Church-based group says new US hunger data is not surprising
Wednesday, 18 Nov 2009
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By Chris Herlinger
Church-based anti-hunger activists in the United States say they are not surprised by a new government report that more than one in seven U.S. households, and nearly a quarter of children in the country, are experiencing food insecurity.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 14.6 percent of households in the United States suffered from food insecurity in 2008, a 3.5-percentage point increase from 2007 - the largest single-year increase since the department began releasing data in 1998.
"What should really shock us is that almost one in four children in our country lives on the brink of hunger," David Beckmann, the president of the Christian-based anti-hunger advocacy group Bread for the World said in a 16 November statement.
The agriculture department report said that 16.7 million children, or 22.5 percent of children in the United States, were "food insecure" in 2008, an increase from 4.3 million in 2007.
Beckmann said the recession and a record high participation in a federally-funded food assistance programme, called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are key "barometers" of the severity of current food insecurity in the United States.
"With millions of Americans losing their jobs, participation in SNAP has reached record levels as more families are in need of food assistance," Beckmann said in his statement, released the same day as the government report.
He noted that more than 36 million people in the United States, half of them children, received federally-funded food benefits in August. This amounted to a 24 percent increase from the same month in 2008.
"Child hunger is not just a casualty of the recession. It was a problem before the recession, and unless we take the necessary steps, kids will continue to suffer after the economy recovers," Beckmann said.
A recent study in an American Medical Association journal said that nearly half of all U.S. children, and 90 percent of African American children, will receive some type of federal food benefits by the age of 20, said Bread for the World, which is based in Washington DC.