Virus food-aid program nears its restart date

PHILADELPHIA — Starting Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will add $1.5 billion to the Farmers to Families Food Box program, a distribution of food to Americans in need. It began in May with more than $ 3 billion in funding and ended in mid-December. The additional money for the program was included in the covid-19 relief package as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act passed on Dec. 21.

While anti- hunger advocates are grateful for the intervention, however, they have complained that the program has been mismanaged. They say it benefits farmers and distributors more than those in need and that food deliveries often have been delayed and sometimes spoiled. Congress has been investigating these charges.

Nationwide, the Trump administration has said it has distributed 3.3 billion meals made from the food boxes, each containing about 35 pounds of meat, dairy and produce products.

Crediting Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, for lobbying U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue for the additional funding to restart the program, nonprofit Share Food Program executive director George Matysik said, “There wasn’t much appetite from the White House to keep this program going, but Ivanka, along with Congress, moved it ahead.”

As welcome as the food boxes have been, their disbursement has at times been bogged down by problems.

During the summer, members of Congress noted that to deliver the food boxes, the USDA used its Agricultural Marketing Service not its Food and Nutrition Service. The marketing service helps farmers sell produce, while the nutrition group administers food-aid programs.

This may have caused serious delays, as distributors unfamiliar with food banks’ needs were put in charge of sending out the boxes, anti-hunger advocates said. In many cases, food never got to food banks, or when it did, it had already rotted.

In a statement, Kate Leone, chief government relations officer for Feeding America, the nation’s largest food charity, questioned whether the food box initiative was being used more as a job-support program for food distributors and producers than as a means to aid the hungry.

In August, U.S. Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., announced that the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis would investigate alleged mismanagement in the program.

Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs in Washington, D.C., and other advocates have said that increasing food stamp allowances would be a more efficient way to feed hungry Americans than delivering boxes. The Consolidated Appropriations Act included a temporary 15% increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program despite the Trump administration’s multiple efforts to decrease them.

As the pandemic rages, the need to help the hungry is a foregone conclusion, Weinstein said.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Census Bureau released a finding showing that in mid- December, 30 million Americans reported they “sometimes or often” didn’t have enough food during the week. That’s 4 million more than in late November.

Weinstein concluded, “This situation has become incredibly urgent.”