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Susan Palmer - The Eugene Register-Guard October 16, 2003The five-year plan aims at going beyond simply providing food to the poor.
Last winter, Gov. Ted Kulongoski set out to do something about hunger in Oregon, and in the past nine months he has used his office as a bully pulpit.
The Oregon Food Bank, hub of the state's network of food distribution agencies, reports a 5 million pound increase in food donations and more financial support since the governor's February summit on hunger.
This week, Kulongoski upped the ante, asking two government advisory groups to tackle the root causes of hunger. They met Wednesday to start crafting a five-year plan designed to go beyond the triage of providing food to people in dire financial straits.
Hunger represents a stubborn and perplexing challenge. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture began releasing state-by-state information on hunger and food insecurity in 1999, Oregon has ranked No. 1 in hunger and among the top three states where people experience food insecurity.
The USDA defines hunger as painful pangs in the stomach that result from not getting enough to eat and food insecurity as worrying about having enough money to consistently buy nutritious food.
"We want to change the focus of the conversation from the perceived hopelessness of hunger to the hope of building food security for our citizens," said Erinn Kelley-Siel, a health and human services policy adviser to the governor.
That means addressing Oregon's low wages, reinforcing the state's social services safety net and supporting the emergency food providers, she said.
In a state still stuck in recession, getting out in front of the problem won't be easy.
The Oregon Food Bank estimates a 10 percent increase statewide in the number of people receiving emergency food boxes last year over the previous year.
In Eugene-Springfield, Catholic Community Services saw an 8 percent increase in people seeking emergency food boxes during the fiscal year that ended in June compared with the previous year. The agency distributes about 40 percent of the food boxes provided by FOOD for Lane County.
And the picture didn't improve this summer as demand continued to rise, said Joe Softich, food room manager for Catholic Community Services
"We've done days where we've done 160 boxes in four hours. It's unheard of," Softich said. In previous years giving out 65 boxes of food was considered a busy afternoon, he said.
So far, the governor's anti-hunger campaign has helped.
The Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua tribe, for example, gave the Oregon Food Bank $10,000. An anonymous donor contributed $17,000 to help fund summer lunch programs for children in Portland.
A mailing by Northwest Natural Gas to its customers generated more than $110,000 in donations.
But hunger will be part of the Oregon landscape until the underlying problems get some attention, said Michael Leachman, an analyst with the Center for Public Policy, a nonpartisan Silverton think tank that focuses on poverty issues.
Oregon racked up its high hunger numbers during the last half of the 1990s, a period when the state's economy was one of the fastest growing in the nation, Leachman said. So there's little reason to think that recovery from the current recession alone will solve the problem, he said.
Task force members are well aware of the challenge, Kelley-Siel said.
"It's not enough just to have a job," she said. "It has to pay a living wage."
But solving hunger won't happen just by boosting wages, said state Republican Party Chairman Kevin Mannix.
Increasing the minimum wage, for example, is likely to decrease the number of jobs available, he said.
"I've talked to far too many employers who have had to reduce the number of jobs in order to pay workers more," he said. "As long as there's one person going hungry in this state, that's too much, but it worries me that some people want to convert the hunger agenda into some other social agenda."
The task force expects to have a plan to the governor in January, Kelley-Siel said.
"It's about what we want Oregon to stand for," she said. "My sense is if you asked anyone in Oregon if they knew their neighbor didn't know where their next meal would be coming from, that would upset them and they would want to do something about it."