DES MOINES (AP/Middle East Eye) – Month by month, more of the roughly 40 million Americans who get help buying groceries through the federal food stamp program are seeing their benefits plunge even as the nation struggles with the biggest increase in food costs in decades.
The payments to low-income individuals and families are dropping as governors end COVID-19 disaster declarations and opt out of an ongoing federal program that made their states eligible for dramatic increases in SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began offering the increased benefit in April 2020 in response to surging unemployment after the COVID-19 pandemic swept over the country.
The result is that depending on the politics of a state, individuals and families in need find themselves eligible for significantly different levels of help buying food.
Nebraska took the most aggressive action anywhere in the country, ending the emergency benefits four months into the pandemic in July 2020 in a move Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts said was necessary to “show the rest of the country how to get back to normal.”
Since then, nearly a dozen states with Republican leadership have taken similar action, with Iowa this month being the most recent place to slash the benefits. Benefits also will be cut in Wyoming and Kentucky in the next month. Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Tennessee have also scaled back the benefits.
Muslim-run food banks also struggle to feed the hungry as prices surge.
A day before the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, Jabaran Akram was volunteering at a food bank in Brooklyn, New York City.
Usually, every person who lines up gets an entire loaf of bread. But as Akram and his fellow volunteers were distributing bags of food they soon realized they were running low on supplies - and there were still hundreds of people in the queue.
Struggling to cope, they had no option but to ration the supplies.
They opened up bags of bread and started giving people a few individual pieces instead.
He said that during the past two years, the lines had “gotten longer to a level I haven’t seen”.
“Food prices are going up and many people have told me they can’t afford to shop the same way,” he said.
“I would say inflation is a high driver of this. While people are trying to recover from a pandemic, they are faced with drastic increases in food prices.”
According to a U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report, food prices increased 0.6 percent in February in New York and New Jersey. In the DC-Maryland-Virginia area, food prices rose 6.7 percent over the year.
A report by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) stated that price increases for food-away-from-home (which includes grocery store purchases) are expected to “exceed historical averages”.