Vast expansion in aid kept food insecurity from growing
Despite the sudden loss of 20 million jobs at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, food insecurity among Americans remained unchanged last year, the government reported Wednesday, in what researchers called a testament to a vast expansion of government aid.
As lines outside food banks stretched for miles in March 2020, experts feared the country faced a looming hunger crisis. But bipartisan legislation signed by former President Donald Trump offered billions in emergency aid, forestalling the expected rise in hunger that has accompanied past recessions and keeping levels of hardship flat.
“This is huge news; it shows you much of a buffer we had from an expanded safety net,” said Elaine Waxman, who researches hunger at the Urban Institute in Washington. “There was no scenario in March of 2020 where I thought food insecurity would stay flat for the year. The fact that it did is extraordinary.”
The government found that 10.5% of U.S. households were food insecure, meaning that at some point in the year, they had difficulty providing enough food to all members of the home because of a lack of money.
It also found that 3.9% experienced “very low food security,” meaning the lack of resources caused them to reduce their food intake. That was statistically unchanged from the previous year.
Food insecurity did rise among some groups, including households with children, households with Black Americans and households in the South. The gap between Black and white households, which was already large, widened further, with 21.7% of Black households experiencing food insecurity, compared with 7.1% of white households. That is a gap of 14.6 percentage points, up from 11.2 points in 2019, before the pandemic struck.
Black households suffered disproportionately from job losses and school closings during the pandemic and had fewer assets with which to buffer a crisis.
Still, the overall pattern — of hunger constrained — contrasted sharply with the country’s experience during 2008, when nearly 13 million additional Americans became food insecure at the start of the Great Recession. Last year, 38.3 million Americans lacked food security, a level far below the 50.2 million Americans in that situation at the recession’s peak.
As President Joe Biden pushes a $3.5 trillion plan to further expand the safety net over Republican opposition, the report Wednesday from the Agriculture Department provided fodder for both sides. Supporters said it showed the value of increased aid, while critics said the unchanged rates of food hardship showed that further spending was not necessary.
The aid expansions reflected in Wednesday’s report occurred early in the pandemic last year. They include the first round of stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits. Several large rounds of aid followed, most recently in a $1.9 trillion spending package in March.