Cash Instead of Food Stamps--a Risky Leap : Poverty: San Diego County’s shift away from food stamps may worsen the problem of childhood hunger.

Hunger hurts everyone. We all have a stake in preventing infants from being born underweight, in improving the performance of school children, in improving the work performance of adults and in preventing debilitating and expensive nutrition-related health problems among the elderly.

No one goes hungry by choice.

Hunger is the result of poverty; and in America today, 32 million people are poor.

According to a recent, scientifically valid survey of poor households in the United States, 3 million to 5 million children are hungry. This same survey found that hungry children suffer significantly more health problems than children who have enough to eat. These illnesses cause children to miss more days of school. And hungry children cannot learn.

Many larger issues relating to poverty must be addressed, including adequate education, jobs and wages, affordable housing and health care. But hungry children cannot wait for long-term solutions.

Any proposal that could help alleviate hunger deserves careful consideration. But converting food stamps to cash, as San Diego County began to do this fall, is unlikely to lessen the blight of childhood hunger. In fact, it may well make this problem worse.

The federal food stamp program was begun in the early 1960s as a way of helping poor families achieve a nutritious diet. Even before severe cuts in the early 1980s, it was never funded at a level sufficient to assure adequate diets for low-income people.

Food stamp benefits are not based on poor households’ food costs in the real world. Instead, benefits are based on the “thrifty food plan,” a hypothetical projection of the least amount that low-income households could spend to obtain a minimally adequate diet. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that only about 1 in 10 low-income households spending this amount would obtain a nutritionally adequate diet.

Little wonder, then, that soup kitchens and food pantries report substantial increases in requests for emergency assistance at the end of the month, when food stamp allotments have run out.

It is against this backdrop that San Diego began its “cash-out” project. Households that previously received booklets of food stamps each month now receive checks in the same amount.

Proponents assert that recipients will have greater freedom as to how to spend this money. The county also expects to reap administrative savings, because checks are less expensive to write and distribute. In fact, this freedom is likely to be illusory, the savings relatively insignificant and many other costs hidden.

USDA studies show that a household’s nutritional level increases far more rapidly with each additional dollar it receives in food stamps than it does when that same dollar is provided in cash. Studies of previous cash-out projects do not show dramatic improvements in the program’s performance.

The Alabama welfare department recently asked food stamp households whether they would prefer the freedom of receiving assistance in cash rather than food stamps. Much to the department’s surprise, the majority of the recipients it surveyed preferred stamps.

One of the dangers of the cash approach is that it gives landlords and creditors the opportunity to charge more.

In many communities, rents for the lowest-quality housing hover a few dollars below the maximum public assistance grants; when grant levels increase, many landlords raise their rents by a corresponding amount.

Landlords cannot collect food stamps as rent, but converting stamps to cash allows landlords to raise rents.

Other creditors may react similarly. With energy costs skyrocketing and the Low-Income Home-Energy Assistance Program having been cut 47% over the last nine years, many poor households are forced to negotiate limited service arrangements with utility companies for which payments may be based on percentages of their incomes.

Many of these creditors will want their share of any “new” cash that comes into a poor household, even if that cash is just the equivalent of the household’s food stamp allotment.

The danger that cashing out food stamps poses to low-income children is exacerbated by the inadequacy of other food assistance programs. A lack of funds still prevents the highly acclaimed Special Supplement Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) from serving more than about half of those eligible.

In California, which already has lower-than-average WIC funding, thousands of children were thrown off of WIC this summer because unexpected food price increases threatened to exhaust program funds. For these children and those unable to get onto WIC, food stamps are the main line of defense against hunger.

Although it is much too early to form a firm judgment on the San Diego experience, local food pantry operators are already reporting a sharp increase in requests, which appears to go beyond what could be expected from a slackening economy.

Significantly, poor households are coming much earlier in the month, having exhausted their food budgets sooner than they had previously.

This increased demand for emergency food comes at a time when surplus commodities for the poor have been drastically reduced. The result is that many families in dire need may be turned away from these food pantries. San Diego County hopes to save $600,000 in administrative costs this year.

But the costs of hunger are quite great: even a slight increase in hunger-related illness is likely to increase Medi-Cal costs by more than the cash-out’s administrative savings.

And, although it may be harder to measure the human costs of these illnesses and the long-term losses in productivity resulting from hungry children’s failure to learn in school, these costs are no less real.

In a world where low-income people’s resources more closely approximated the cost of living, providing food assistance as cash would have great merit for reducing the stigma of the program.

But under existing conditions, a cash-out of food stamp benefits threatens to further undermine the tenuous nutritional safety net on which many more households and their children already depend.