{"title":"Can government investment in food pantries decrease food insecurity?","authors":"Brian T. Hamel , Moriah Harman","doi":"10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102541","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><p>About 10% of Americans are food insecure, lacking consistent access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. One way that the federal government seeks to reduce food insecurity is by investing in charitable food providers, such as food banks and pantries. This paper highlights a limitation on the potential effects of these investments on food insecurity: some communities have more charitable food providers than others. We support this claim with an analysis of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. COVID-19 program which distributed about 175 million boxes of food worth $9 billion to food pantries from May 2020 to May 2021. Consistent with our expectations, we find that food was targeted primarily to food insecure counties, but that counties with high rates of food insecurity that lack many food pantries received significantly less food than counties with <em>equally</em> high rates of food insecurity but more food pantries. Moving forward, policymakers should focus on providing direct aid to those in need, and on building a charitable food system rather than only investing more resources in the existing system.</p></div>","PeriodicalId":321,"journal":{"name":"Food Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":6.8000,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Food Policy","FirstCategoryId":"97","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306919223001392","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS & POLICY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
About 10% of Americans are food insecure, lacking consistent access to enough food for a healthy lifestyle. One way that the federal government seeks to reduce food insecurity is by investing in charitable food providers, such as food banks and pantries. This paper highlights a limitation on the potential effects of these investments on food insecurity: some communities have more charitable food providers than others. We support this claim with an analysis of the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. COVID-19 program which distributed about 175 million boxes of food worth $9 billion to food pantries from May 2020 to May 2021. Consistent with our expectations, we find that food was targeted primarily to food insecure counties, but that counties with high rates of food insecurity that lack many food pantries received significantly less food than counties with equally high rates of food insecurity but more food pantries. Moving forward, policymakers should focus on providing direct aid to those in need, and on building a charitable food system rather than only investing more resources in the existing system.
期刊介绍：
Food Policy is a multidisciplinary journal publishing original research and novel evidence on issues in the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of policies for the food sector in developing, transition, and advanced economies.
Our main focus is on the economic and social aspect of food policy, and we prioritize empirical studies informing international food policy debates. Provided that articles make a clear and explicit contribution to food policy debates of international interest, we consider papers from any of the social sciences. Papers from other disciplines (e.g., law) will be considered only if they provide a key policy contribution, and are written in a style which is accessible to a social science readership.
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