conquistador

Economy dishes up hunger pains


Wednesday, April 21, 2004

By Sharon Emery

"Food insecurity" is rising in the state, a nationwide report released today
shows.

About 9 percent of Michigan families -- or 359,444 households -- often don't
know where their next meal is coming from, according to the study.

About a third of them occasionally go hungry, said the Food Research and
Action Center in Washington, D.C.

Driving the "food insecurity" numbers -- a term coined by the federal
government to measure hunger -- is Michigan's stubborn unemployment rate,
the anti-hunger research and policy group said.

Michigan's 6.9 percent jobless rate continues to top the 5.7 percent
national rate.

The need is reflected in Kent County.

"We just had a record-breaking month in March," said Marsha DeHollander,
program director for ACCESS, an organization that oversees a network of 100
food pantries.

"We know about one third of families coming to our pantries are new records,
meaning they have not been there before. That's a pretty significant
number."

DeHollander said her organization typically serves 3,600 households monthly.
In March, that number jumped to 4,800. She expects the agency to double the
7.5 percent increase it saw last year.

DeHollander attributes the rise to the newly unemployed and increasing need
from the long-term jobless and those who have had to take lower-paying
positions.

"Everything else, all their bills, have stayed the same," she said. "That's
the new kind of face we're seeing -- people who were previously middle-class
workers needing to be very creative in the way they feed their families."

Michigan's "food insecurity" numbers are up from 8 percent of families in
the center's report last year on use of federal food programs.

"The economy simply is not providing enough year-round, full-time jobs with
wages high enough to support a family," the authors say in the report.

The greatest increase has come in the Food Assistance Program, also known as
food stamps, which saw the number of Michigan residents served grow from
750,037 in 2002 to 837,629 last year. Over the past three years,
participation is up 39 percent, according to the report.

By February of this year, the number of Michigan residents on food stamps
was up to 917,969, state statistics show.

Press reporter Kyla King contributed to this report.


© 2004 Grand Rapids Press. Used with permission