Needy May Get Up to 16% Less From Food Banks This Year : Charity: The donations by companies and government agencies have dropped. Officials are putting the blame on corporate takeovers.

This holiday season is a time of worry for many of those who serve the needy. It has been a year of red ink for the nation’s food banks, whose generosity has not been matched by the corporations or government agencies that supply them.

Second Harvest, the Chicago-based distributor of surplus food that is the largest single supplier for most food banks, expects to distribute 16% less food this year than last--the first decline in its history.

The decline would be even larger, Second Harvest officials say, were it not for a spurt of corporate charity after Hurricane Hugo and the Northern California earthquake.

Food bankers blame the decline, in part, on a frenzied pace of corporate takeovers that have left food industry executives glued to the bottom line and less concerned about the needy.

“I think corporations are not as generous as they have been in the past,” said Rodney Bivens, executive director of the Oklahoma City Food Bank, where contributions were down 41% by the end of September.

Donations have picked up slightly since then, Bivens said, but are far from meeting Oklahoma’s rising demand for food. “The reality is, the agencies that we serve end up giving out less,” he said.

Once, a poor family might have been able to count on a loaf of bread with sandwich meat in its weekly food bag from a charitable organization. Now, Bivens said, the bag may contain two loaves of bread--but no meat.

“The ultimate loser is, obviously, the most needy of us all,” said Kevin Fagan, director of development for the Greater Philadelphia Food Bank, where donations are down at least 15% from last year.

The Philadelphia organization is fairly typical of the 200 food banks that have sprung up around the nation since the first was established in Phoenix in 1967.

About half of the Philadelphia bank’s food comes from Second Harvest, which collects products that are considered unmarketable by major corporations. Such food might be mislabeled, underweight or overweight, too close to its expiration date or an item that has been discontinued or repackaged.

The other half of the bank’s donations come from local sources: supermarkets, local manufacturers, charitable organizations or private individuals.

All of the food is distributed to a network of local organizations that are involved, in one way or another, with feeding the needy.

The federal government used to supply a substantial portion of the food given out by private organizations, but that amount has been shrinking. Second Harvest officials say they received 172 million pounds of surplus government food in 1987, but half that amount in 1988 and this year.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that it will distribute 239 million pounds of food to charitable organizations this year, down from 272 million pounds the year before.

The main reason for the decline, department spokesman Phil Shanholtzer said, is a sharp drop in the amount of surplus dairy products, in part because of a change in federal price support payments.

The president of Second Harvest, Philip R. Warth Jr., said the change hit food banks hard. After that, he said, the drop in corporate support was “a downturn coming on the heels of a bigger downturn.”

Warth said the slowdown in the corporate spigot is partially because of the merger mania that has swept the food industry in the last several years. But he refused to say which companies have become less generous; food bankers are acutely sensitive about biting the hand that feeds their clients.

“We still consider the nature of our relationship to be very much a partnership, so our task is to very gently tug on the coattails of the industry,” Warth said.

Directors of several food banks did name some companies that, they claimed, have been donating less since being purchased by other corporations. Among those named repeatedly were Pillsbury, General Foods, Kraft and Nabisco.

But officials at three of those companies--all but Kraft--denied that they were giving less; those at Pillsbury and General Foods said they were giving more. A spokeswoman for Kraft, which merged with Philip Morris last year, said she did not know how much the company was giving to Second Harvest.