Harsh requirements hurt those needing food assistance
Although we are pleased to see unemployment numbers declining nationwide, many of Arizona’s workers still struggle to stay employed at jobs that don’t pay enough to support them. This often presents families with challenging choices between paying for healthy food, safe housing, medicine, and other basic needs. These decisions disproportionately impact children.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the first line of defense for working families who earn too little to make ends meet, who do not have steady employment, or who are searching for work. SNAP also helps people who live on a fixed income — including people with disabilities and senior citizens — put food on the table. It is America’s most effective anti-hunger program.
In Arizona, 850,000 people receive SNAP benefits at the average rate of $118 per month, or $1.30 per meal. About 50 percent of SNAP participants in Arizona are children, and another 18 percent are disabled or elderly.
Congress is currently considering the Farm Bill, a complex piece of legislation requiring reauthorization every five years, which governs agriculture and nutrition policy. For decades the Farm Bill has ensured that if market forces were bad or Mother Nature was not cooperating, farmers and ranchers could keep growing food so that people can keep eating.
Typically this bipartisan legislation would bring together agriculture and nutrition stakeholders. However,the bill under consideration in the House of Representatives contains harsh eligibility changes to SNAP that would impact 280,000 struggling Arizonans and jeopardize free school lunches for up to 40,000 children statewide.
The proposal would cut benefits to adults, including parents of young children who are not currently working or participating in a mandatory job-training program. This means that a family in the midst of a household crisis wouldn’t be able to afford groceries unless the parent immediately finds a new job, or that a seasoned worker laid off in the final years of his or her career wouldn’t have basic food assistance while struggling to re-enter the workforce. Under the proposed legislation, people would only have one month to find work before losing SNAP for a year.
People want to find meaningful employment, and there is certainly bipartisan support for work. But where the Farm Bill is good at setting agriculture and nutrition policy, it poorly addresses employment policy.
How will parents of young children manage to work if they don’t have safe, reliable childcare? Are there sufficient jobs for the hundreds of thousands of Arizonans who will be affected? In rural areas, will workers be forced to leave town to seek employment in adjacent counties? If people are unable to find a job within one month, how will losing access to food for one year support them in their employment search? Without SNAP, it’s likely the majority will turn to their local food bank or social service agency — which are already stretched beyond capacity.
In its current form, SNAP has robust work requirements that should be preserved, but the ones being proposed in the Nutrition Title of the Farm Bill use food and nutrition to forcefully incentivize untested and underfunded stateled job-training programs; in short, it’s bad policy.
The challenges in implementation will likely eliminate any of the cost-savings it was designed to generate.
We strongly encourage Arizona’s members of Congress to focus on developing a Farm Bill that supports farmers and families, and finds a way to make SNAP and job training co-exist without undermining access to basic nutrition assistance for people struggling to make ends meet.