TEST SCORES DROP WHEN SNAP RUN OUT

A new study that confirms that it’s harder to think when you’re hungry. The study’s authors matched up the timing of math tests in South Carolina to the dates when low-income students’ families received monthly SNAP benefits. They found that kids’ test scores dropped at times of the month when nutrition benefits had run out. Put another way, access to SNAP substantially improves students’ academic performance—but only when there are actually enough benefits for families to be able to eat. Running out of SNAP benefits isn’t an anomaly—nearly half of participating families run out before the end of the month. Many previous studies have demonstrated the long-term effects of food insecurity on children; this study shows that the effect of losing SNAP benefits is immediate.

Source: Talk Poverty, 9/25/17, Test Scores

Secretary of Agriculture statement on SNAP

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack today released the following statement on the House Committee on Agriculture's new report on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which contains the Committee's findings from a series of hearings on the program:

"After holding 16 hearings on SNAP over the past two years, the House Agriculture Committee reached a simple conclusion: SNAP provides a critical nutrition safety net for millions of low-income Americans, and we need to do all we can to protect and strengthen the program so it can continue effectively serving American families in need.

"Four out of five SNAP participants are children, seniors, people with disabilities, or working adults. SNAP reduces food insecurity, increases access to healthy food, and generates economic activity and creates jobs all along the supply chain—from the store where food is purchased, all the way back to the farmer who produces it. The program has also been shown to have a positive impact on children's health, academic performance, and long-run economic self-sufficiency. SNAP rewards work with benefits that decrease gradually as earnings increase, and SNAP Employment & Training helps participants build the skills they need to get good-paying jobs and move off the program the right way.

"SNAP is designed to respond swiftly to changing economic conditions—on a national scale, as we saw during the Great Recession when SNAP lifted millions of people out of poverty, or locally, when a plant closes, disaster strikes, or another event causes sudden unemployment or hardship in a particular community. As the report highlights, states already have significant flexibility to tailor the program to their unique needs, while maintaining the responsiveness, effectiveness, and oversight of the Federal program.

"Proposals to convert SNAP into a block grant are misguided and would mean the program could no longer respond to economic conditions and serve all eligible Americans without drastically reducing benefits. As Congress begins working on the 2018 Farm Bill, they must protect SNAP and resist pressure to weaken the program by turning it into an ineffective block grant."

SNAP fraud by state employees denies people benefits

New Mexico is supposed to grant people in dire financial situations expedited SNAP benefits within seven days, rather than the 30 it takes to process regular applications. But  thousands of New Mexico residents may have been cheated out of those benefits, according to new allegations that claim SNAP administrators in the Human Services Department tampered with applications to disqualify people from the program. Nine former and current HSD employees have testified that if the department hadn’t met the required seven-day processing deadline, they were told to give the case file to a supervisor. When the files were handed back to them, they say, the data on the application had been altered. Assets were added and the applicant no longer qualified for the emergency benefits. The practice, which may have been going on since 2003, allows HSD to take the longer, 30-day timeline to process the application. That way, the delay doesn’t count against its court-ordered efforts to comply with regulations.

Source: Think Progress, 5/25/16, SNAP Fraud @ the Top

Can urban foraging feed poor people?

What if we connected the people most in need of healthy food with the expensive, nutrient-dense greens that just happen to be growing between the cracks in their driveways? A project at UC Berkeley is testing out this idea. Philip Stark, chair of the Berkeley statistics department, has organized a team of researchers to map edible plants in low-income neighborhoods,...

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