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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:57 am Post subject: Food pantries struggling with shortages |
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| Quote: | Food pantries struggling with shortages
CINCINNATI - Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions.
Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing, utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks.
"I've been doing this for 20 years, and I can't believe how much worse it gets month after month," she said.
Diana Blasingame has lately found herself having to go to a free food pantry once a month to feed herself and her teenage daughter.
"I'm pretty good at making things stretch as far as I can, but food is so high now and I have to have gas in my car to do my job," said Blasingame, 46, who earns $9 an hour as a home health aide. "I work full time, but I don't have health insurance and sometimes there just isn't enough to pay bills and buy food."
"We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with demand so high," Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America's Second Harvest — The Nation's Food Bank Network, the nation's largest hunger relief group, said Friday. "One of our food banks in Florida said demand is up 35 percent over this time last year."
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual hunger survey released Wednesday showed that more than 35.5 million people in the United States were hungry in 2006. While that number was about the same as the previous year, heads of food banks and pantries say many more people are seeking their assistance.
Tony Hall, vice president of the Food Bank of Southwest Georgia, estimates a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in demand for food in the 20-county area the organization serves. He cites cutbacks by local companies, rising fuel costs and the lingering impact of a March tornado that tore through Americus, Ga., destroying or damaging hundreds of homes.
"We really didn't rebound from that," Hall said Friday. "We're definitely down in donations. Each year the demand gets bigger and bigger."
Supplies are down to a little over 8 million pounds of food from a peak of about 12 million pounds two years ago at Hocking-Athens-Perry Community Action, which provides food bank services in 10 counties in southeast Ohio.
"We've lost factory jobs and many service jobs don't pay a livable wage," said Dick Stevens, director of the organization's food and nutrition division. "We see a lot of desperation in families who are trying to figure out how to pay higher fuel and utility costs and still put food on the table."
Most food banks and pantries aren't optimistic about the coming winter.
"November weather has been relatively mild, and you haven't seen the cost of home heating fuel added to what a family has to deal with," said Evelyn Behm, associate director of the Mid-Ohio Food Bank, which supplies food to pantries, soup kitchens and other charities in 20 central and eastern Ohio counties. "Those prices, we all know, are going up substantially this year."
At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati, clients now get three or four days' worth of food instead of six or seven.
"We are trying to stretch our resources to help more people," said Liz Carter, executive director of the society. "But it's so difficult when you see the desperation and have to tell them you just don't have enough to give them what they need."
Officials with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which serves nearly 1,000 agencies in 23 counties, also are worried.
Through the end of August, the food bank was down almost 700,000 pounds of USDA commodities that include basic essentials such as canned fruit and vegetables and some meat — food that is very difficulty to make up in donations, Executive Director Mark Quandt said.
"We're bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with home heating fuel prices at record highs in the Northeast," Quandt said. "People living in poverty or near poverty just can't sustain those types of increases."
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Associated Press writers Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and Doug Whiteman in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this story. |
from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071119/ap_on_re_us/food_pantries_shortage
i don't mean this to be a dig at the american people, its a dig at capitalism - or the system we call capitalism, a system that benefits the tiny few right at the top of the triangle.
it shocked me that their were even 'food banks' to help poor people - america is the richest country in the world ever - you'd think they'd be the last country in the world where there'd be any people going hungry - let alone 35.5million people! i mean compare this story to this recent story about cuba ( which of course got hardly any media coverage );
UN praises Cuba's ability to feed people
A U.N. food expert hailed Cuba as a world model in feeding its population, some 18 years after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc ravaged the island's economy and sparked widespread hunger.
"We haven't seen even one malnourished person" - a rare feat in much of poverty-stricken Latin America, Ziegler said Tuesday. "The right to being fed is the priority, without a doubt."
Cuba is one of 32 countries that include the "right to food" in their constitutions, and fewer still - including Brazil, Latin America's largest economy - meet pledges to provide food to all their citizens, he said.
Despite a 46-year U.S. embargo against the island, Cuba has found ways to ensure its population does not go hungry, Ziegler said. "Cuba always invents an answer," he noted.
...
it kinda baffles me that little old cuba, even suffering massively under the american embargo against it, can feed all its people - but america can't? i mean it could - theres enough food, it just decides not to. and by 'it' i mean the american elite who make the decisions, not marcella 
another thing that surprised me was that woman working for $9 an hour - thats like £4.50 - that would be illegal in this country, the minimum wage here is £5.52. i'm guessing theres no such thing as the minimum wage in america?
capitalism needs to be destroyed for the good of the people and the planet  |
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