“I’m worried that 2022 is going to be a really hard year for lots of families, and that there isn’t the same sense of urgency that there was two years ago,” she added.Vitamin A is a fat-soluble vitamin with several important functions in the body. “Even though we have evidence that these policies worked, we haven’t managed to preserve most of them,” Professor Bowen said. The gap between Black and white households also narrowed to 12.8 percent from 14.6 percent in 2020, but remained wider than the prepandemic figure of 11.2 percent in 2019.Įxperts said that the portrait of hunger in the United States would change this year given that many of the assistance programs had lapsed. Lauren Bauer, a researcher at the Brookings Institution who specializes in social safety net policies, said the rise in food insecurity among those groups could also be attributed to changes in household size, including losing family members or the declining propensity of older people to work.įood insecurity also declined for households with Black Americans, to 19.8 percent last year from 21.7 percent in 2020.
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Those changes, coupled with a recovering economy and school reopenings, particularly benefited households with children and contributed to the decline in hunger among families, experts said.īy contrast, households without children and seniors did not qualify for the expanded child tax credit or benefit from free school meals. Experts attributed that shift to big expansions of government aid, which continued into 2021, and additional changes to food assistance programs.Īmong them were an expansion of the child tax credit, which gave most families hundreds of dollars a month pandemic legislation, which increased benefits for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and made school meals universally free and an emergency program that reimbursed families for missed school meals. The finding was at odds with past experiences, when recessions led to a spike in hunger. Bowen added, the report “also shows that it can get worse if we do nothing.”ĭata released last year showed that food insecurity remained unchanged, in spite of mass unemployment and an economic downturn brought on by the pandemic. That was statistically unchanged from the previous two years.īut for households without children, particularly for women and seniors living alone, food insecurity increased. About 13.5 million American households, or about 10.2 percent, were food insecure, or had difficulty providing food for all family members because of a lack of money. Overall, household food insecurity remained level in 2021, the department said. That was the lowest rate since at least 1998, the oldest year with comparable data. In a report released on Wednesday, the Agriculture Department said that about 4.6 million households with children were food insecure at some point, a rate of 12.5 percent.
“This shows that food insecurity is a solvable problem. “The social safety net for families with children was more generous in 2021 than it has been, and better than it is now,” said Sarah Bowen, a sociology professor at North Carolina State University and an expert in food insecurity. But experts warned that picture was almost certain to change as pandemic-era programs expire and inflation remains high. The department’s findings were in line with data last year showing that vast expansions of government aid helped reduce hunger.
WASHINGTON - Food insecurity for households with children declined to its lowest rate in two decades last year, the Agriculture Department said on Wednesday, as government assistance programs continued to blunt the effect of the coronavirus on the economy.
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