Council OKs Funds for New Food Agency

Seeking to fashion a more holistic response to problems of hunger, the Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday allocated $280,000 to launch a nonprofit group that will serve as a clearinghouse for all issues connected to food.

The 18-member L.A. Food Security and Hunger Partnership will be appointed by the mayor, City Council president and general manager of the Community Development Department. It will include supermarket owners, small grocers, union workers, religious leaders, academics and people working in community gardens, farmers markets and food banks. This new, broad-based group will tackle issues ranging from how to bring lower-priced markets to impoverished neighborhoods to helping farmers fight for cheaper water rates to making sure families have full plates at holiday time.

“What we’re trying to do is to make food an issue just as housing is an issue, transportation is an issue, all the other basic necessities of life that government deals with,” said Andy Fisher, coordinator of the Community Food Security Coalition and one of the activists pushing the new organization. “It’s not just about feeding hungry people, it’s about using food as a way to make Los Angeles a better place to live.”

Fisher, who worked on the 1993 UCLA study “Seeds of Change”--the first comprehensive food system analysis in the country--said Los Angeles’ problem “is not that there’s not enough resources. It’s just that there’s a lack of coordination and planning.”

Specifics about how often the food agency would meet or what form its activities might take have not been hammered out. The Volunteer Advisory Council on Hunger, which designed the new agency, has set up a lofty list of goals for it.

First on the list: To end hunger. Lower down, a little more concrete: To provide an annual report on the state of hunger in the city and to enhance effectiveness of existing programs by making people work together.

“Right now you don’t have any one place in the city that can deal with the broad issue of food,” said Carolyn Olney of the Interfaith Hunger Coalition, a key player in the development of the partnership. “This is beyond just an increase of food that gets into the emergency food system. It will get at factors that the emergency food system cannot get at.”

Tuesday’s council action is the result of a decade of discussion, starting in 1986 when the council formed a committee to oversee development of a city policy on the elimination of hunger. That led to the creation in 1991 of the nine-member volunteer advisory council, which has held 18 meetings and six public hearings in the past two years.

The agency will receive $100,000 in start-up money from the city’s Community Development Department for the first year, $80,000 the next year, $60,000 the third and $40,000 in the final year. It is to gradually assume responsibility for funding.

“There are a lot of hungry people in our city who do not have friends to fall back on, who do not have family to fall back on, who do not have churches to fall back on. It is our responsibility to step into the void,” Councilman Rudy Svorinich said before Tuesday’s unanimous vote. “I cannot sit here with a clear conscience and know that there are children and elderly and people in between those two age groups who are hungry in our city.”

Councilman Mike Hernandez reminded his colleagues that food banks ran dry last year during the holidays, and said 680,000 Los Angeles residents live in poverty.

“We have children who are going hungry in our city, and we deny that is happening,” Hernandez said later. “The reality is that [the food banks] are running out of food.”