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In Food Price Crunch, More Americans Seek Help
By Missy Ryan
Reuters
Wednesday 07 May 2008
Baltimore - Carolyn Stanley, a single mother with five children, receives $327
in food stamps each month to feed her family. With prices for staples like bread
and cheese going ever higher, each month is harder than the last.
She buys hot dogs over higher-quality meat and feeds her kids cereal, but even
with other government support she often has to seek help from local churches
and from friends.
"The food runs out somewhere within the middle of the month, or getting
close to the end," said Stanley, 49. "It is not easy. I pray."
While food inflation is causing tensions and riots around the world, even the
affluent United States is being touched. Stories such as Stanley's are becoming
more common as Americans increasingly turn to food stamps and other programs
to make ends meet.
At a cost of about $39 billion to the U.S. Treasury, nearly one in 10 Americans
- 28 million people - are expected next year to use food stamps, which would
be the highest enrolment in the program apart from a spike after the Gulf Coast
hurricanes of 2005.
U.S. food prices are expected to rise by up to 5 percent this year, part of
a global trend driven fueled by consumption in rapidly developing countries
such as China, adverse weather, and the funneling of food crops to make biofuels.
"People don't want to talk about hunger in America because that's not
supposed to have happened. Didn't we take care of that a generation or two ago?"
said Kevin McGuire, Food Stamp director for Maryland. "Well, not really."
The number of beneficiaries jumped 12 percent in Maryland from a year ago.
Making Ends Meet
The crunch comes as the economy takes a sharp turn for the worse and many see
the number of people receiving food stamps as advance indicator of an economic
slump.
Today, food stamp officials are not only watching more people apply for the
benefits, they're seeing more of them come from the working poor, people whose
low-wage jobs still leave them eligible under the program's strict income caps.
"Having a job isn't enough anymore. Having two or three jobs isn't enough
anymore," said Marcia Paulson, spokeswoman for Great Plains Food Bank in
North Dakota, where nearly half the households on food stamps have at least
one adult with a job.
"Our pantries are overwhelmed," said Diane Doherty, director of the
Illinois Hunger Coalition, which helps the needy find food assistance and sign
up for food stamps.
Doherty said people's food stamps are running out more quickly due to higher
prices - often within two weeks. More than ever are receiving stamps for the
first time, she said.
"They're just not able to make ends meet when they're trying to raise
a family on these meager salaries, with the cost of housing and now with the
cost of gas," she said.
Maryland's McGuire is one official who believes that the annual adjustments
in food stamp dollars have been inadequate.
Nationally, the average benefit per person early this year was about $100 per
month - around $1 a meal.
The government will adjust that payout in June, but people won't see their
benefits change until October.
Stanley, who receives no child support for her daughters, the youngest of whom
is in the first grade, hopes that federal officials will act more quickly.
"If you've ever lived the crunch of that poverty level, you would understand
that people need more," Stanley said.
Outreach Partly Behind Growing Rolls
Program officials are quick to stress that food stamps were never intended
to make up a family's entire food budget, and point to other programs that can
help needy families - school lunches, after-school programs, and food banks.
"We firmly believe that no American should go hungry," said Kate
Houston, a deputy undersecretary at USDA.
The growing rolls of food stamp beneficiaries is a mixed picture, Houston said,
reflecting in part a success in reaching out to eligible people who hadn't received
help in the past.
"The program is designed to expand and contract based on economic conditions,"
she said.
House and Senate lawmakers, forging a final compromise on a giant agriculture
law, now plan to add over $10 billion to the food stamp program over the next
decade, raising the standard income deduction, boosting the minimum benefit
to $14 a month, an increase of $4, and giving more to food pantry donations.
Food stamp officials are counseling people on how to make their stamps last
as long as possible - buying ground beef or other meat when it's on sale and
freezing it, for example.
That may be cold comfort for people like Sandra Fowler, 42, a mother in suburban
Chicago who recently applied for food stamps, and describes her situation as
increasingly desperate.
Fowler is months behind on mortgage payments on her house and is going through
a messy divorce.
"It will feed my children, at least. I've been going to a food pantry,
waiting in line. The choices are really limited - there might be some eggs,
canned goods," she said.
Most experts predict that high crop and fuel prices will linger for at least
two to three years, and sky-high oil and gasoline prices are unlikely to abate
any time soon.
Even in the country known as the 'land of plenty,' McGuire said, the cost crunch
"affects literally at a gut level what's going on" for the less fortunate.
"We're going to need to start stitching the safety net a little bit bigger."
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(Additional reporting by Andrew Stern in Chicago and Carey Gillam
in Kansas City; Editing by Russell Blinch and Eddie Evans.)
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