USDA wants to help farmers feed families, but advocates and lawmakers say it's not enough

Posted at 10:57 AM, May 02, 2020
and last updated 2020-05-02 11:57:27-04



Lawmakers called on the USDA to provide "bold and innovative" solutions Friday to address the harm to farmers and the confusion over why food is being discarded while other Americans need help feeding their families.



Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the program has the potential to address one of the reasons the pandemic has been so disruptive to the food supply chain, that big national producers and distributors can't easily shift from delivering entire trucks of product to providing food in a way that's accessible to consumers and doesn't add work for food banks to repackage it.

"This program will not only provide direct financial relief to our farmers and ranchers," Perdue told reporters in April. "Mr. President, it will allow for the purchase and distribution of our agricultural abundance in this country to help our fellow Americans in need."


"Farmers to families" could be an experiment in a new model of agriculture that addresses the disruptions of the current emergency, but lawmakers, experts and advocates also warn that spending federal money to buy and donate food won't solve all the ripple effects from the pandemic.


Elizabeth Balkan, director of the food waste, food and agriculture program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that even though disruptions from the pandemic brought attention to the increased waste of products from farms, it's a longstanding issue that the current system hasn't fixed.

"Even in the best of times there's enormous amounts of food waste happening upstream at the point of production or the farm level," she said, citing estimates that billions of pounds of produce can go unharvested or unsold every year.

"The reason why we're in this mess is because there's so many intermediary points and excess food and it's hard for excess food to get to the people in need in a straightforward manner," Balkan said.

Balkan said she's still concerned prefilled boxes won't stop all food from being wasted if producers aren't matched up with organizations to distribute the food or if the contents of the boxes don't match the foods families need. But she said the pandemic has made people appreciate the people that produce our food and that it could fuel a push for policies that help reduce food waste.

Miguel Gomez, an assistant professor at Cornell University who researches the food supply chain and distribution, said the program could show if our food system can adapt to entirely new ways of packaging and distributing fresh food that's ready to go to market on a larger scale and address some of the weaknesses the current crisis has highlighted.


Gomez said one of the challenges in the current system is that big farming operations supply large retailers while small local farms can sell directly or via farmers markets, but there are fewer outlets for midsize producers and distributors that could be more flexible, affordable and resilient to change. While the food from this program will go to food banks where there's the most need, Gomez said it could also change the food market for consumers as more families look for places to buy food directly if they're scared or unable to go to grocery stores.

"I think it will be very interesting to see the ability or power of our food system to repurpose all that food that is there," he said.





Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America, said that while food banks need support and are playing a vital role in the pandemic, their role can't compare to the long-term impact of federal spending.

"The truth is in best of times, they are less than one-tenth of the dollar amount of the federal nutrition assistance safety net," he told ABC News.

He said the efforts to expand nutrition programs during the emergency might not be helping the people with the most desperate need, the lowest-income households that already receive the maximum amount of benefits or families that can't get to schools or food banks to collect meals and groceries.



Katie Fitzgerald, president and CEO of Feeding America, said that while food banks have more stock on hand because of government programs to buy excess food, they can't sustain the push to help millions of Americans in need on donations alone.

"This is a problem that our food bank system, however strong and capable it is, is not able to solve on its own," she told ABC News in April.
