At the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Tuesday, advocates for the hungry initiated an effort to stop planned cuts in food stamps. The clock showed the time left before the cuts went into effect.
According to research by the Food Bank for New York City, the price of food in the New York metropolitan area rose by 16 percent between December 2007, the start of the recession, and the end of last year, with 32 percent of New Yorkers in 2012 reporting difficulty paying for the food they needed. In The New York Time’s Article “Cutting the Lean from Food Stamps,” the author, Ginia Bellafante, discusses the current problem with the decrease in funds allocated by Congress to Food Assistance programs. The cost of food in the New York City region continues to increase, while the amount of funds available through food stamps continues to decrease. Large and very affordable supermarkets are beginning to pop up in the low income areas of NYC. In the Bronx a supermarket by the name of Bogopa, which in Korean means “yearning for you,” just opened. Although this is definitely an active effort to help put food on peoples plates, the answer lies within Congress, and it is in their hands to allocate not just less funds to food stamp programs, but even more. This is in no way an easy problem to solve, especially in the hard times our government is currently facing, but a change must be made for the sake of these lower income individuals spanning widely across the New York City area.
