After three decades of tracking food insecurity, understanding the reality of Americans without access to reliable food may become more difficult due to the discontinuation of a federal survey.
The Household Food Security Report is an annual, national survey that monitors the severity of food insecurity in U.S. households. The United States Department of Agriculture will no longer publish it, describing the assessment as “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”
Without the numbers, the nation will lose out on “the most accurate data that we have on the status of food insecurity” says LaPorchia Collins, a food and agricultural economist in the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Collins previously worked for the USDA’s Economic Research Service, the department responsible for administering the report for the past 30 years.
“This food security report gives us a snapshot of individuals who have struggled to gain access to food at some point in time, over the course of a year,” Collins said.
She added: “Having this information is really important because many of these policies that are designed to improve nutrition, improve food access amongst households, depend on it. It’s really hard to gauge progress if we’re not measuring the outcomes.”
The USDA defines food security as “access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.” The report includes statistics on food spending and the utilization of federal food and nutrition assistance programs. It is a supplement to the monthly Current Population Survey, which is conducted by the Department of Commerce and Bureau of the Census. The findings have been used as a means to inform policy decisions such as making larger investments into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, according to the USDA.
In a Sept. 20 news release, the USDA said the studies “do nothing more than fear monger.” Additionally, stating that “for 30 years, this study … failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.”
The final USDA report will be released in October, covering 2024 data on food insecurity. The decision to end the publication comes in the wake of federal funding cuts for food and nutrition safety net programs nationwide.
Anti-hunger organizations such as the Food Research & Action Center called the federal government’s decision “short-sighted” and said that the move dismisses the need for clarity on the extent of food insecurity.
“We have to be able to measure the current status of food insecurity, and how it changes over time,” Collins told Capital B. “If we can’t measure it, how are we going to create effective policies to address the issue?”
The most recent survey found more than 47 million people were food insecure at some point during 2023, which includes 13 million children. In Black and Hispanic households, the rates of food insecurity were higher than the national average. It was also significantly higher in the South.
While working at the Economic Research Service, Collins didn’t work on the food security reports. She focused primarily on farming and agriculture. As a professor who uses the reports in class and research, she wanted to explain the importance of the survey and the implications of what could happen now that this data will no longer be collected.
Collins details below what can be found in the report and why it was an important tool to document hunger. Her conversation with Capital B has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Capital B: Why did this report exist, and how does it measure food insecurity across the country?
LaPorchia Collins: I didn’t work specifically on this report, but I have definitely used this report in my work, even in terms of teaching. So, this food security report will show individuals that not only have struggled to have in terms of finances and access to food, but also it goes deeper in terms of measuring whether they’ve had changes in terms of their eating patterns, if they’ve had disruptions in terms of their food intake. That’s where sort of this idea of hunger comes into play. If you’re skipping meals because you can’t afford to purchase food — or with households that have children, if you’re skipping meals making sure that your child is eating but you as an individual are skipping meals — this is an indication of hunger within society.
One of the key reasons why it’s important to sort of measure this data is because over time, food insecurity changes depending on the situations that we experience as a country. In times of economic recessions or economic downturns when there’s high unemployment, high inflation, all of that is going to show up in terms of trends that we see in this food insecurity data.
The data definitely shows what happens in terms of food insecurity when we have these different issues arise, and also when policies are implemented to assist individuals, we tend to see reductions in food security. Measuring food insecurity is really important for making sure that we can track not only progress, but trends.
The other thing that’s really important is that we’re not just looking at it from just one household. We’re also going into depth in terms of what types of households tend to experience food insecurity, whether that’s the household type, whether you have children, whether it’s a single parent household, whether it’s a minority household, whether it’s low income households.
What are some of the challenges with documenting hunger at the local level?
At the county level or at the local level, you may not have the resources to do a very broad food security survey. It’s very difficult, very time-consuming. You have to have not only the individuals to conduct the surveys, but also the money in order to do that. It’s difficult to say we should do this in every county or every parish. That would be wonderful. It would be ideal, but that does not negate this need for a national and state level survey, and for those communities that are trying to address food insecurity, the national level survey gives them a good foundation and a good context for understanding some of the drivers of food insecurity.
Even though you may not know what that percentage is in your county, you may have information on the actual drivers at a county level. So you may know income levels. You may know the percent or minority population rates. For example, you may know what percent of your population is of low income, so you have information on some of these drivers, and this broader food security report really helps you to understand what are sort of those indicators of vulnerability in the area of food security.
Is there a fear that without this data, some folks will fall through the cracks?
There’s an old adage that you can’t solve a problem that you don’t acknowledge, so measuring food insecurity is an acknowledgement that this is a problem that exists, and we want to continue to monitor the situation and how it changes over time. There are limitations in terms of the depth of the survey, but we can’t say that we’re going to measure nothing.
If there is concern regarding the depth of the survey, then the answer to me would be to invest in research and strategies for improving the measurements while continuing to have this survey exists so that we can then compare and contrast the results that we’re getting between the two, but also making sure that we have a consistent weight over time that we have been using to measure so doing away with a survey and then coming up with something new is not going to help us.
Is there anything that people can do now that the USDA will no longer publish the report? What could be the call to action?
I think individual citizens could reach out to their representatives to underscore the importance of the report for understanding food insecurity within their communities. Organizations, I’d say, continue investing in initiatives to reduce food insecurity, and also consider whether there are ways to use some of the methodologies that are described in the report to produce smaller surveys within their areas. That’s costly, and not everyone will be able to do that, but to the extent that you’re able, perhaps a short form of the survey could provide some data in the interim.
Is there anything else you feel is important to this topic that we didn’t cover?
You mentioned something, and it made me think about my work with farmers — about how some of the issues might kind of go under the radar without the actual data. So for example, in my work in terms of farm financial performance, there were always anecdotes about the lack of profitability among minority farms and those types of differences in access to resources. A lot of it was anecdotal. During my time at the Economic Research Service, we worked on producing reports that would actually document and compare and contrast, sort of, the financial position of farms across race, and so it’s kind of similar in terms of the food insecurity report, right?
We won’t be able to kind of see and understand those differences if they’re not documented. And if it’s not documented, then issues can easily be ignored. So it’s important to have the data present in a transparent way. Then, the community, the research community, and also individuals can then interpret that data for themselves.