Ann Arbor Times

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has decided to discontinue its annual Household Food Security Report, which has served as the main source for tracking hunger and food insecurity across the country.

Experts from the University of Michigan have expressed concern about the decision and are available to discuss its potential effects.

Kate Bauer, associate professor of nutritional sciences at the School of Public Health, commented on the importance of the report. “The USDA’s annual report on Household Food Security in the United States is a critical resource. The long history of these data allows us to understand changes in community food security,” she said. “They also show us the depth of hunger in the U.S., for example, the number of U.S. children who have to skip meals because there’s not enough food at home.

“Eliminating the resource is eliminating the most rigorous, objective method to evaluate how changes to our federal budget will affect Americans. Without these data, we will be flying blind, not knowing whether our policy changes are working and not knowing how we should be spending money to best help Americans.”

Natasha Pilkauskas, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy and expert at U-M Poverty Solutions, highlighted why ongoing measurement is needed: “Tracking food insecurity in the U.S. is extremely important,” she said. “The measures researchers use were developed by the USDA, are well-validated and have been used extensively in different contexts.

“If we don’t continue to track food insecurity how will we know if it is changing over time—be it for better or worse? It is especially important to continue to track trends now so we can understand how forthcoming changes to SNAP or other policies that might affect the price of food and basic necessities, might impact families’ ability to feed themselves.”

Jennifer Garner, John G. Searle Assistant Professor of Nutritional Sciences at the School of Public Health, raised questions about ending what she described as an essential scientific tool: “President Trump has touted the importance of gold-standard science. The annual food security report is exactly that,” she said. “I am sincerely confused, despite a decade of work in this space, how this report could be seen as ‘redundant’ or ‘extraneous’ given our lack of other rigorous means for monitoring the impact of our existing federal investments.

“It suggests that there is a desire to not know how national food security rates will fluctuate in response to current policy experiments; perhaps this is what they mean by the report being ‘politicized.’ In a country focused on chronic disease prevention, I would remind the current administration that food security is more highly linked with chronic disease risk than poverty itself.”

University experts emphasize that discontinuing this long-standing data collection may hinder efforts to monitor trends related to nutrition programs such as SNAP and school meals and make it harder for policymakers and researchers to assess whether interventions are effective.