The Chicago Bureau
November 14, 2013
From The Chicago Bureau:
For Chicagoan Darrell Hairl, a $20 cut from a monthly SNAP allotment is no small change. The 44-year-old is unemployed and has been supporting himself through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program since 2010.
But with the Nov. 1 expiration of some recession-era legislation, his monthly stipend was cut from an already meager $200 down to $180. Now, the House and Senate are facing off on the long-debated U.S. Farm Bill, legislation that could cut up to $40 billion in additional funding from SNAP, affecting thousands of Chicagoans and their children.
The SNAP program was a nutritional mainstay for more than 2 million Illinois residents — until Nov. 1, when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which increased SNAP benefits by 13.6 percent in 2009 and has sustained families ever since, became null and void, despite the millions of people who are not yet “recovered” from the economic downturn. While Congress further the debates the farm bill, under which SNAP falls, local agencies and nonprofits are struggling to pick up the pieces.
“Any amount is a large amount,”said Hairl. “When that deduction happened, it cause some hardship. A lot that I was depending on could have been toiletries, bus cards. I was devastated. It put me in a frantic situation, asking what is going to happen at the end of the week ?”
The reductions will affect about 886,000 Illinois children, a group already vulnerable to hunger and poverty, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. For families of three, SNAP benefits will be cut by $29 a month, bringing the allotment for an average meal per person to less than $1.40. The cuts will in turn impact soup kitchens and food pantries, which will see more families coming in earlier in the month because their stamps will run out sooner.
Kimberly Drew, policy associate at Chicago non-profit Heartland Alliance, said it’s her organization’s job to move people out of poverty—a job that becomes much harder when family food budgets are diminished. People are much more likely to seek education or employment when their families are fed. But for the 16 percent of the Illinois population receiving reduced SNAP benefits, difficult decisions will need to be made.
“The cuts to SNAP will mean making decisions between buying dinner or buying a bus ticket to get to work,” said Drew. “For a mother with two children that $29 translates to about 16 fewer meals per month. We know that parents might choose to go without food to feed their kids.”
Children may be the hardest hit by these cuts if their parents cannot afford the nutrient-rich foods they need, said Penny Roth, chief of the bureau of family nutrition for the Illinois Department of Human Services. Roth also spearheads Women, Infants and Children, a program run through IDHS which serves as a second line of defense for pregnant mothers, infants and children up to age five.
WIC is exclusively funded by the federal government, and is still recovering from the complete loss of funding during the 16-day government shutdown. Unlike the SNAP program, which allows participants to buy “just about anything that qualifies as food,” the WIC program provides designated food coupons for nutrient-rich items that children and infants need, such as iron-rich cereal, peanut butter and canned beans.
