These are lines and lines of people
waiting for food aid in the U.S.,
the richest country in the world.
While companies like Amazon and Walmart
are reporting record profits,
scenes like this are becoming more and more common
during the coronavirus pandemic.
It is my first time, yes.
I mean, we need the help now.
Hunger was already a crisis in America
before the pandemic,
affecting as many as 40 million people.
And with COVID, that number could rise to 54 million.
It’s not that we don’t have enough food —
we have so much that we waste it outright.
But what if I told you that more and more food banks
wasn’t the answer to solving hunger?
What if I told you that some U.S. corporations
are profiting off of that hunger?
What if I told you about something called the
Hunger Industrial Complex?
Food is not the solution to hunger.
That’s Andy Fisher,
an anti-hunger activist and author.
Giving somebody a box of food –
sure, it’s going to solve the problem for today.
But it's not going to do much more than that.
In a lot of countries, food banks pop up
to feed people in times of disaster.
But here in the U.S., they’re a permanent fixture
in our fight against hunger.
And they’re supported mostly by charity.
That leads us to Andy’s fascinating theory
about hunger in the U.S., which he calls:
the Hunger Industrial Complex.
It’s basically ...
the web of connections between
the government, nonprofits and business
that perpetuates hunger through making sure that
hunger is profitable for all.
Could you break that down actually?
So I know Walmart plays a role in this.
Walmart pays its employees, you know, $11, $12 an hour –
which isn't enough for them to make ends meet.
They typically don't give them full-time hours,
so people don't get benefits.
So basically Walmart is encouraging its employees
to go get food stamps or to go to a food bank,
because they don't pay them enough wages in the first place.
And here’s what’s screwed up:
What Walmart is doing is completely legal.
They’re getting away with it
because the federal minimum wage
in this country is still $7.25.
Then there’s the other elephant in the room:
Amazon.
You've seen Jeff Bezos' wealth –
- skyrocketed during this pandemic.
He turns around and donates
100 million dollars to Feeding America,
which, on one level is wonderful,
and another level, it's chump change for him.
And it's just going to protect his own interests
because it's ensuring that those food banks
are there to meet the needs of his workers,
who he is not paying adequate wages
and would cost him a few billion to do so.
Low wages, no benefits?
Those have a huge impact on our ability to afford food.
The whole problem is
That’s the root of it all.
That’s Kim.
She’s been relying on food banks to feed herself
and her son since 2012.
Now, she’s an anti-hunger activist
who shares her experience in hopes of changing policy.
A large portion of my income was going toward rent.
The rest that was left, I had to divvy it up.
Electricity, right? You have gas, you have water...
So, I went to food banks, I went to soup kitchens.
How did this make you feel,
lining up at a food pantry for the first time?
It’s humiliating.
We are one of the richest countries in the world,
but we are a tale of two countries.
We have the haves, and we have the have-nots.
OK, so what exactly are food banks though?
They collect donated food
in warehouses and distribute it
on a huge scale.
Today, there are hundreds of food banks
supplying tens of thousands of food pantries –
you know, where you go and actually pick up the food –
throughout the country.
But they weren’t all that common in the U.S.
until the ‘80s.
A recession hit really hard back then.
People lost their jobs and couldn’t afford food.
And the Reagan administration cut a lot
of government programs that could’ve helped.
So food banks
– supported by charities, not the government
– popped up to fill the gaps.
Today, the government props up these food banks
instead of supporting social safety net programs.
Each year for example,
they spend half a billion dollars
to buy food off farmers and give them to food banks.
But what if the government put more money in SNAP?
That’s the name of the food stamp program in this country.
SNAP distributes an average of $250-ish per month
to lower income families on a prepaid card.
It provides 9 times as many meals
as all the country’s food banks combined.
And it costs a fraction of the government aid
that goes to food banks.
My message to the U.S. government is,
number one: increase wages,
number two: make the SNAP benefits enough
so that we don’t have to rely on food pantries.
But get this,
corporations have learned how to use food stamps
to earn even more profits.
Remember Walmart?
Walmart is the single largest redeemer
of food stamps in the country.
They're benefiting from people's tax dollars.
So, Walmart captures one in every five
or one in every six dollars that are redeemed.
OK, but what about the billions of dollars
corporations like Walmart have donated
to "end hunger?"
Every time they give a $50,000 donation
to your local food bank,
they’re going to get an article in the local newspaper
that’s going to say how wonderful they are.
They're gaining the publicity benefits,
which are actually really important nowadays.
It appears to be a hunger fighter
rather than a hunger causer.
So, big companies donate to food banks.
But the ties go even deeper.
In his 2017 research,
Andy found that 22% of food bank board members
worked at Fortune 1000 companies.
Walmart, Kroger, Bank of America, Wells Fargo
– you know, all those big corporations
whose staff are sitting on the board of food banks.
– Ah ...
– They're actively stopping the food bank from engaging
on public policy that threatens their business interests.
– Wow.
– So it's a very tight integrated web.
In an ideal world,
we wouldn’t really need food banks.
And I guess that’s the point of what Andy’s saying.
He’s not saying that food banks are operated by evil people
or that donating food to those who don't have it is a bad thing.
The food banks are fighting the good fight,
you know, they’re good people.
They’re trapped in this system in which the government
has not funded adequate benefits,
has not raised the minimum wage.
The crux of the argument is this:
Hunger is a systemic problem
that requires a systemic response.
The roots of hunger are in poverty.
And if we're going to address poverty,
we have to address the multiple forms of oppression
that lead to it, whether it's racism, sexism,
as well as just the underlying economic system we operate in.
Capitalism is exploitative and what's driving this crisis.
Food – and many other things frankly
– aren't guaranteed in America
thanks to decades of cuts that have, in many ways,
benefitted the richest members of society.
So what we’re left with is a system
that relies on charity to address poverty,
a system that's dependent on the whims and good graces
of rich people and corporations.
No one in these United States of America
should go hungry
at any time.