Single-mother households in more trouble

By CAROL REEVES
Gazette-Times reporter

Just a few years ago, Oregon was ranked as the hungriest state in the nation.

But since 2003, the situation has improved significantly, according to Mark Edwards, associate professor of sociology at Oregon State University.

“The overall rate of hunger has fallen from 5.2 percent, which was the highest in the nation at the beginning of this decade, to 3.8 percent — much closer to the national average (of 3.6 percent),” Edwards said, adding that the “food insecurity” rate also fell substantially; Oregon is now ranked 17th in hunger.

“This decline in Oregon is especially impressive and surprising because the national rates of hunger and of food insecurity were increasing over the same period,” he said.

Edwards and Jay Grussing, a graduate student in the Master of Public Policy Program at OSU, have studied hunger issues for years as part of the university’s Rural Studies Program. Using figures from the annual Food Security Supplement survey conducted by the Census Bureau, the research team has traced the rise and fall of Oregonians’ access to food according to a number of categories including family size, employment status and geographic location.

Food insecurity is defined in Edwards’ work as the uncertainty of having enough food, or of being able to obtain enough food, to meet the basic needs of everyone in the household because of insufficient funds or other resources for food.

A subset of that, Edwards explained, is food insecurity “with hunger” which results from not having enough food to the extent that one or more members of the family are hungry at some time during the year from not being able to afford groceries.

The good news is that in nine out of 10 categories, hunger rates fell in Oregon over the last five years. The one exception was single-mother households, where hunger rates rose from 9.4 to 12 percent.

The rates of food insecurity, however, were less consistent.

“Food insecurity fell for full-time year-round employed households, renters, two-parent families and households in metropolitan locations,” Edwards explained. “But food insecurity grew substantially for single mothers, and to a lesser extent among unemployed and nonmetro households.”

Analysis is still going on as to why hunger rates have dropped so quickly, but Edwards speculates it could be a result of the state expanding its food stamp program since 2000. “We did an amazing job of getting people registered for this federal program,” he said.

“I was reminded by the Food Bank people the other day that we also have continued to improve our delivery of emergency food services throughout the past 10 years,” he added.

Looking at the categories where rates of food insecurity are higher than in 2003, however, suggests that while food stamps and emergency food deliveries may stave off hunger, they don’t eliminate food insecurity, Edwards said.

ON THE NET:

Copies of Edwards’ studies on hunger in Oregon are available at http://ruralstudies.oregonstate.edu.