As organizations with decades of experiences in the food and farm system, Rural Coalition and our grassrooted partners gathered with our members and communities to discuss the intersectional realities of hunger, nutrition, and health and recommendations to create systemic changes. Our partners include Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, Slow Food USA, Farm Action, National Family Farm Coalition, North American Marine Alliance, Slow Fish North America, One Fish Foundation, HEAL Food Alliance, World Farmers, Inc., Family Farm Defenders, and Wallace Center. These realities elucidate our nation’s opportunities to address the longstanding consequences of broken food and healthcare systems, inadequate infrastructure, an extractive economy, and the undervaluing of workers in many of our communities - among many other interconnected issues. The following realities and opportunities from our report, The Realities of Hunger in Our Rural, Agricultural, Urban and BIPOC Communities, highlight the complexity of hunger, nutrition, and health within rural and urban communities and recommendations for direct, systemic change with a particular focus on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) communities.

The Complex Realities of Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

Food inaccessibility and unaffordability drive hunger in our communities. The demand for healthy, affordable food in many communities far exceeds its supply capacity across the United States. The Ma-Chis Lower Creek Indian Tribe reported that the nearest grocery store to tribal land is often 15 miles or more away and fails to offer fresh, quality fruits and vegetables. To make matters worse, twenty states impose an unconscionable sales tax on groceries, which deepens income and racial inequalities.[1] Participants in Alabama discussed how taxes on food can be as high as ten percent, depending on the county, and have a harmful impact on individuals and families. Perpetuated by an extractive economy in rural areas, many participants reported receiving low wages that are inadequate to cover the rising prices of food, gas, rent, and other essential bills. Increased household expenses and the cost of transportation to worksites inhibits farmworkers’ ability to afford quality and nutritious food for themselves and their families. As the pandemic has expanded virtual work opportunities, it has also increased population and migration to small towns, intensifying an affordable housing shortage. Participants also explained how service providers of housing, health care, and nutrition assistance refuse to address the needs of members of many state-recognized tribes.

Many of our rural communities reported inadequate infrastructure with deleterious effects that exacerbate health inequalities. The water systems in employer-provided farmworker housing in the Coachella Valley of California is contaminated with arsenic and unsafe for washing hands, drinking, cooking, or mixing baby formula. Impoverished rural families in the southeast struggle with aging, substandard housing that is poorly maintained, unsafe and largely left out of development initiatives, disaster assistance, or loan programs that would fund improvements or connect them to new infrastructure. Many of these homes lack adequate and safe cooking and food storage facilities and protection from pests.

Members from Alabama described how these issues are compounded by the growing preponderance of absentee farm and timberland ownership, which decreases land value and the resulting property taxes needed to fund public roads, water and sewer systems, hospitals, and schools. These factors contribute to increased poverty rates.[2] Rural families are also overburdened with higher energy costs and lack broadband to access higher-paying virtual jobs and quality telehealth systems. Participants from New Mexico explained how wildfires and evacuations have delayed planting, devastated natural and ancestral resources, and caused a current loss of farm and ranch land in excess of 600,000 acres.[3]

However, despite the realities of hardship that rural communities endure, community-based organizations continue advancing work to address the effects of our broken system. Alianza Nacional de Campesinas and Lideres Campesinas continue to host regular drive-through food and water distribution events in these communities, using U-Haul trucks to provide bottled water and fresh fruits and vegetables to at least 500 families per event. Kansas Black Farmers Association’s educational camps for ages 10-17 teach youth how to grow food for themselves. Cottage House, Inc. in Alabama engages local school children in their predominantly Black and Hispanic community in growing food both during the school year and in intensive summer activities reaching upwards of 100 children each year. These organizations continue to need the funding to support and expand their community-based solutions.

Opportunities for Positive Systemic Change

The complex realities of hunger in our communities require comprehensive solutions and investments. As the White House builds out its action plan for addressing the hunger crisis and its effects, the administration should immediately enact the following interconnected policy interventions:

Income: Advocate for a federal living wage and restoration of the enhanced child tax credit.
Food assistance: Remove barriers for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participation based on immigration status, full-time higher education, prior criminal conviction, and work status; base SNAP benefits on the Low Cost Food Plan.
Universal free school lunches: Direct the USDA’s national school lunch program to advocate for universal free school lunch in the child nutrition reauthorization; incentivize procurement of fresh, locally produced, minimally processed and culturally meaningful and healthful foods; increase good food education and school gardens support, support “scratch cooking” through cafeteria and kitchen equipment upgrades and staff training, and increase children’s time to eat school meals, thereby reducing food plate waste.
End unfair food taxes: Initiate federal attention and efforts to end the disproportionate impact of local and state taxes on groceries and prepared food on low-income communities.
Expand healthcare coverage: Advocate for affordable healthcare coverage for everyone, regardless of immigration status or employment, including through full Medicaid expansion.
Affordable and safe housing: Work with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development agency to address inequities in availability, affordability, and quality of rural housing, including farm labor housing, with the goal of assuring safe housing with safe water, cooking, refrigeration and storage facilities in each home.
Safe drinking water: Work with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to improve and enforce rights to clean drinking water for all with particular emphasis on rural America and farm worker communities.
Water and housing infrastructure: Establish a process to immediately report, address and mitigate reported public health hazards, including arsenic, lead, or other toxins in drinking water with a special focus on manufactured/mobile homes and farm labor housing.
Immigrant farm labor protections: Advocate for extension of fair labor standards to farmworkers, including living wage, the right to organize, overtime pay, sick leave, access to protective gear, protection from pesticide exposure, and protection from workplace violence; provide an optional path to citizenship for undocumented farm workers and their families.
Farmer equity: Increase targeted assistance for small and mid-scale diversified farmers and ranchers, tribal communities, and fishers, including compensation for food provided directly to communities and families who need it; urge Congress to swiftly address debt relief from Section 1005 of the American Rescue Plan Act.
Resilient and equitable rural economies: Prioritize and incentivize governmental and institutional value-based procurement of locally sourced foods; prioritize and incentivize farm to school purchases of locally or regionally sourced foods; remove administrative barriers to local and regional meat processing; and strengthen and enforce antitrust and anticompetition laws and prohibit further consolidation of agricultural processing, seed, equipment sectors; ensure infrastructure investments are equitably distributed to the most underserved communities.
Farm and food network: Provide structural assistance, grants, loans, and price support sufficient to maintain the food supply and support transportation, processing, distribution, and storage of goods with a focus on local food systems, regenerative production practices, and underserved communities.
Tribal Consultation: Assure Tribal consultation in policy and decision making throughout administrative agencies to support and protect access to ancestral agricultural land and sea resources and traditional foods and foodways and to honor obligations to sovereign tribal entities.
Farmworkers (landless farmers) to farmers: Modify requirements in beginning farmer and rancher programs to specifically recognize the skills of farmworkers with respect to eligibility for these programs and provide additional USDA program to assist farm workers to transition to owners of farms and ranches.
Global climate crisis: Continue to take and advocate for immediate actions to address the global climate crisis with a particular focus on BIPOC communities such as increased technical assistance and set-asides for socially disadvantaged producers in conservation programs.
Environmental quality and soil health: Direct the USDA to invest in and incentivize transition to regenerative and organic farming including through technical assistance, cost-sharing, and supporting community based organizations doing this work. Incentivize and prioritize restoring and rebuilding soil health including capacity to sequester carbon, hold water, and reduce nutrient runoff.
Pesticides: Prioritize EPA review of pesticide safety (including the ongoing review of glyphosate) to reduce harmful impacts on farm workers and their families, consumers of food, water quality, and soil health.
Rural development: Provide financial assistance to develop retail access to nutritious, healthful foods in underserved communities; to increase infrastructure support and programs with higher cost share for underserved and persistently poor areas.

Conclusion

As the White House examines hunger, nutrition, and health, we hope the complex realities and recommendations presented here and in our comprehensive report are thoroughly considered and enacted. We are grateful for this historic opportunity to help move our nation forward by addressing the longstanding challenges and perpetuating intricacies of the hardships communities face, especially BIPOC communities, related to hunger, nutrition, and health.

[1] Johnson, Nicholas, Lav, Iris J., “Should States Tax Food? Examining the Policy Issues and Options,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, May 1998. https://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/stfdtax98.pdf

[2]See Bailey,Connor, Gopaul, Abhimanyu, Thomson, Ryan, Gunnoe, Andrew. “Taking Goldschmidt to the Woods: Timberland Ownership and Quality of Life in Alabama.” 31 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/ruso.12344

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/01/climate/new-mexico-wildfires.html