In food price crunch, more Americans seek help

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Thursday , May 08, 2008 at 2230 hrs Carolyn Stanley, a single mother with five children, receives $327 in food stamps each month to feed her family. With prices for staples like bread and cheese going ever higher, each month is harder than the last.

She buys hot dogs over higher-quality meat and feeds her kids cereal, but even with other government support she often has to seek help from local churches and from friends.

“The food runs out somewhere within the middle of the month, or getting close to the end,” said Stanley, 49. “It is not easy. I pray.”

While food inflation is causing tensions and riots around the world, even the affluent United States is being touched. Stories such as Stanley’s are becoming more common as Americans increasingly turn to food stamps and other programs to make ends meet.

At a cost of about $39 billion to the U.S. Treasury, nearly one in 10 Americans — 28 million people — are expected next year to use food stamps, which would be the highest enrolment in the program apart from a spike after the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005.

U.S. food prices are expected to rise by up to 5 percent this year, part of a global trend driven fueled by consumption in rapidly developing countries such as China, adverse weather, and the funneling of food crops to make biofuels.

“People don’t want to talk about hunger in America because that’s not supposed to have happened. Didn’t we take care of that a generation or two ago?” said Kevin McGuire, Food Stamp director for Maryland. “Well, not really.” The number of beneficiaries jumped 12 percent in Maryland from a year ago.

MAKING ENDS MEET

The crunch comes as the economy takes a sharp turn for the worse and many see the number of people receiving food stamps as advance indicator of an economic slump.

Today, food stamp officials are not only watching more people apply for the benefits, they’re seeing more of them come from the working poor, people whose low-wage jobs still leave them eligible under the program’s strict income caps.

“Having a job isn’t enough anymore. Having two or three jobs isn’t enough anymore,” said Marcia Paulson, spokeswoman for Great Plains Food Bank in North Dakota, where nearly half the households on food stamps have at least one adult with a job.