Why Did Food Insecurity Increase from 2019 to 2022 in the United States?

Abstract  In 2022, the United States witnessed a notable rise in household food insecurity, reversing a decade-long decline. Some observers have argued that the expiration of government relief efforts stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic caused the one-year spike. However, the household food insecurity rate was higher in 2022 than in 2019, the year before the pandemic started. We explore several potential reasons for the household food insecurity increase from 2019 to 2022. We find that neither changes in the social safety net nor underlying economic factors, such as unemployment, could explain this trend. Instead, we attribute the increase to a rise in food price inflation during this period, compounded by changes in the survey methodology for food insecurity assessment. The increase in food insecurity would likely have been larger without expansions to the social safety net during this time. We conclude with several recommendations to keep food price inflation low.  Read the full pdf . Introduction  After peaking during the Great Recession, food insecurity rates in the United States had been falling dramatically since 2010. For all households in the United States, food insecurity rates declined from 14.5 percent in 2010 to 10.2 percent in 2021 (a 29.4 percent decline), with an even greater fall of 38.0 percent for households with children (from 20.2 percent to 12.5 percent). Moreover, these declines occurred for every demographic category (Gundersen 2023a). In 2022, however, food insecurity rates went up sharply, reversing some of the progress made over the past decade. The food insecurity rate rose to 12.8 percent for all US households and to 17.3 percent for households with children (Rabbitt et al. 2023). These rates represent the highest food insecurity rates in the US since 2014.  The one-year reversal in food insecurity rates has received attention from scholars and policymakers, with some implying that the expiration of certain pandemic-era safety-net expansions, including the expanded child tax credit (CTC), was behind the rise. While the expiration of some pandemic-related safety-net expansions coincided with the food insecurity rate increases in 2022, food insecurity rates also increased from 2019 to 2022, making the end of pandemic-relief an unlikely culprit for this rise. This raises an important policy question: After more than a decade of declines, why did food insecurity rates  increase so sharply from 2019 to 2022? By comparing food insecurity trends for 2019 and 2022, we eliminate most of the short-term pandemic-related financial assistance as a potential reason for the rise in food insecurity. Understanding the reasons behind the increase in food insecurity from 2019 to 2022 remains relevant to contemporary policy debates. If the reasons relate to cuts to government programs, as some commentators have suggested, then this finding would inform discussions over safety-net program reforms. However, if the reasons lie elsewhere, alternative approaches might be in order.  To answer the question of what contributed to the food insecurity rate increases from 2019 to 2022, we structure this report as follows. First, we define food insecurity and describe how the federal government measures it. As part of this description, we also explain the “resource gap” as another potential determinant of food insecurity trends during this time. Next, we describe the data we use, the December Food Security Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS).  In the third section, we explore several potential explanations for the rise in food insecurity rates from 2019 to 2022. After documenting changes to the composition of the food-insecure population, we examine five possible factors that the literature has linked to changes in food insecurity rates: changes to safety-net programs, the measure itself, economic conditions (e.g., unemployment, income, poverty rates, and disability status), food prices, and the resource gap. In the final section, we summarize the results and offer some preliminary policy conclusions based on these results.  Our central findings are fivefold. First, we find that changes to some of the standard predictors of food insecurity, such as unemployment and poverty rates, did not change in a way that would explain a rise in food insecurity over this period. As such, it is unlikely that a reduction in household resources led to this increase.  Second, changes to the social safety net likely did not contribute to the rise in food insecurity, mostly because the tremendous pandemic-related expansions to the safety net had largely expired by 2022. Furthermore, those changes that had not expired made the social safety net more generous, which should have lowered food insecurity rates. In support of this view, we found that food insecurity rates actually fell among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants over this period.  Third, we found that changes made to the structure of the survey used to establish food insecurity rates were possibly responsible for up to a third of the increase from 2019 to 2022.  Fourth, and most importantly, we found that food price inflation explains almost all the increase that was not due to survey instrument changes. The increase was consistent with what we would expect based on previous analyses of the impact of food prices on food insecurity. In fact, the increase in food insecurity rates was less severe than these estimates would predict, suggesting the continued effectiveness of the safety net.  Fifth, the increase in food insecurity rates given food price increases was expected, but less understood is why the resource gap increased so dramatically. We offer potential reasons for and implications of this finding. This increase may help further explain the changing composition of the food-insecure population over this period.  Read the full report . References Anderson, Patricia M., Kristin F. Butcher, Hilary W. Hoynes, and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. 2016. “Beyond Income: What Else Predicts Very Low Food Security Among Children?”