Craig Gundersen, the Soybean Industry Endowed Professor of Agricultural Strategy at the University of Illinois College of ACES, is an agricultural economist who studies the causes and consequences of food insecurity and the impact of food assistance programs on public health. He spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the Trump administration’s proposal to replace the benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program with boxes of shelf-stable food that would be delivered to recipients.
How realistic is the Department of Agriculture’s Harvest Box proposal?
It’s dead on arrival, and the main reason why is that it’s a policy idea that goes backward in time. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program began in the early 1960s, and before that, it was a commodity supplement program, meaning you would go somewhere to get surplus cheese or surplus milk. It changed to become a more efficient and ultimately more effective program – people go to grocery stores to get the food that they feel is correct for their family as opposed to what was available at the moment at these distribution centers.
The irony of all of this is, from an administrative standpoint, the Harvest Box idea is a disaster. First of all, you would have to set up an entirely new bureaucracy to figure out what foods you’re going to put in these boxes, how you procure those foods and how you distribute the boxes, among many other decisions. Needless to say, the government is not really in the business of shipping food to tens of millions of Americans on a weekly basis.
It just doesn’t make any sense, mostly because we already have a very good system in place. The current SNAP system is more efficient and effective than what the Trump administration is proposing.
Is this idea aligned with the Trump administration’s stated intention of cutting SNAP by more than $213 billion over the next decade?
In the past, a lot of these proposals for giving poor people baskets of food in lieu of food stamps were the province of the political left. There are a number of people in the public health community who argue that SNAP beneficiaries shouldn’t be able to choose what to eat, and that they should be prohibited from purchasing certain items – soft drinks, sports drinks, certain cereals.
What happens is, when you stigmatize SNAP, fewer people sign up for it. So the idea of giving people food baskets and eliminating choice is just another way to insult and disenfranchise people and hope it has the intended effect of fewer people signing up for benefits.
If you want to kill a program without actually killing it, this is how you do it.
What effect would this have on big-box retailers?
Big-box retailers have come out against the idea. Yes, it’s in their interests to come out against it because it affects their customer base. But one of the great things those big-box retailers do is keep food prices low. This is one of the reasons why many of their customers are low-income Americans: SNAP recipients can go to a big-box store and purchase safe, nutritious food at a very reasonable price. But even though these retailers have a customer base of SNAP recipients, it’s a fraction of their total sales.
What makes SNAP different from the vast majority of government programs?
SNAP is far and away the most successful government program we have going today. It provides benefits to more than 46 million people, and it does everything it sets out to do in terms of alleviating food insecurity and reducing hunger in our country. It’s really the only near-cash assistance program in the U.S. that serves as a social safety net for all Americans who are eligible.
The reason why it’s successful is that it gives autonomy and dignity to low-income households to make the choices that they think are best for their families. But this idea of giving a family a box of food takes away their autonomy and treats them like people unable to decide what is best for their families.
That’s condescending to people as opposed to giving them dignity. It really is an insulting way to treat low-income households. It stigmatizes being poor.
And people do often treat SNAP recipients differently even though the vast majority of SNAP recipients are taxpayers – either in the past or in the present. Many Americans working full-time at low-wage jobs still struggle to put food on the table for their families. SNAP gives them a little extra boost to purchase the food they need.
There are other groups that benefit from SNAP. There are millions of seniors who are no longer in the labor force – SNAP feeds them. Another group that often gets overlooked are people with disabilities who can work a little but maybe not full-time or don't earn enough in wages to get by. SNAP helps them, too.
I wish more people would understand just how much SNAP helps individuals and families in times of need. It truly is a safety net.