USDA Food Security Report a Wake-Up Call

USDA Food Security Report a Wake-Up Call. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

With the holidays right around the corner it is a good time to be thinking about the safety of your food. You might not think there is a problem but the Secretary of Agriculture says a USDA report showing a spike in food insecurity last year is a "wake-up call" for America.

VILSACK: The unfortunate news from this years report is today 17-million households in the United States, which encompass 49-million people are currently challenged with low food security and of that number, 6.7-million households and well over 17,284.000 American citizens are people who are confronting very low food security. And the tragedy of that is at that amount well over 1,077,000 are children.

USDA economist Mark Nord co-authored the report - Household Food Security in the U.S. He says families who are unable to put enough food on the table usually tell USDA researchers three things.

NORD Typically they’ll say we’re worried that our food will run out before we got money to buy more; the food we bought didn’t last and we didn’t have money to get more and we couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals.

According to Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack - it’s too early to tell if food insecurity will spike again this year in response to rising unemployment.
VILSACK: Those increases may or may not correlate with the number of unemployed in part because of the Recovery and Reinvestment Act and its focus of resources in this area; increased resources for SNAP, increased resources for administration of state programs for SNAP as well as additional resources for emergency assistance under the TEFAP program, as well as our continued effort to commodity purchases of trying to help out struggling dairy farmers, pork producers and others; all of that can have an impact and effect at least to help reduce the pain that folks are feeling.

Domestic food assistance already consumes 70-percent of USDA’s budget. Vilsack says the Obama administration is seeking a 10-billion dollar increase in child nutrition programs over the next decade and is confident it can work with Congress to identify an appropriate combination of spending offsets to pay for it.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.