USDA's new Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) for affordable fruits and vegetables

Friedman School graduate student Cailin Kowalewski reports today in the student publication Sprout on USDA's new financial incentive program:

The USDA this week announced a new grant program that will help participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) afford fruits and vegetables. The Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) program will offer $31.5 million in competitive grants to organizations from across the food system. These organizations will be able to use FINI funding to support projects that increase SNAP participant access to fruits and vegetables through incentive programs at the point of sale.

The Sprout article provides a history and overview of the new program, and it notes divergent views on implementation questions, such as whether the focus should be on farmers' markets or whether it should encompass larger-scale retail channels as well.

USDA's Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP) finds significant positive impact on fruit and vegetable intake

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service yesterday released final results showing that the Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP) had a significant positive impact on fruit and vegetable intake for low-income participants in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

In the pilot, which was conducted in Hampden County, Massachusetts, HIP participants received a 30% incentive added back to their benefit card when they purchased targeted fruits and vegetables in participating retailers. A randomly assigned control group received SNAP benefits as usual with no incentive.

On average HIP participant adults on SNAP consumed 0.23 cup-equivalents more in daily targeted fruits and vegetables -- a 25% increase -- compared to the non-HIP adults on SNAP.

HIP Participants Consumed 0.23 Cup-Equivalent 

More Fruits and Vegetables per Day

The HIP Evaluation Study was led by Abt Associates, Inc., with participation from Westat and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Susan Bartlett from Abt was the project director. On behalf of the Friedman School, I was director of design for the evaluation study and a co-author of the final report.

The pilot represents the most ambitious effort so far to deliver a healthy eating incentive to SNAP participants right through the SNAP card (as opposed to a separate coupon) and in a full range of participating retailers (as opposed to farmers' markets alone). The results complement new work being done by Wholesome Wave and others to explore the potential of financial incentives.

The primary results were based on two post-implementation rounds of surveys of SNAP participants. Preliminary results, based just on the first post-implementation survey round, were published recently in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (may be gated). The new full report released today has more information about a wide variety of food spending, shopping behavior, and food intake outcomes, and it analyzes the likely cost of extending such a healthy incentives program nationwide.

Sharing store-level SNAP redemptions data

USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) has requested public comment on the question: Should store-level redemptions data for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) be shared with the public?

This blog has long encouraged making public such information, which is useful to low-income communities seeking to improve access to healthy food.

In 2010, I covered the efforts of the MuckRock website to make public similar information. More recently, the Argus Leader pressed USDA to release store-level SNAP redemptions data. Tracie McMillan summarized the controversy in an article for the Food and Environment Reporting Network (FERN) and Mother Jones in April.

The public comment period is open through today. Act now if you would like your voice heard. Here is an excerpt from my comment, submitted just now.

Thank you for requesting public comment on the question: should USDA/FNS release store-level redemptions data for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)?

The answer is “yes.”

This public information is useful

SNAP represents an increasingly large fraction of the U.S. food retail economy, now accounting for more than 10% of all food retail sales (Wilde, 2012). SNAP is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, of course, and in recent years the program also has become a critical and central part of the food retail economy overall. To administer this responsibility transparently, in circumstances such as this one where information release is legal and ethical, USDA/FNS should make the information available.

With growing public interest in encouraging access to sufficient healthy food retail in low-income communities, these communities require good information about store-level SNAP redemptions. In a newsmagazine article this year by Tracie McMillan, James Johnson Piett explained the need: “We’re working kind of blind when it comes to empirical data” (McMillan, 2014).

It is legal and ethical to make this information public

The most important point is that SNAP redemptions data are not private confidential business information.

Section 9(c) of 7 U.S.C. 2018(c) prevents USDA/FNS from sharing information that is “received from applicant and participating SNAP retailers.” Similarly, Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) allows FNS to hold back “trade secrets and commercial or financial information obtained from a person and privileged or confidential.” In both cases the confidential information is obtained by the government from a private party or firm.

Store-level SNAP redemptions data are not private information acquired from a private party or firm in this manner. The redemptions data show what is being paid out by USDA/FNS and the federal government, on behalf of the American taxpayers, who have committed great resources at large expense to this important public purpose. Public expenditures in contracts with businesses that provide goods and services are usually rightly public information. Think about subsidies to farmers, or the value of military contracts to arms manufacturers, or municipal expenditures on roads, all of which are public information. No roads contactor can say, “please keep the amount of this contract private, because that is valuable confidential business information.”

In the comments to FNS that have already been posted to the Federal Register docket, many retailers have expressed concern over the release of their private business information. It is good for FNS to reassure them that private information they have provided will not be released. But -- despite the repetition in the submitted comments -- the basic store-level redemptions data are not private confidential information of this type. These redemptions data should be shared.

In the comments from retailers on the Federal Register docket, retailers express concern about the feared difficulty and cost of new data collection mechanisms to provide these data. These fears are unfounded. If there were any new data collection cost or difficulty, FNS would be entirely correct to decline to collect or release these data. FOIA is about public release of existing data that FNS already collects. Certainly, the state SNAP agencies that administer the program already know the redemption amounts.

Media coverage of SNAP (food stamp) cuts

A temporary boost to SNAP benefits, which was instituted in 2009 as part of the federal government's response to the Great Recession, ended yesterday (November 1). This means that all SNAP participants, approximately 48 million Americans, have reduced benefits this year. For example, a 4-person family will lose $36 in monthly benefits. Overall, the cuts amount to approximately $5 billion in the 2014 fiscal year. Congress is contemplating further cuts as part of Farm Bill negotiations between the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Media organizations this week covered these cuts in slightly different ways, but generally agreed on the overall message.

The concern that SNAP participants will turn to emergency food sources such as food pantries was featured by Julie Siple at Minnesota Public Radio and by Marisol Bello at USA Today.

Perhaps surprisingly, media outlets that are considered more conservative or more market-oriented highlighted many of the same themes.  FoxNews did expand on AP coverage by giving high-profile space to a claim by Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute that lax eligibility requirements contributed to recent caseload increases.  Yet, that same story quoted Ellen Vollinger from the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) and also described the cuts themselves in stark terms, saying SNAP benefits were being "slashed."

In this sense, FoxNews provided essentially the same mix of views as did the Minnesota Public Radio story, which included an interview with Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute, who emphasized that the 2009 increase was always intended to be temporary.  The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank that is considered comparatively liberal, but whose reports are always careful with facts and largely free of spin, similarly acknowledged in a very informative report and press release that the 2009 increase was intended to be temporary.  I imagine that most journalists covering this story had read the Center's report.

A separate FoxNews story by Joseph Weber on October 30 claimed that a crackdown on food stamp fraud could "save millions," but the body of the article recognized that the potential savings from such efforts really may be quite small, amounting to less than 1 percent of total program costs.  Moreover, I could not find the FoxNews statistic in the "recent" USDA Inspector General audit report on which it was supposedly based.  The most recent related national audit report from the Inspector General appears to be this 2012 report (.pdf), which includes some praise for existing USDA efforts along with some suggestions for improvement.  The report concludes with a statement that USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) agreed with all the suggestions and planned to implement them by September, 2013, along with a statement from the Inspector General that this response was satisfactory.

Derek Wallbank and Alan Bjerga at Bloomberg News included fascinating coverage of related food retail business topics, including comments from retailers who are highly concerned about the benefit cuts and also those, such as Walmart, that may prosper in times when hard-hit consumers are even more price conscious.

I spent a good deal of time this week speaking to media about the SNAP cuts.  Because I had never before done a live television news interview, perhaps the most interesting was a conversation last night with Elaine Reyes of China's CCTV America network (my interview begins at minute 30:00).  I pointed out that the SNAP program is a particularly important part of the general social safety net in the United States, and that the economic recovery from the Great Recession has been slow, only recently beginning to provide improved private-sector opportunities for low-wage workers, so many people feel that now is a tough time for cuts.

In general, across the spectrum of coverage, I saw perhaps more balance and consistency than I might have expected.  Food stamp policy used to be fairly bipartisan, because the program was perceived more favorably in the United States than cash assistance programs have been perceived.  In the House of Representatives in particular, food stamp policy used to be decided through bipartisan conversations in the Agriculture Committee's hearing room, rather than fiery speeches on the floor of the House.  I wonder if the end of the budget shutdown has cooled some tempers and shown some limits to political rhetoric that really seeks to stick it to poor people.

Rodney Leonard: "No food stamps, no farm program."

The Republican-led House of Representatives recently passed a Farm Bill with no food stamp provisions.  Fiscal conservatives in the House hope this will allow them to make deep cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) without jeopardizing their political support from farmers.

It is unlikely to work out that way.

In a note this week on the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) site, Rodney Leonard, who had been a special assistant to Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman in the early 1960s, described the early politics that led Congress to combine nutrition assistance and farm programs into a single Farm Bill.

The union began when Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman finally pushed the Democratic majority of House of Representatives to approve by a narrow 30-vote margin legislation to adopt the statute creating a permanent food stamp program originally proposed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy. That program is a far cry from the program that today ensures the right of every American adult to choose to protect themselves and their children from hunger. Freeman was intent on linking the capacity to feed a growing nation to a policy insuring that every person, regardless of income, is entitled to share in an abundantly productive agriculture. Within two weeks of the passage of the food stamp legislation, Freeman was able to convince an urban dominated Congress to adopt a Farm Bill establishing supply management as the new post-war policy for American agriculture. Agriculture could maintain remunerative prices for farmers despite a structural tendency to overproduce year after year.

To some extent, this policy logic remains intact. Leonard argues that -- far from allowing farm programs to thrive without SNAP -- the divorce between the two parts of the Farm Bill will allow the nutrition assistance program to survive.  It is the farm programs that will lose support.

The effort of the House GOP to perform political surgery to remove food stamps can have only one predictably disastrous outcome:  Food stamps will survive. An urban nation will not compel millions of its residents to accept a life dominated by hunger. But, if divorced from food stamps, farm programs, whose benefits largely are delivered to the largest 200,000 farm operations, likely will perish in the ideological bonfire that is the GOP Farm Bill. The political conflagration will inevitably include rural America as well.

Simply put, no food stamps, no farm program.

I am not sure.  With separate bills, SNAP also faces political hazards.  We will see what happens next.

In addition to being a former special assistant at USDA, Rod Leonard is a past board member for IATP, and he is author of a history about Orville Freeman's time as governor.  Rod was the long-time executive director of the Community Nutrition Institute (where he hired me as an editor in 1990, my first-ever job in U.S. food policy).

Asset limits for SNAP eligibility

Julie Siple at Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) this week discusses the role of asset limits in determining who is eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps.

To be eligible, according to USDA rules, program applicants generally must have net income below the poverty line.  Middle-income and high-income Americans are ineligible for SNAP.  This is uncontroversial. 

Program applicants also generally must have financial assets below $2000 (or below $3250 if they are elderly).  In recent years, states have been allowed some flexibility regarding this rule.  Many states effectively have set a more generous higher limit.  This is more controversial.

A provision of the farm bill in the U.S. House of Representatives proposes to reduce states' flexibility to determine what asset standard to use.  Siple's report for MPR explores several sides of this issue.

Without an asset test, conservative program critics say, the program may grow too big: "No one wants to see people bear financial hardship, but we have a real financial problem in this country, with the federal government running trillion dollar deficits," Siple quotes CATO scholar Chris Edwards saying. "You know, we can't keep subsidizing everyone like we have been in recent years or we'll simply go bankrupt."

On the other hand, with the strict asset test under the House proposal, imagine the hardship for an elderly person who must spend down her savings to a very low level before becoming eligible for nutrition assistance.  The radio report includes an interview with an 88-year-old Minnesota resident who lost much of her savings due to medical issues, and who worries about having to use up her remaining savings before becoming eligible for food stamps.  The question at stake: is it okay for somebody in her position to still hold $80000 in assets while applying for food stamps, or should she spend down her life savings to 3250 before becoming eligible?

On Point covers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) today

An episode today from the syndicated NPR radio show On Point, with Tom Ashbrook, is titled, "Food Stamps: Fighting Hunger or Draining Resources?"

The guests include AP reporter Mary Clare Jalonick, Boston Medical Center researcher and nationally known child health advocate Deborah Frank, and UC Davis agricultural economist Daniel Sumner. 

There are good reading suggestions on the On Point website.  The episode is at 10 am Eastern.

For further context, the Senate is considering moderate cuts to SNAP of about $4 billion over 10 years.  The House of Representatives is considering cuts perhaps five times as large.  Here from C-SPAN is Senator Pat Roberts (R-KS) arguing unsuccessfully for an amendment to make deeper cuts in the Senate, which would make the two bills more similar.

House and Senate mark up farm bills

At long last, the House Committee on Agriculture and the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry both marked up farm bills this week.  But there are many miles to go before this legislation ever reaches home.

The Associated Press has a summary of several key differences in the main provisions (with dollar amounts stated on a per year basis).

In a partisan division that we saw already last year, when this legislation was still over-optimistically known as the "2012 Farm Bill," the House committee proposes deeper cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) than the Senate committee does.  The House committee proposes to cut $2 billion per year, while the Senate committee proposes to cut $0.4 billion per year.  The Republican committee leaders in the House sought the deeper SNAP cuts in part so they could move slower on budget cuts to direct payments for cotton farmers (largely in the South), and in part so they could accommodate the strong anti-food-stamp sentiment among some Republican legislators on the floor.  Yet, these deep SNAP cuts may make it difficult to reach eventual agreement with the Democratic-led Senate, leading to possible continuation of the years-long impasse over U.S. food and farm policy.

For the Senate committee bill, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition summarizes provisions of interest to producers interested in sustainable production practices, especially at the local and regional level.  For the House committee bill, Politico reports on the political angles.  The Hagstrom Report (gated, but valuable) is working overtime this week, and the FarmPolicy blog links to many national and regional media sources.

Food stamp challenge (with abundant talent)

In my presentation at Virginia Tech last month, I mentioned the food stamp challenge, a short-term exercise in living on the food budget available to a very low-income participant in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

One of the students there began the challenge and documented it on a blog, posting food photography and receipts.  Although some people attempt a food stamp challenge using average benefits as the spending benchmark, I think Clara was correct to use the maximum SNAP benefit as a benchmark (this is the benefit amount received by the lowest-income program participants).

Of course, few of us have the talent to make a food stamp challenge look so good.  Please do not use Clara's blog posts for the purpose of redesigning federal food stamp policy!  Instead, just consider Clara's experience as one example of the diversity of experiences that people have with the economics of food spending, preparation, and ... clearly ... enjoyment.

SNAP benefits surpass 10% of all grocery spending

In 2010, for the first time, SNAP benefits appear to have surpassed 10% of all grocery spending.

This seems to me like a significant threshold.  The program formerly known as food stamps is not just an important part of the safety net.  It plays a big role in the U.S. retail economy more generally.  It should be a national priority to seek economic growth of the sort that reaches all the way to the low-wage labor market.  The last time we had that type of poverty-reducing economic growth for a sustained period was the late 1990s.

I provide more detail about recent program trends in "The New Normal: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) (gated)," published this week in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (AJAE).  The paper came out of a lively conference session, organized by Benjamin Senauer and including papers by himself and Mark Rosegrant, Mike Boehlje, Brent Gloy, Jason Henderson, and Tim Beatty.

This figure compares administrative data on SNAP benefits to USDA's two data series on aggregate food spending.  Depending on the measure of food spending used, SNAP now represents 10% to 17% of the food retail economy.

Figure 4.

Total SNAP benefits, as a percentage of food at-home sales in food stores and in total, 1981–2010

Author's computation based on USDA/FNS annual SNAP data (converted from fiscal year to calendar year by interpolation) and USDA/ERS annual national food spending data by calendar year.

Cuts to SNAP in the Ryan budget

For many years, the Food Stamp Program enjoyed reliable bi-partisan political support.  Even as the U.S. entitlement program for cash assistance was cut and converted to a block grant in the 1990s, food stamps remained largely unharmed.  Leading Republicans such as Senator Bob Dole joined leading Democrats in supporting food assistance for low-income Americans.

Now, at a time when U.S. household food insecurity is near record levels, the nation's largest food assistance program -- under its newer name the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- is targeted for the most severe cuts ever in its 50-year history.  According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, GOP Congressman Paul Ryan's proposed budget plan for 2013-2022, approved by the House of Representatives Thursday in a partisan vote, would cut SNAP by $133.5 billion, or 17 percent, over ten years.

In reaction to this proposed budget plan, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said, "It's an excellent piece of work."

Second-place GOP Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, according to the New York Times, said the budget didn't go far enough.

The New York Times editorial yesterday disagreed.  The Times said the proposed cuts "would mean a loss of $90 worth of food a month" for the average household.  If you read the Center on Budget's analysis carefully, clearly the Times should have said "a loss of $90 worth of food stamps in a month" (the distinction arises because SNAP benefits are effectively food support only in part and effectively income support for the remainder).  An economist colleague called me up to criticize this oversight in the Times editorial and to encourage me to post on this topic, saying of the Times: "It's an attempt to be inflammatory.  They wanted a big number."

I see the point, but I might add that the budget cut correctly described, $133.5 billion from SNAP, also is a big number, and perhaps also in this election season an attempt to be inflammatory.

Update (4/1/2012): My colleague encourages me to explain the economic flaw in the Times editorial even more clearly.  The issue has to do with the effect on food spending from an additional dollar of SNAP benefits.  A good rough estimate is that an additional dollar of SNAP benefits generates about 30 cents of additional food spending.  The rest of the additional SNAP benefit substitutes for cash income that the household otherwise would have spent on food, freeing up resources for other household needs such as housing or transportation.  The economic lesson is that a targeted benefit such as SNAP is in part a food subsidy and in part a general income subsidy.  The Times editorial should not have said the Ryan budget would generate a loss of $90 in food, but rather that the budget would generate a loss of $27 in food and $63 in other household needs.

With this correction in mind, my friend writes: "What you did not do in your blog post was tell your reader the nature of the NYT mistake and what the right concept is.... So finally, if I object, it is that you did not take this opportunity to teach a little economics and encourage accuracy.   You came very close to saying, lying is okay as long as the political cause is GOOD.   I do not think you really believe that."

The SNAP (food stamp) explosion

Every couple years, we update this dynamic interactive graphic showing how Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation changes in response to economic conditions and federal and state policies.  (Thanks to graduate student Dan Hatfield for data processing in this new 2010 edition, and to Hanqi Luo and Joseph Llobrera for data processing in earlier versions).

With this Google Gadget, you can track a particular state of interest, or watch all states move together. Of course, the real drama is in the final two years.