SNAP funding worries area shoppers

Thousands get food stamps

News of the Congressional debate over how to fund federal food assistance hadn’t yet reached Elaine Hugo, who had just finished using food stamps to buy lunch for her children and grandchildren Friday at a convenience store in northeast Memphis.

She did know this: Without the extra $200 a month she gets from the government to buy food, “we’d be living off beans,” Hugo said. “I don’t know what we would do.”

For the first time in 40 years, federal lawmakers opted to pass a farm bill on Thursday that does not include funding for food stamps, leaving the fate of a program that feeds more than 260,000 people in Shelby County hanging in the balance.

Although it’s not likely that food stamps, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will be defunded, the partisan debate that is sure to follow over SNAP’s funding means its future is more uncertain than ever.

“This is not something we’re terribly excited about,” said Marcia Wells, communications director for the Mid-South Food Bank. “Now we just don’t know what scenario is going to play out.”

Any major cuts to SNAP — particularly the cut proposed in earlier versions of the bill that would skim $20 billion from the program over the next 10 years — would mean that “many thousands of people in Shelby County would not be able to get the food assistance they need,” Wells said.

Roughly 44 percent of chil-

dren in the county live in households that receive federal aid in a state that is already one of the most SNAP-dependent in the country.

The 1.3 million people in Tennessee who receive SNAP benefits make up about 21 percent of the state’s population. About 20 percent of Tennesseans who receive SNAP benefits live in Shelby County.

Wells said the staff at the Mid-South Food Bank will be “monitoring the situa- tion closely” as Congress decides how deep any cuts to the roughly $80 billion a year federal program might be, or how they will affect the 46.6 million Americans who use it.

Rick James, the owner of four Cash Saver stores in Memphis, said that more than a quarter of his customers use food stamps to purchase their groceries.

“There are an awful lot of local people who rely on them to get from one month to the next,” James said. “Any cuts to the food stamp program are a big mistake.”

Democratic congress- man Steve Cohen of Memphis blasted the decision in a statement Friday.

“I am disappointed that Republican leaders broke their own rules and used this f latly partisan maneuver to strip out of the farm bill critical nutrition and food stamp programs that children and families in Memphis and across the country rely on,” Cohen said.

Republican congressman Stephen Fincher, a West Tennessee farmer, praised the “farm- only” bill in his own two-sentence statement Thursday.

“Today’s farm bill serves to provide certainty for America’s farmers,” Fincher said. “I am pleased the House was able to rally together to allow our country’s farmers the certainty they need to make important long-term planning decisions and to carry out the vital work of feeding our nation.”

Lawmakers will need to decide how they are going to fund SNAP before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.