The number of people without enough food over one seven-day period spiked by 54 percent in Virginia, and 30 percent nationwide between October of 2021 and October of 2022, according to a report by the nonprofit group Hunger Free America, based on an analysis of federal data.
Over that year, the number of people without enough food increased from 281,406 to 434,197 in Virginia, and from 19.9 million to 25.7 million nationwide.
Hunger Free America attributes the surge in food insecurity to the expiration of the expanded Child Tax Credit and universal school meals, coupled with the impact of inflation.
Many federal benefit increases have either gone away entirely, or are being ramped down, even as prices for food, rent, healthcare and fuel continue to soar.
According to the USDA food insecurity data – a different way of measuring food hardship analyzed by Hunger Free America – across Virginia, 7.4 percent of residents, or 619,000 people, lived in food insecure households from 2019-2021. This includes 9.2 percent of children in the state (171,910), 5.7 percent of employed adults (235,128), and 5.8 percent of older Virginia State residents (114,850).
“Effective federal public policies over the previous few years were spectacularly successful in stemming U.S. hunger, but as many of those policies have been reversed, hunger has again soared,” said Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America. “At exactly the moment when so many Americans are in desperate need of relief, many of the federally funded benefits increases, such as the Child Tax Credit and universal school meals, have expired, due mostly to opposition from conservatives in Congress.
“While increases in food and cash assistance were far greater than the increases in food prices, leaving the vast majority of Americans in far better condition than they would have been without this extra aid, hunger and food insecurity rates continue to soar in all 50 states, especially among working people, children and seniors. We desperately need the upcoming lame duck session of Congress to address this crisis.”
National findings in the study
- 11 percent of Americans were found to live in food insecure households between 2019 and 2021
- 14.5 percent of children in the U.S. lived in food insecure households in the 2019-2021 time period
- 8.2 percent of employed adults in the U.S. lived in food insecure households during the three-year time period
- 7 percent of older Americans, defined as people 60 years and older, lived in food insecure households
- Nearly three-fourths of respondents to our national food pantry and soup kitchen survey (73.1 percent) said they served more people in 2022 than in 2021
The report includes detailed public policy recommendations at the federal level, state and city level, including passage of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Bill and the HOPE Act of 2021, reauthorization of the Child Tax Credit, which raised millions of families out of poverty, and making permanent the pandemic-era improvements in SNAP access for college students.
The full report is available at https://www.hungerfreeamerica.org/en-us/research/2022-annual-survey-report
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Crystal Graham
