Food Bank Requests Increase as Donations Decrease

The New York Times reports that since the spring, the number of people showing up hungry at food pantries and soup kitchens has surged, straining the capacity of many organizations in the vast, largely unseen and lightly financed network of volunteer emergency feeding operations. Many are newcomers who were reluctant to seek help until they had no choice. In the four months since June, demand for food aid has risen 20% in areas of the country with the healthiest economies and more than 40% in areas with the weakest, leaders of nonprofit food-distribution organizations say. And they predict that the need will keep growing in 2009 if the job market continues to contract.

Requests are so high that some food centers are turning away the hungry. Kitty Schaller, who runs the Manna FoodBank in Asheville, N.C., said that while demand was up, donations had fallen because of the local economy. “We are flat against last year on contributions,” she said. “The trouble is, expenses are going up and it is a very uncertain future in terms of our ability to have enough goods in the warehouse” to meet demand. Her agency supplies food to more than 330 pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other such operations in 16 counties, on a budget of just $2.5 million, half of which comes from individual and foundation gifts, with another 5% from the local United Way.

Even when much of America is prospering, hunger is a significant problem, according to annual reports issued by the United States Department of Agriculture. 1 American household in 9 was “food insecure” (the government avoids the word “hungry”) for part of 2006, and more than 1/3 of these households “had very low food security — meaning that the food intake of 1 or more adults was reduced and their eating patterns were disrupted at times during the year because the household lacked money and other resources for food,” according to a recent department report.

The federal study estimated that 35.5 million people — nearly as many as live in California — sometimes lack enough to eat and that 10.1 million adults and children, roughly the population of Michigan, often go hungry in America. What makes the demand so striking this year is not only the suddenness but also the demographic that is seeking help. Most of the newcomers have been employed and have managed to survive dips in the job market. Many of them are couples and single parents who had managed without handouts.

“A lot of people coming to us have never been to a charitable distribution center before,” said Larry Sly, executive director of the Foodbank of Contra Costa and Solano, two counties east of San Francisco where about 1.6 million people live. “We are getting people whose work is always up and down, and they have lived with that their whole lives because they work construction,” Mr. Sly said. “Construction here has just stopped, and so we have carpenters and masons and electricians who have not worked on a new house in forever. So it is not that they are out of work for some weeks and then they go back to work. There is nothing for them, and they cannot imagine when there will be work again.”

At the core of the problem is the lack of job growth. The number of Americans earning any wage grew by two million a year in the 1990s, but at only half that rate in the first 7 years of this decade. In recent months the economy has been shedding jobs at a quickening pace, especially in construction and manufacturing. At the same time, tax data show that 55% of Americans have no interest-bearing savings accounts to draw on during hard times. Among the bottom half of taxpayers, who make less than $30,000, 2/3s have no interest income.

So the big donations of food that were once easy to come by have now become, like jobs, increasingly scarce, food bank directors say. Further, surplus production is often sold to overseas markets at a discount that brings food manufacturers more than the value of the tax deduction of a charitable donation, food bank managers across the country said in interviews. Donations from grocers have also fallen.

SS