the month, showed the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday. It showed that gasoline was up 59.9%, electricity - 13.7% and food at home - up 12.2%. The impact has also been exacerbated by an end to federal COVID-19 relief disaster declarations that had temporarily allowed increased benefits under SNAP, the federal food stamp program, covering some 40 million Americans.
