I was talking last night to some food pantry workers and community organizers. One had just returned from a trip home to Nairobi – where, he said, a third of the city’s 3,000,000 were living in shanty towns with no water, sewers, etc. Hunger in NYC is not like starving to death in Kenya. Even so, if you are the forty-second person in line at the pantry around the corner, you are out of luck and food for the day. More than 1.3 million New Yorkers depend upon soup kitchens, pantries and the like because, even with food stamps (if they get them) there’s a shortfall. And as food prices rise, the shortfall gets bigger and more people turn to food pantries.

Unfortunately, declining federal aid and rising food prices have sharply reduced the amount of food available in NYC. For example, a few days ago, Winter Miller, writing in the NY Times reported that pantry shelves are bare .

At its sprawling warehouse in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, the Food Bank is storing about half what it housed in recent years. Instead of distributing 5.5 million pounds of food a month to food banks and soup kitchens, the Food Bank now offers 3 million pounds. So rather than having 10 trucks on the road at any given time, there are now only 3 or 4.
“It’s the first time in a few years that I could walk into the warehouse and see empty shelves,” said Lucy Cabrera, the president and chief executive of the Food Bank, which helps feed about 1.3 million people a year.
Officials at the Food Bank say the bare shelves stem from a steady decline in federal emergency food aid, though a farm bill stalled in the United States Senate could increase that aid.
According to a study to be released today by the Food Bank and Cornell University, New York City receives a little more than half the amount of emergency food annually from the federal government that it did three years ago. The shortfall is occurring as the number of families and individuals relying on soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City has risen to 1.3 million from 1 million since 2004.

Update at the end.

This is what Mr. Bush’s compassionate conservatism is all about.

The Food Bank is the voluntary organization in NYC which operates the Hunt’s Point central warehouse and truck fleet and supplies pantries, soup kitchens and feeding stations with food (donated by supermarkets, wholesalers and the federal government or purchased when donations fall short). It’s detailed, 111-page report on hunger in NYC, referred to in the Times snippet, above is worth reading through. I’ve gotten a hard-copy and you can too. Ask for it, but try at least to read through some right now right here

UPDATE: The solution is said to be passage of the 2007 Farm Bill which, as usual, is a melange of funding schemes for farmers, agri-business and food manufacturers. In addition there is nutrition aid. Senator Schumer appeared at a Food Pantry in NY and issued a this press release (pdf, sorry) which urges Senate passage of the bill and recounts some hair-raising figures about food pantries running out of food. He was joined at the Yorkville Common Pantry (one of Manhattan's larger centers) by Joel Berg of the NY Coalition Against Hunger. Can you stand reading more about the better parts of the Farm Bill? If you're committed to intellectual self-abuse, click here and here .