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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071119/ap_on_re_us/food_pantries_shortage_2
Food pantries struggling with shortages
Mon Nov 19, 7:58 AM ET
Operators of free food banks say they are seeing more working people
needing assistance. The increased demand is outstripping supplies and
forcing many pantries and food banks to cut portions.

Demand is being driven up by rising costs of food, housing,
utilities, health care and gasoline, while food manufacturers,
wholesalers and retailers are finding they have less surplus food to
donate and government help has decreased, according to Lisa Hamler-
Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest
Foodbanks.

"I've been doing this for 20 years, and I can't believe how much
worse it gets month after month," she said.

Diana Blasingame has lately found herself having to go to a free food
pantry once a month to feed herself and her teenage daughter.

"I'm pretty good at making things stretch as far as I can, but food
is so high now and I have to have gas in my car to do my job," said
Blasingame, 46, who earns $9 an hour as a home health aide. "I work
full time, but I don't have health insurance and sometimes there just
isn't enough to pay bills and buy food."

"We have food banks in virtually every city in the country, and what
we are hearing is that they are all facing severe shortages with
demand so high," Ross Fraser, a spokesman for America's Second
Harvest — The Nation's Food Bank Network, the nation's largest hunger
relief group, said Friday. "One of our food banks in Florida said
demand is up 35 percent over this time last year."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's annual hunger survey released
Wednesday showed that more than 35.5 million people in the United
States were hungry in 2006. While that number was about the same as
the previous year, heads of food banks and pantries say many more
people are seeking their assistance.

Tony Hall, vice president of the Food Bank of Southwest Georgia,
estimates a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in demand for food in
the 20-county area the organization serves. He cites cutbacks by
local companies, rising fuel costs and the lingering impact of a
March tornado that tore through Americus, Ga., destroying or damaging
hundreds of homes.

"We really didn't rebound from that," Hall said Friday. "We're
definitely down in donations. Each year the demand gets bigger and
bigger."

Supplies are down to a little over 8 million pounds of food from a
peak of about 12 million pounds two years ago at Hocking-Athens-Perry
Community Action, which provides food bank services in 10 counties in
southeast Ohio.

"We've lost factory jobs and many service jobs don't pay a livable
wage," said Dick Stevens, director of the organization's food and
nutrition division. "We see a lot of desperation in families who are
trying to figure out how to pay higher fuel and utility costs and
still put food on the table."

Most food banks and pantries aren't optimistic about the coming winter.

"November weather has been relatively mild, and you haven't seen the
cost of home heating fuel added to what a family has to deal with,"
said Evelyn Behm, associate director of the Mid-Ohio Food Bank, which
supplies food to pantries, soup kitchens and other charities in 20
central and eastern Ohio counties. "Those prices, we all know, are
going up substantially this year."

At the Society of St. Vincent de Paul food pantry in Cincinnati,
clients now get three or four days' worth of food instead of six or
seven.

"We are trying to stretch our resources to help more people," said
Liz Carter, executive director of the society. "But it's so difficult
when you see the desperation and have to tell them you just don't
have enough to give them what they need."

Officials with the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York, which
serves nearly 1,000 agencies in 23 counties, also are worried.

Through the end of August, the food bank was down almost 700,000
pounds of USDA commodities that include basic essentials such as
canned fruit and vegetables and some meat — food that is very
difficulty to make up in donations, Executive Director Mark Quandt said.

"We're bracing ourselves for a very tough winter, especially with
home heating fuel prices at record highs in the Northeast," Quandt
said. "People living in poverty or near poverty just can't sustain
those types of increases."

___

Associated Press writers Dan Sewell in Cincinnati and Doug Whiteman
in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this story.