The Biden-Harris administration is hosting the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health today. The administration has released a plan to address food insecurity and health issues like diabetes, obesity and hypertension. Susannah Morgan is the CEO of the Oregon Food Bank. She joins us with details of the plan and what this means for the Pacific Northwest.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Biden Administration is hosting the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, today. It’s the first such conference in more than half a century. As part of the event, the Administration has released a plan to address food insecurity and health issues like diabetes and obesity. That includes commitments from corporations and nonprofits totaling $8 billion. Susannah Morgan is the CEO of the Oregon Food Bank. She joins us to talk about this federal plan and also what it could mean for the Pacific Northwest. Susannah, welcome back.
Susannah Morgan: Thank you.
Dave Miller: Can you remind us first just where we are right now. I mean how bad the issue of hunger is in Oregon and Southwest Washington right now?
Morgan: Yeah. We are still at historically high levels of hunger in Oregon and Southwest Washington. My professional gut, if there is such a thing, says that we will see 1.5 million of our neighbors ask for food assistance at a food pantry or a meal site this year, in 2022. That is down from the high of 1.7 million in 2020, but still way over the 2019 number of 860,000. So hunger is still at historically high levels.
Miller: When we talk about hunger, is it different from poverty?
Morgan: The root cause of hunger is poverty right? It is not having enough; not having enough resources to be able to meet all of your basic needs. When you get paid, Dave, or when I get paid, we don’t get a paycheck that says this is the amount for your rent and this is the amount for your food and this amount for your car. We have to make up our own budgets and spread it out – and if there isn’t enough something gets cut – and frequently what gets cut is hung…is food – because it is the one thing that you can figure out how to stretch. Your rent is…there’s no stretching it. If you need your car to get to work, you gotta fix your car, but you can eat a little less or eat a little more cheaply or feed your kids first. And so we see that hunger is the canary in the coal mine for poverty.
Miller: I brought that up because I was reminded of LBJ’s, you know, so-called ‘war on poverty’ nearly 60 years ago. And I think that at this point, when there are big national conferences, when a presidential administration says,’ we’re gonna get together and we’re going to address ‘X.’ ' It’s hard not to be a little bit cynical about the ability of any administration to address ‘X.’ Whether it’s in the war on poverty or the war on drugs or the war on terror. Not that president biden has called this a war on hunger. But it sort of feels like the same thing, and we can drill into what is being talked about today, what’s already been talked about and what’s in this plan. But in the big picture, how much can any presidential administration address an issue as big as hunger?
Morgan: I think we can do a lot. So the last conference under the Nixon administration was held in the year I was born, 1969, years ago; and out of that conference came a lot of the public policy that we are still relying on – SNAP and USDA commodities and school breakfasts. So there was a huge swath of public policy that was put into place the decade after that conference, envisioned in that conference and put into place after that conference and that has gone on now for half a century. So I have a lot of optimism that we can put the spotlight on public policy that will really make a difference and help us set a new path for the next half a century.
Miller: So then what are the public policies first of all that are being announced today or being floated today?
Morgan: The White House has five pillars of their strategy: improving food access and affordability, integrating nutrition and health, empowering all consumers to make and have access to healthy choices, supporting physical activity for all and enhancing nutrition and food security research. And there are tons of pages and 800 million dollars on the table to push these things forward. So there is quite a lot happening.
Miller: One of the things that stood out to me was in the announcement, how much of the money that is being announced today is either from corporations like grocery stores or tech companies or yogurt makers or various nonprofits. That seems to me different than true public policy shifts or you know like the SNAP program that you mentioned or or food stamps or lunch in schools. How much are we relying on the private sector or the nonprofit sector to solve this issue?
Morgan: I think you and I are in agreement on this, Dave, is that the only way to solve hunger in the long run is to solve poverty, and the root causes of poverty, systemic inequities, and the only way to do that in the long run is through public policy. So we do need private-public sector partnerships to build power, build momentum, build coalitions, that will then help us achieve our public policy win. So I see it less instead as the amount of private money that’s on the table, and more, the number of private players that are coming to the table who can then be channeled into pushing for major public policy reform.
Miller: What are the policy solutions that have been shown to have the greatest impact?
Morgan: The one that we are most excited about at Oregon Food Bank is the child tax credit. So this was a new policy that was put into place for just a little bit over a year during the pandemic, and it was providing a tax credit for folks living on low to moderate incomes with children. It’s expensive to have young children; your expenses are going to be high, you’re likely to be earlier in your career, so your income is gonna be low. let’s help you out – and the results were astonishing. Dave, they were astonishing. President Biden said this morning that the expanded child tax credit is one of the most effective programs we’ve ever seen, that in the time it was in effect, it cut child poverty by 50%. And those of us in the anti-hunger world know that it cut food insecurity in children and in those families by 26%. So we have something we know worked that we could put back into place tomorrow if we can line up the political will.
Miller: What do you wish that you had heard today that you haven’t heard yet?
Morgan: We here in Oregon have spent a lot of time thinking, especially during the pandemic, about our neighbors who do not have full American citizenship or have not been in legal residence of the United States for more than 60 months, which is what is required to receive SNAP benefits or food stamp benefits. During the pandemic we Oregonians came together for the Oregon Worker Relief Fund and handed out cash benefits to those neighbors. And we found that those cash benefits were spent on housing, transportation and food to help folks through the pandemic. So here in Oregon we’re spending a lot of time thinking about how are we including everybody, and particularly, how are we including those members of our communities who are most essential in our food systems, right – Who are picking our food, who are washing the dishes in the restaurants, who are working in the backs of grocery stores. These are immigrants and refugees and our migrant neighbors. And they’re currently not included in something like SNAP, and none of the recommendations we’ve seen so far really talk about how we can include those 112,000 Oregonians in Basic Food Assistance programming.
Miller: What happens after this? Today is this big conference, the announcement of some of these commitments from nonprofits and corporations. What happens tomorrow?
Morgan: Tomorrow? We work hard to bring them into reality. So in a democracy, what happens is what the majority of people can organize to make happen? So what happens today and tomorrow and the next day after is for us to encourage all Oregonians who care about ending hunger to get involved, to participate in the civic process at the local level. Talk to your city hall, show up at the town hall meetings, and be thinking about who you’re electing, you know, as a 501C-3 Oregon Food Bank doesn’t support candidates, but who we elect and what the policies they’re going to support, matters. And you can learn that through people’s public statements and through our website we’ve collected our Governor’s candidate statements on what they think they would do to end hunger.
Miller: Susannah Morgan, thanks very much.
Morgan: My pleasure.
Miller: Susannah Morgan is the CEO of the Oregon Food Bank.
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