Feeding the Hungry with Surplus Commodities

Abstract

Since January 1982, the federal government has released three and three quarter billion pounds of surplus food valued at $4.5 billion for distribution to the needy.I The combined work of more than twenty-thousand church groups, food banks, community action programs, soup kitchens, food pantries, and civic clubs across the country has helped deliver direct food assistance to as many as twenty million people during this period. The federal plan to distribute surplus commodities resulted from the confluence of several disparate developments: unprecedentedly high levels of government dairy holdings; urgent indications that the problem of hunger was rapidly increasing; and a decision by the Reagan administration to curtail the growth of (or indeed cut) federally sponsored food and nutrition programs. In addition, the new federal initiative coincided with the administration's commitment to limit the size of government and promote greater reliance on the private sector and charities. The federal government succeeded in distributing significant surpluses to needy families and households and has managed to avoid creating government bureaucracies to handle direct service delivery. In the first four years of the program it re-