Lawmakers decry food box program
“Puzzling” USDA plan brings little aid to New Yorkers, they say
A new round of contracts in the Trump administration’s coronavirus food box program again does little to address increasing hunger in New York, 14 congressional representatives warned the U.S. secretary of Agriculture on Monday.
After awarding a second round of contracts, companies serving the Northeast received only 4% of the funds, although roughly 10% of the nation’s population lives here.
“We’ve had less luck in the second round,” said Mark Quandt, executive director of the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York. “We’re fighting with other food banks for the same product, which we don’t want to do.”
Dan Egan, executive director at Feeding New York State, said New York has “barely been impacted by this program.”
“It’s $3 billion,” Egan said. “There should be food f looding in and there is barely a trickle.”
After awarding just 4% of food box funds to companies in the Northeast in a first round of contracts, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in late June awarded $202 million worth of new contracts to 16 companies and continued earlier deals. Four of the new companies with contracts totaling $8 million will serve the Northeast, including New York — which means only 4% of secondround food box funds went to companies in the region.
The new distributors will direct food to underserved areas and will have an increased focus on opportunity zones in order to deliver food to places where either no boxes have yet been delivered, or where boxes are being delivered but where there is additional need, a spokesperson for the USDA said.
Rep. Paul Tonko, D-amsterdam, said USDA has “chosen to double down on their obvious and puzzling mismanagement of this vital food assistance program.”
“I cannot fathom why USDA continues to exclude local food banks that are already set up to do this work in support of the neediest among us,” Tonko said. “Instead, USDA has chosen to award lucrative food distribution contracts to small out-of-state companies that have little or no presence or capacity here.”
Limited contracts mean food banks in the regions where coronavirus struck hardest this spring have less access to food through the program, the New York lawmakers wrote in a letter to Sonny Perdue, the secretary of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, demand for food assistance from food banks remains high, Quandt said.
Over the past four and a half months, over 350,000 people have submitted new Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamp) applications in New York. The number of individuals on food stamps in New York rose from 2.6 million in March to 2.7 million in April, according to the most recent data available.
the usda’s program
For farmers whose supply chains were upended by the pandemic, the program establishes new buyers for products in areas where contracts were awarded.
‘‘Both our family farmers in upstate and most vulnerable populations have experienced dire consequences from the coronavirus pandemic and it is essential that the programs designed to assist both communities are transparent and good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” said Rep. Antonio Delgado, D-rhinebeck, whose rural district is home to many small farms.
The solution the administration crafted was supposed to move boxes of farm fresh produce, dairy and meat from “truck to truck” using $3 billion of federal funds.
In May, the USDA contracted with 198 companies to create $1.2 billion worth of boxes. In
this first round, only 29 companies won contracts to distribute the food boxes in the Northeast region, including eight from New York. Their contracts totaled $54 million — about 4 percent of the total food box funds.
In late June, the USDA announced it would continue most of the contracts, including all eight from New York, but the agency did not provide details on how much the extended contracts were worth nor whether companies would be asked to produce more.
Several of the new companies selected for contracts in the second round are the nation’s largest food distributors, a change from the first round in which some contractors lacked clear food distribution
experience. For the first round, the USDA quickly approved bids for the $3 billion program, so fast that some companies had an approved contract in hand one week after they applied, raising questions about the agency’s vetting process.
The contracts have set off a “chaotic” scramble as food banks around the country compete to secure the food from the box distributors with no oversight from an agency governing how many boxes food banks and nonprofits can snag, Egan said.
“There was no traffic cop,” he said.
The USDA also did not lay out who covers the cost of shipping the food boxes from food banks to food pantries and other places of distribution, Egan said. This has created friction between some food banks and distributors.