by
Lok_hunger
INTRO: As the economy falters, more New Yorkers are going to food pantries for groceries to make ends meet. But sometimes what they find there are empty shelves. Annie Lok reports.
NARR: The Bed-Stuy Coalition Against Hunger is a food pantry in Brooklyn. On a Thursday afternoon, volunteers mover sacks of produce out of the storage room to get ready for another busy session of serving clients.
AMBI: pantry room tone, woman saying, "you want another bag?"
The pantry had just opened for the day, but more than a dozen people were waiting in the tiny lobby. One of them was Will, a construction worker who didn't want to use his last name because he doesn't feel good about going to a food pantry. Will injured his foot in February and couldn't go back to work. Soon after that, he ran out of money. In March, he came to the pantry for some help—cans of milk, salmon and vegetables, a box of cereal. It was his only source of food, but it was barely enough.
AX: Let's just say you've got to stretch it for the week until the next week. that's why you've got to go from one pantry to the next pantry, so you can have a decent amount of food.
NARR: He had gone to two other pantries earlier in the day. One was closed, and he missed the distribution time at the other. And he almost didn't make it inside the Bed Stuy pantry, either. When his number came up, the volunteer at the front desk stopped him.
AX: [volunteer:] what day did you come?
Will:Last week? Friday.
[vol:] what day was that?
NARR: The volunteer thought Will was trying to exceed the pantry's once a month limit. But Melony Samuels, a pastor who is the pantry's executive director, intervenes and lets him in.
AX: [Samuels] What happened, when he came last week, he got very little things. so what we've done is, those who came back, looking for food, which he did, we still give it to them.
NARR: But Samuels says that is harder and harder to do.
AX: [Samuels] for the last few weeks all the shelves have been totally empty. we had no rice, no pasta, we had no milk, we had no juice. we had no bread.
Samuels has been running this pantry since 2000, and she says she has never seen such small amounts of food come through the pantry's doors.
She says there are two problems. First, the government has cut back subsidies. Second, those subsidies don't go as far as they used top because food prices have risen so much.
The pantry receives more than a third of its food from the federal government's Emergency Food Assistance Program. Over the last year, the subsidy fell fell by more than half, from 47 thousand to 21 thousand dollars. Over the same period, the price of food has gone up about 20 percent. Meanwhile, more and more people seem to need help.
In the middle of an interview, Samuels took a call from somone looking for a food pantry.
AX: [Samuels]: All right, bye. (hangs up) And these kind of calls have increased over the last two months. It has I would say tripled over what we normally see.
NARR: Food pantries depend on food banks warehouses that distribute to local programs like the one in Bed Stuy. And these food banks are having problems too.
ANYA DUGgan is the policy director at the Food Bank for New York, which supplies food pantries and soup kitchens that feed 1.3 million New Yorkers Duggan says the Food Bank shelves are bare.
AX: [Duggan] That's a unique situation for us. Usually the warehouse is brimming with food that goes in and out on a daily basis. But for definitely the last year and longer, we're seeing the increase of empty shelves every day.
Duggan blames Washington D.C. Specifically, the fact that Congress hasn't passed a new Farm Bill. The Farm Bill authorizes the federal government to support food banks and food pantries. Congress passed the last one in 2002, and Duggan says that although more people are in need and food is more expensive, funding for the program has remained the same for five years.
AX: [Duggan]: When you don't increase funding in a five year period, it's the same as a cut, because the cost of food keeps increasing. Cost of living keeps increasing, so people have less money to spend on basic necessity. So need increases. At the same time the USDA can bring in less food for the dollar amount. So there's less food in the system.
Congress has already extended the 2002 Farm Bill three times since last September. The new bill is stuck in legislative limbo because the Senate has passed a version with tax breaks that House members oppose. There is also argument over where an extra $10 billion in funding would come from. Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted again to extended the existing law. President Bush has threatened to veto the extension.
Annie Lok, Columbia Radio News