California Association of Food Banks Applaud the American Families Plan
abril 28, 2021
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Today President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris released the American Families Plan. The California Association of Food Banks applauds this bold, comprehensive plan that will make significant strides towards a hunger-free future for millions of families and people across the country who are struggling to make ends meet. This continues this Administration’s impactful work fighting hunger and poverty, which began with the American Rescue Plan and several actions by the USDA and other agencies.
Right now, California is in the midst of a hunger crisis and a response like the America Families Plan is necessary and critical for our state. In California, while food insecurity is at the lowest point since the COVID-19 pandemic began (19.8% in March 2021), it still remains more than double the pre-pandemic levels (9.9% in 2019), with deep inequities for low-income communities of color. For households in California with children, a shocking 35.5% of Black households, and 27.3% of Hispanic or Latinx households are experiencing food insecurity, compared with 15.6% of White households.
Unsurprisingly given these numbers, many food banks are still reporting serving double the number of people compared to before the pandemic, with the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank — the state’s largest food bank — reporting a three-fold increase in the number of people it serves each month.
While we work to reduce the rates of hunger in California, we should not endeavor to “go back to normal” — which would mean 4 million Californians still experiencing hunger — rather, we should seize this moment to work towards a hunger-free future once and for all.
We strongly urge Congress to swiftly enact these important policies to fight hunger, including:
CAFB further applauds the many measures to address the root causes of poverty and systemic racism that lead to hunger, including:
CAFB has long called for many of these policies to be enacted, and we honor the work by California leaders to advance them, including:
We again call on Congress to enact these policies into law and continue this historic march against hunger and the underlying causes of poverty and systemic racism.