Joel Berg, author of “All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?”
The amount of money businesses could possibly donate wouldn’t even dent the problem. However, if they raised their wages and used their trade associations to lobby for food stamps, businesses could help end hunger. But they could never end hunger just by donating more to charity.
… I’ve calculated that every charity in America, every food bank, every food rescue group, altogether they provide roughly $5 billion worth of food each year. The federal government just reduced Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding by $5 billion, nearly the exact amount charities in America are giving out. One little change of the federal decimal point is equivalent to wiping out the entire charitable food effort in America. I’m not even including sequestration. Sequestration is cutting funding for food banks, [the Women, Infants and Children program], senior meals. Those numbers are a little harder to come by. The Senate farm bill would cut another $4 billion and the House version would cut almost $40 billion. You could increase charity in American tenfold and it would only dent the problem. And yet you could marginally increase the federal nutrition assistance safety net and raise the minimum wage and eliminate hunger in America.
… I don’t think they can do it on their own, but I think they could play a significant role in getting the government to do what it needs to do, and the business community can fill in the gaps.
