Pandemic adds to pain
Already struggling Delta faces hunger surge.
TUCKERMAN — A year ago, the only food pantry in this tiny Delta town served between 500 and 700 boxes of groceries to individuals and families every month.
Since the onslaught of the pandemic in March, the pantry, operated by the nonprofit Every Child Is Ours, has nearly doubled its output, distributing sometimes more than 1,200 boxes of groceries every month to households in town as well as surrounding communities such as Grubbs, Amagon and Jacksonport.
“We get new ones every week,” Lo Andrews, a volunteer, said. “They are just all ages, college-aged, young families, elderly. It has just been a huge increase.”
Food insecurity across the state, and, in particular in the Arkansas Delta, has reached levels not seen since the financial crisis in 2008 as thousands of individuals who have lost jobs because of the pandemic continue to struggle to make ends meet.
Food banks, pantries and other organizations working in the area of hunger relief say they are seeing record numbers of people who are in need of their services because of the economic fallout from the coronavirus.
Some say the demand for food assistance is worse now than during the crippling economic recession that ravaged global economies over a decade ago.
“Right now, the increased need has actually been worse than 2008,” said Rhonda Sanders, head of the Arkansas Food Bank, which distributes food to some 320 agencies in 33 counties. “The suddenness of the pandemic was much greater than the recession.”
“It is unprecedented,” Sanders said. “It has been a strain on the entire system.”
Last year, the Arkansas Food Bank distributed 30 million pounds of food to some
280,000 individuals. This year, the organization expects to distribute 39 million pounds to nearly 400,000, a 40% increase from 2019, Sanders said.
To be sure, food banks and pantries across Arkansas have experienced growing demand; however, in the already economically depressed Arkansas Delta, poverty has become even more backbreaking during the pandemic.
Even as the state’s economy experienced a slight rebound over the summer, counties in the Arkansas Delta continued to have unemployment numbers in the double digits, far worse than the state average, according to a report from the Mississippi Delta Grassroots Caucus, a coalition of grassroots leaders in the eight-state Delta region.
The report also found that many low-income populations in the region do not have enough savings to survive the downturn.
“The Delta continues to suffer seriously from the pandemic and a strong recovery is still not here,” Lee Powell, director of the Caucus, said in the report, released in August.
Since March, when the full brunt of the pandemic hit the United States, the Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas, located in Jonesboro, increased the number of mobile food pantries from once a week to up to five times a week in the 12 counties it serves, some of which are among the poorest in the state.
“Every community we went to, the cars were lined up long before the distribution began,” Christie Jordan, Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas chief executive officer, said. “All of the food was distributed. There was always a steady stream of people coming to the distribution.”
Earlier in November, the Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas organized a mobile food distribution in Greene County, where nearly 17 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to 2019 data from the U.S Census Bureau.
“I cannot recollect a time we have run out of food so early,” Jordan said. “We went to that community, and there were far more people that came to distribution than we were ready to serve that day.”
Jordan said she expects the Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas to serve 113,000 individuals this year, about a 20% increase from the year before.
She also said she expects the level of need to stay the same or increase well into next year, even into 2022.
“We don’t anticipate a decrease in need in our area,” Jordan said. “We even anticipate well into 2022 we may still be serving families who came to us for the first time during the pandemic.”
Food pantries across the region reported that many who are seeking assistance are seeking it for the first time.
They are families who were once middle class, but job losses have catapulted them into financial despair.
They are college students and young people who are struggling to support themselves.
They are single mothers who can no longer work because school closures have left them unable to afford child care for children now learning from home.
“There are people who come here and cry because they have had to ask for assistance and have never had to before,” Jacqueline Ross, head of the Delta Regional Community Services Outreach Network, operator of the Delta Network Food Bank, which distributes food in Pine Bluff and 16 other counties in the Arkansas Delta.
“I am talking all races, all ages, all classes, creeds and colors,” Ross said. “And it is just not one instance where I have seen someone cry.”
By the end of the year, Ross said the food bank is projecting to have served 75,000 individuals, up from 52,000 in 2019.
“Covid-19 has really increased our clients who are coming in,” she said. “I don’t think it will get any better in the near future.”
The Delta Network Food Bank is also seeing more people who are homeless, with many walking miles to a food pantry.
“I have had people walk 4 and 5 miles with a backpack to the food bank and walk back to take food to their families,” Ross said. “You are seeing people sleeping under bridges or living in an abandoned motel, abandoned house or some substandard place.”
“It is heart-wrenching to experience and to see people having to go through this level of agony,” she said.
Service providers say they are growing increasingly concerned about having enough food to distribute to those in need. Because of overwhelming demand across the country, it has become harder to procure grants or other resources needed to secure food.
Supply chain issues have slowed down shipments; sometimes it could take up to three months for the delivery of a truckload of products, and even then, there is uncertainty as to when they might arrive.
Prices have also increased, with the cost of some products, such as a shipment of canned green beans, doubling in cost. Some federal programs put in place during the pandemic to aid with hunger relief are also expiring soon, adding extra strain to the food bank ecosystem.
Evelyn Shackelford, director of the Delta Dream Food Pantry in Marianna, recently learned that her operation would have to make the tough decision to reduce the number of people it serves as a result of changes in federal programs that had been providing food throughout the pandemic.
Delta Dream had been serving three times as many people during the pandemic and had expanded food distribution to additional counties, including St. Francis and Phillips, which with poverty rates hovering around 35 percent, are the poorest in the state.
“This is a big concern for me,” Shackelford said. “We will stay open and serve fewer people. We are just going to have to see how it works out. I don’t know how we are going to do it without the extra food.”
“It is heartbreaking and hard to sleep at night thinking about it,” she said.