SNAP benefits will end in 32 states; food pantries aim to fill the gap; it may not be possible to meet the demand

Photo by Erin Schaff, The New York Times

Across 32 states, emergency Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits will end in March. The drop in assistance has local food pantries gearing up to feed more families and hoping they will have enough. "Food bank managers fear that demand will spike further in March, when officials roll back pandemic-era increases to SNAP benefits," reports Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez of Kaiser Health News. "The program, administered by the Department of Agriculture, provides monthly stipends to people with low incomes to spend on food. Before 2020, those payments averaged a little more than $200 and were hiked by a minimum of $95 during the pandemic."

"Friends in Service Helping food pantry is known in rural northeastern Nevada as FISH," writes Rodriguez. "The food pantry is one of a few in this city of about 20,000 people. In January, FISH provided food boxes to nearly 790 people. . . Officials estimate FISH families will see a 30% to 40% decrease in SNAP payments as emergency allotments tied to the public health emergency halt in 32 states, including Nevada." Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Kentucky, and South Dakota, have already ended the emergency allotments.

Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy for GRACE, a nonprofit run by the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, focused on reducing childhood hunger, told Rodriguez, "We have so many households who simply aren’t going to know that this is happening. They’re going to go to the grocery store and expect to have money in their account and not be able to buy the food they need to feed their families. . . .There’s just no comparing the scale of SNAP to the charitable food sector. It’s simply not possible to make up that difference.”

Rodriquez reports, "In Montana, the expanded SNAP benefits were cut in summer 2021. Brent Weisgram, vice president and chief operating officer of the Montana Food Bank Network, said that reporting from the network’s partners shows a 24% increase in the number of households seeking assistance from emergency food pantries from July 2021 to July 2022. Weisgram said food pantries are not prepared to absorb the impact of the cut to the largest federal nutrition assistance program and are strictly a supplemental resource."

Tammy King, a volunteer at FISH, told Rodriquez, “I feel that everybody who has the power to help is doing everything they can to help us. You just gotta look at your food and say, ‘OK, how long can I make this last and make a difference in someone’s life?’”