Miami Student

Issue date: 12/7/07 Section: Community

The Shared Harvest Foodbank of Fairfield, Ohio is struggling to provide food to the needy this holiday season due to a lack of funding.

The Shared Harvest Foodbank of Fairfield, Ohio is experiencing an ongoing food shortage that is affecting its ability to provide food to the needy over the holiday season.

Shared Harvest, a branch of the national food bank Second Harvest, works to get donations in bulk to distribute to local private organizations, such as charities and soup kitchens.

"We are like the warehouse for charitable food distribution," Shared Harvest Executive Director Tina Osso said.

According to Osso, most of the donations come from food companies such as Nabisco and Keebler, which donate their surplus or close to code, meaning almost out-of-date, product. Second Harvest, a national organization, has a contract with companies such as this to make them the charity of choice to send all or most of their donations to.

Osso said the rest of the donations for Shared Harvest and Second Harvest come from two United States Department of Agriculture programs-the emergency food assistance program that provides food to pantries, soup kitchens and shelters, and the commodity supplement program that provides food for reduced school lunches, food stamps and senior feeding programs. She added that about 10 percent of their donations come from food drives.

With the decrease in donations, the pantry does not have enough to help charities get through the season, according to Osso.

"This year is the first year that we have not been able to help them prepare the food baskets because we don't have the inventory," Osso said.

Osso said that the problem with donations stems from several sources. The first is that Second Harvest never quite recovered from Hurricane Katrina.

"The donations started trending downwards a couple of years ago, and then when Katrina hit, a good amount of our national resources were focused on the immediate recovery and immediate needs of the families along the gulf coast that were displaced from the hurricane," Osso said.

The second source, Osso explained, is the fact that large food corporations have gradually decreased donations. Osso estimates that 40 percent of the eight million pounds of food donated comes from the food industry and decreasing this amount has proved to be detrimental to the stability of the food supply.

Continued...

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