RALEIGH – Is North Carolina facing a hunger crisis? It depends on how you read the statistics – and which statistics you read. I’m more persuaded that we have a crisis of faulty statistics on hunger.
The latest spate of news stories on this issue began in early November, after the Center on Hunger and Poverty at Brandeis University released a report analyzing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The Brandeis report placed North Carolina in a tie for the fourth-highest rate of households reporting hunger, along with Texas and New Mexico. The hunger rate, representing an average of survey results from the years 2002 to 2004, was 4.9 percent of North Carolina households. Oklahoma (5.6 percent), South Carolina (5.5 percent), and Arkansas (5.3 percent) had higher rates.
Some stories used the much-higher figure of 13.8 percent of households in North Carolina, the rate of “food insecurity” as reported by the same Department of Agriculture survey. This statistic is the one cited by advocates of more redistribution programs when they really want to jar the public into panic mode. It is also methodologically questionable.
The relevant questions on the Ag survey ask respondents not whether they have had at least one episode of hunger in the past month – which is essentially how the hunger rate is defined, more on that later – but instead whether a respondent feels anxiety about whether he or she will be able to buy sufficient food. Such a question, given particular conditions, may yield a false positive from plenty of people who aren’t hungry or who aren’t even poor, given that the range of responses to such “anxiety” can be to use food stamps or to purchase less-expensive meals than one might have originally intended to consume.
To put it bluntly, “food insecurity” is not a measurement of hunger. I’m not the blunt one here: the Department of Agriculture makes it clear that the two aren’t synonymous. Indeed, in the relevant tables from the 2004 report, there is a category “food insecure with or without hunger” and a category of “food insecure with hunger,” that latter being a small fraction of the former.
As to the hunger rate itself, it’s worth noting that 95 percent of North Carolinians, including most poor people and the vast majority of poor children, are not hungry. This does represent a statistically significant change from the 1996-98 average, when 97 percent of North Carolinians were not hungry, but let’s keep this in perspective. Indeed, the 4.9 percent hunger rate for 2002-04 is itself less than meets the eye. According to the Agriculture Department report, most hunger is short-term, not chronic. We’re not talking about the same people, month after month, year after year. Every North Carolinian whose family lacks the financial wherewithal to afford basic sustenance represents a tragic story, naturally, but these data do not establish the existence of a perpetual, starving underclass of capitalism’s victims. Instead, they establish that a combination of constant economic change and unfortunate social pathologies leads a small segment of North Carolina’s population each year to face significant economic challenges, challenges that lead some of them to flock to shelters and pantries or rely on the assistance of family and friends to tide them over.
But a crisis of hunger in North Carolina? No. Such terminology is inaccurate and misleading, and could prompt policy responses all out of all proportion. Let’s address poverty, certainly, but effective solutions do not lie in more government handouts.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.