Fortifying the U.S. Nutrition Safety Net photo by Jeffrey Austin
Preventing people in the United States from going hungry is the single most important objective of federal nutrition programs. In times of high unemployment and reduced incomes, government spending on nutrition programs increases to help people cope with these difficult economic conditions.
In the past three years, since the country plunged into a severe recession, participation in nutrition programs has skyrocketed. The economy continues to stumble. Millions of people can’t find work or can’t find sufficient work to support their families. The programs are doing precisely what they’re designed to do: counteract the impact of the recession on families and help prevent the recession from getting worse. Once the economy begins growing again at a steady and sustainable rate, the number of people eligible for nutrition programs will be closer to what it usually is.
Federal nutrition programs go a long way towards reducing hunger, but they accomplish much less by way of ensuring a healthy, well-balanced diet. This is especially troubling since more than half of all participants in nutrition programs are children. Dietary habits form early in life and tend to last a lifetime. Rates of obesity and other diet-related health conditions are soaring, and the medical costs associated with obesity have risen to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Thus, nutrition programs need to make greater efforts to enable low-income families to overcome barriers to purchasing healthy foods.
In the upcoming farm bill, policymakers have an opportunity to make the needed improvements to nutrition programs. The nation’s largest nutrition program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly the Food Stamp Program, is reauthorized in the farm bill. Most importantly, SNAP benefits must be maintained.
In addition, SNAP should continue to scale up incentives to use benefits to purchase healthy foods. The farm bill can also provide more healthy foods to schools and daycare centers. Allowing schools to purchase more locally or regionally sourced foods when possible would benefit struggling small farmers and rural communities.
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