Hunger in the U.S.A. - Oregon's Solution

Hunger is a major problem all over the world. As long as the concept of currency has existed, there has been a gap between those that possess said currency, and those who don't. As society has become more industrialized, the gap has grown to ridiculous sizes, with a minuscule number of people controlling most of the money in the world. Poverty is rampant in the world, and even in the United States, the richest country in the world, poverty is a visible problem. In any given town, the homeless and impoverished sleep on the streets, panhandle at the freeway exits, and do what they can to find a warm place to sleep.

An unlikely state - Oregon - has set a great example of how a state can deal with poverty. At the beginning of the new millennium, Oregon had the highest rate of hunger in the nation. Since then, thanks to improvements in the food stamp program and other statewide assistance programs, Oregon has jumped from 50^th to 17^th in the nation, and is still improving. Oregon has one of the highest minimum wages in the country; a newly expanded food stamp program that now gives aid to 218,000 households statewide, doubling since 1999.

There are two measurements of hunger that the USDA polls in order to gain their statistics. There is the level of food insecurity, which means that a home is sometimes insecure about their ability to feed everyone in the household. Then, there is the level of hunger, when at least one person in the home has gone hungry in the past year, without adequate food available to them in order for them to eat. Both rates have gone down in Oregon in the past 5 years, with food insecurity going from 13.4% to 12.2% (national average is 11.4%), and hunger rates going down from 5.2% to 3.7% (national averages have increased from 3.1% to 3.6%). This is very significant, and this seems to show the merits of the food stamp and welfare programs in Oregon. Most of the statistics used to figure out these numbers sometimes are based on income, and thanks to the programs in this state, often a family's consumption far exceeds their income. This allows low-income families to save their earned money for housing, living, and medical costs.

In today's society, even in the prosperous United States of America, Hunger is a prevalent and powerful problem. This problem is incredibly close to home for us, and it is incredibly important to examine what our society can do to help alleviate this problem. As the rich seem to grow richer and the poor seem to grow poorer, some states are changing their policies and laws to compensate and do what is possible to fix the societal problems. The state of Oregon has stepped out of the crowd, and even in a time when national hunger levels have risen, has increased the services available to the hungry and impoverished of the state, and have begun to decrease the hunger levels statewide, a trend that seemingly will continue in future years.