Fix Our Food System, Start Solving Hunger

There is a logistical aspect of hunger in the United States that really drives me nutty. It would be one thing if we struggled, as a nation, to produce enough food to feed ourselves. Fine. I could deal with the notion that hunger in this country is a direct result of a lack of food available for consumption.

The unfortunate reality is that we produce many, many times the amount of food to adequately feed the entire country, but have been unable to direct this excess to hungry stomachs. Expanding federal food assistance programs and developing regional food systems would go a long way towards correcting this mismatch.

Recently, an article about the rise in food stamp participants in San Joaquin County, California quoted a member of the local Hunger Task Force as saying, “we’re worse off than we were four years ago” in terms of feeding the county’s hungry residents.

This comment refers to the county being worse off than when a 2005 study conducted by UCLA ranked it as one of the most food insecure in the entire state of California.

Ok, so we’ve had a bit of an economic collapse in the last four years. That seems like a logical reason for a hunger organization to be “worse off” now than before.

But what really drives me crazy is that while hunger is on the rise, San Joaquin County continues to be one of the most productive agricultural counties in the entire country, with a gross agricultural production value of just over $2 billion in 2007.

Let me throw some other statistics at you.

In 2007, the county ranked as one of the top five producers in California of: apples, asparagus, sweet cherries, pumpkins, walnuts, apricots, blueberries, cucumbers, onions, peaches, pears, potatoes, tomatoes and watermelon.

With all of this production, I find it pretty appalling that 41 percent of adults in San Joaquin County are classified as “food insecure” according to the UCLA study linked to above.

This example also illustrates a dire reality for hunger advocates throughout the country: while soup kitchens and food pantries are adequate short-term solutions to feeding the hungry, they are ineffective and unsustainable options for solving the problem of food distribution and ending hunger in the United States.

What is really needed is an expansion of federal food aid programs such as WIC, SNAP and the National School Lunch Program, and a coordinated effort between state and local government to support the development of regional food systems that will refocus production to local consumers.

Here’s an idea for how to make this work:

Contract farmers to grow food specifically for these national food-aid programs (to be operated and implemented on a state or regional level) as they now grow for food processors and distributors. If the government could guarantee a fair market value for farmers’ products, this would help to provide an almost guaranteed income source (which farmers love, just look at the increase in Community Supported Agriculture operations) while helping to ensure healthy food is available for all of those participating in the expanded government programs.

This effort would support smaller-scale farm operations that could chose to opt into such a program instead of facing competition from giant agri-business producers. To guard against food shortages in times of drought or bad weather, this idea would likely be more successful if undertaken by farmer cooperatives instead of individual farmers.

To me, it would be a win-win situation. The government could expand its food-aid programs to feed an increasingly hunger-stricken population while simultaneously supporting farmers who choose to grow healthy food for regional markets.

(Photo credit: ExperienceLA on Flickr)