USDA’s temporary Farmers to Families Food Box program will end after its expiration at the end of May when the funding will sunset for the food response program crafted immediately following the pandemic’s onset in the spring of 2020.
Through the program, USDA contractors delivered 157,152,030 boxes of fresh produce, milk, dairy and cooked meats through the food boxes. The agency spent $4 billion on the food box program in 2020.
“The food box program was designed and implemented as a temporary effort to respond to market disruption caused by a global pandemic. While it did help respond to severe market disruption caused by the collapse of food service in the early stages of the pandemic, it had a number of significant challenges along the way,” according to a USDA spokesperson.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has been open in remarks since coming into office about the need to evaluate the food box program and look at ways to fix some of the shortfalls with food box program. Problems with food waste, high administrative costs and distribution hiccups spurred new direction by USDA personnel to change things up, including an added focus on funding to commodity purchase programs.
Through the food box program, distribution of boxes was not based on need. In addition, the program was not built to adequately capture data on which counties received boxes, which left too many unanswered questions about effectiveness of the program and where boxes went. Last mile distribution presented a significant challenge to vendors and some did not fulfill those terms of the contract.