One in 10 U.S. households were food insecure in 2020, the same level as a year earlier, the USDA’s Economic Research Service reported Wednesday. The flat rate of food insecurity provided evidence that government and charitable programs during the Covid-19 pandemic tempered a rise in hunger despite the deep recession.
Still, the survey found higher rates of food insecurity among families with children, among African-American households, and among households with members who lost jobs or couldn’t work as result of the pandemic. Food insecurity rises when households can’t earn enough money to buy all the food they need. Among white households, however, food insecurity declined in 2020.
“[Without] government action, food insecurity would have been far higher during the pandemic. Emergency nutrition assistance and other relief legislation have been tied to declines in food hardship in the past two years,” wrote Ed Bolen, senior policy analyst of food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, on Twitter.
The report found that 10.5 percent of U.S. households (13.8 million) were food insecure last year, meaning they could not provide enough food for all their members sometime during the year. The rate was unchanged from 2019, which had the lowest food insecurity rate since 2000, when it was also 10.5 percent. By comparison, during the previous recession, beginning in 2008, food insecurity stayed above 14 percent of U.S. households until 2016.
In 2020, 3.9 percent of U.S. households (5.1 million) experienced a high degree of food insecurity, similar to 2019’s rate of 4.1 percent.
The report, the ERS said, did not explore the reasons for the stable hunger rate, but it noted that changes to government programs, new nutrition assistance, and responses by charitable organizations might have played a role.
Nearly 42 million Americans — the vast majority of them working families with children — rely on SNAP benefits to buy food, and participation in the program swelled during the pandemic. When the pandemic hit, all participating families were eligible for emergency allotments that brought their monthly benefits up to the maximum level; families already at the benefit ceiling saw no increase.
Although the overall rate of food insecurity was flat last year, it did increase among households with children, from 13.6 percent in 2019 to 14.8 percent in 2020. Parents, for example, might have skipped a meal to provide more for their kids. But these households were at times unable to provide enough food for their children. In 7.6 percent of households with children, kids were food insecure at least sometime during 2020 compared with 6.5 percent of these households in 2019.
Among Black households, food insecurity also rose, from 19.1 percent in 2019 to 21.7 percent in 2020, and it was higher in the South. Among white households, food insecurity declined from 7.9 percent in 2019 to 7.1 percent in 2020. The rate of food insecurity in Hispanic homes was 17.2 in 2020.
Food insecurity hit 12.7 percent of households in metropolitan areas and 11.6 percent in rural areas. Both rates were higher than in suburbs and other areas outside of principal cities, where the rate was 8.8 percent.
The survey also looked at a 30-day period from mid-November to mid-December 2020 and found that food security closely tracked employment during the pandemic. In households where someone was unable to work because of the pandemic, food insecurity reached 16.4 percent. One in five households (20.4 percent) also faced food insecurity when someone in the home was unemployed and unable to look for work due to the pandemic.
Separately, the House Committee on Education and Labor, seeking to reduce childhood food insecurity, released details of measures to be included in the $3.5 trillion budget bill. It would expand free school meals to reach 9 million more children; create a summer electronic benefits program so low-income kids could still get food aid; and provide funding to update school kitchen equipment so they could make healthier meals.
The 2020 food security survey included 34,330 households that comprise a representative sample of the U.S. civilian population of about 130 million households.
You can read more about the report here and download a copy here.