USDA: Record 49.1 Million Americans faced hunger in 2008 From Bloomberg News
Posted 11/17/09
Nearly one in six Americans lived in households that struggled to afford food at some point last year as tight credit and the fastest rate of food inflation since 1980 combined to strain budgets, the government said.
About 49.1 million people were “food insecure” in 2008, up 36 percent from a year earlier, when 36.2 million Americans had difficulty staying well-fed, the Department of Agriculture said Monday in a report. That’s the most since 1995, when the USDA conducted its first survey on food insecurity and 29 percent higher than the previous record in 2004.
The rise, the third straight, will undoubtedly continue this year, with a record 36.5 million people receiving food stamps in August, said Jim Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center.
Unemployment, which reached a 26- year high in October, will push more people to skip meals even as food inflation falls to 2 percent to 3 percent, from 5.9 percent last year, he said.
“There’s every reason to believe that food insecurity this year is considerably higher than it was last year,” said Weill of the Washington-based anti-hunger organization.
Food insecurity was determined by a survey that asked about 44,000 households to identify hunger-risk factors, including whether they were running out of food without money to pay for more, or were unable to afford balanced meals. They also were asked if some family members skipped meals.
The typical U.S. household spent $43.75 a week on food for each member last year, up from $42.50 in 2007, while food- insecure households spent $33.33 per person compared with $32.50 the previous year, the study found.
Of the people in “food-insecure” households, about 17.3 million experienced “very low” security, meaning they were more likely to skip meals or go days without food than others, according to the study.
Food insecurity was also most prevalent in the South and lowest in the Northeast, the survey found. The number of Americans facing hunger in any single day was much smaller than the total for an entire year.
“Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in seven or eight months of the year, for a few days in each of those months,” according to the study.
