Demand for food assistance in the worst-hit areas tripled and remains at unprecedented levels across the region, according to a study released yesterday by America’s Second Harvest (ASH), the nation’s largest network of food banks. In interviews with food-assistance recipients and center directors in Gulf Coast states, ASH found an increase in demand across areas with varying income levels, with even some wealthier areas experiencing a doubling of demand.
This is not about the holiday season.
This is not about just New Orleans.
This is about outlying areas of Louisiana.
This is about Mississippi and Alabama, too.
And this is not about rebuilding Trent Lott’s house.
I was born in New Orleans.
But my father’s family came from Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
My grandparents left Mississippi and settled in New Orleans, where my grandfather worked as a longshoreman until his retirement. My great-grandfather, I understand, schooled children and adults in reading and writing–so that they could vote. This got him into trouble a couple of times from the local white citizenry.
His other children settled in Illinois and in Michigan–the rust belt states where blacks used to make a lot more money in factories than they did sharecropping.
From Southern California, my aunt told me that her Mississippi second home, which had been originally my great-grandfather’s home, was totaled by Katrina.
Bay St. Louis by the 1990s had become a bit of a boom town. There were casinos. People were building summer houses on the water, restoring those already there, and hotels and golf courses had sprung up in the vicinity as if it was Lake Tahoe. And while the wages weren’t always swank, the cost of living was not as bad as it would be in elsewhere.
But now it is just as numbed and quiet and dilapidated as parts of New Orleans. Worse, many places are just plain F-L-A-T.
People haven’t said much, but I’ll bet you, the stomachs of many Mississippians and Alabamans–white, black, Native American, Asian–must be growling as loudly as those of their ancestors `on the place’ who couldn’t afford to eat a decent meal on scrip. In other words, a kind of planned famine that at another time would enforce dependency and control.
Here are some grim statistics:
- Gulf Coast-based food banks are experiencing shortages of critical foodstuffs.
- Minorities, the elderly and low income families continue to use food banks in the Gulf States at disproportionate rates.
- Seventy percent of food bank clients were first time users of food assistance programs during the first two months after Katrina hit the Gulf States. The numbers remain high, double pre-hurricane levels.
- Government statistics tend to back up ASH’s bleak assessments, but the $34 million dollar aid package–called modest by Mississippi standards–is still bottled up in Congress.
(BTW, the congressional hearings on Katrina were not only a window into what the investigators were thinking, but what they were going to give the Gulf States in further assistance. MS Governor Haley Barbour–to his credit–gave an impassioned speech on December 6, essentially begging his fellow Republicans to approve relief that would benefit his constituents. Unfortunately, today they preferred to give $8 billion in tax breaks and creating a Gulf Opportunity Zone for the casino, hotel, golf course, racetrack and liquor industries who would mostly benefit.)
The America’s Second Harvest (ASH) report is here, and it is a PDF.
Call your congresspeople. Contribute.
Update [2005-12-17 22:3:33 by blksista]: From the Guardian:
Congressional Republicans agreed Saturday on $29 billion in additional aid for the victims of Hurricane Katrina and the other powerful storms that lashed the United States earlier this year, far more than the Bush administration proposed earlier this fall.
[…]the hurricane relief as well as an additional $3.8 billion to help prepare for an outbreak of avian flu would be offset, in part by a 1 percent cut across a wide swath of federal programs.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul. Again.
Please contribute so stores won’t run out.
