One in five residents in Baltimore, and one in three Black residents, lives in food deserts — areas where people face systemic barriers to accessing affordable and healthy foods. It’s a problem that has long evaded effective policy solutions. But the rapidly evolving technology of e-commerce platforms offers a new way to bring food justice and security to structurally marginalized communities across the country.
The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has addressed food deserts through its Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) program to bring retail grocery locations to food deserts. Unfortunately, access to nutritious food is often a symptom of concentrated poverty — one that adding brick-and-mortar stores does not automatically fix.
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, distributes benefits to over 40 million people every month, providing funds to low-income families to purchase groceries. SNAP participation has been linked with reductions in poverty, reduced maternal mortality rates, and improved nutrition and health. But the support of SNAP alone can’t solve the problem of recipients who are still unable to access grocery stores. In urban areas, a lack of reliable public transportation is one of the main barriers to accessing healthy food. Further, adding more grocery stores has proved unsuccessful in the past as stores in these areas struggle to remain open.
The USDA has failed to capture the lived experiences of the public in its response to the problem of food deserts. An area qualifies as a food desert under the USDA when there is a poverty rate of 20 percent or greater, and at least 33 percent of the population lives more than one mile from a grocery store.
A John Hopkins study found that residents will typically not walk further than a quarter of a mile if they have to carry groceries. Furthermore, the study noted that the USDA’s analysis does not address transportation issues. In Baltimore, approximately 30 percent of residents lack access to a vehicle. Unlike the nearby cities of Washington D.C., or Philadelphia, Baltimore does not have a robust metro system. A Baltimore resident without access to a vehicle would have to pay for a ride share service, take the bus, or walk — all options that could prove burdensome when carrying bags of groceries.
To overcome these entrenched problems, the USDA is harnessing a popular technology that will enable it to better meet the needs of program participants. This past September, Uber announced that it will partner with the USDA through its “Uber Eats” program to accept SNAP’s Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) payments to deliver groceries. This is encouraging to see, as the USDA’s use of outdated technology has previously hindered its ability to deliver services to the public efficiently.
For example, even though online delivery services for groceries have been available for decades, Congress only authorized a pilot program to test the use of online ordering of groceries using SNAP benefits in 2014.
The spread of COVID-19 provided a wake-up call for government programs that were late to incorporate new technologies. In 2020, six years after the pilot program was launched, the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) had only authorized 13 retailers in the entire country. During the pandemic, many vulnerable recipients of food assistance programs found themselves faced with a choice: social distance and be unable to access their federal benefits or go to the grocery store in person and risk exposure.
SNAP users began urging the USDA to modernize the program by allowing online grocery ordering with SNAP benefits. In response, USDA ramped up the SNAP Online Purchasing Pilot (OPP) across the United States. By 2021, FNS increased authorization of retailers to 122, a nine-fold increase in the span of a single year.
Uber stated in a press release that this new partnership will help reduce barriers to fresh food for people in food deserts, and an increased ability for SNAP recipients to use their benefits for online ordering and delivery services is a major step forward in addressing the problem. However, there’s more to be done if the USDA is looking to bring greater equity to its policies on food insecurity — for instance, expanding enrollment to reflect variations in cost of living across the country, and eliminating restrictions on eligibility based on previous convictions, citizenship, or work requirements.
Increasing equitable access to federal resources and partnering with other entities to utilize existing technologies should be the first step of several if the federal government wants to address food insecurity in Baltimore and around the country effectively.
Showing 2,828 results
Kaitlyn Johnson | November 27, 2023
One in five residents in Baltimore, and one in three Black residents, lives in food deserts — areas where people face systemic barriers to accessing affordable and healthy foods. It’s a problem that has long evaded effective policy solutions. But the rapidly evolving technology of e-commerce platforms offers a new way to bring food justice and security to structurally marginalized communities across the country.
Hannah Wiseman | November 16, 2023
A recent Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania decision has thrown Pennsylvania’s actions on climate change into further disarray. In 2021, through regulatory action by its Department of Environmental Protection, Pennsylvania became a member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). RGGI is a collection of Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic states that have agreed to cap emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from electric power plants with 25 megawatts or more of generating capacity. The cap includes an overall regional limit and a cap for each state. Power plants must purchase allowances or offset their emissions (or pursue other options noted below) to collectively meet the state cap. But lawsuits have challenged Pennsylvania’s entry into RGGI, and on November 1, a memorandum opinion of the Commonwealth Court declared that Pennsylvania’s scheme for auctioning CO2 allowances under the state’s RGGI cap was an unconstitutional tax. The court voided the rulemaking.
Catalina Gonzalez | November 15, 2023
On November 15, I joined Member Scholar and University of San Francisco School of Law professor Alice Kaswan in releasing an in-depth analysis of California’s climate and clean energy funding programs for the state’s historically marginalized and underserved communities. The set of reports and fact sheets, "Funding a Clean and Equitable Energy Transition: Lessons from California," follows the recent publication of the Center’s California Climate Justice Index, which details the laws, executive orders, agencies, funding processes, and funding programs that shape climate policy for the nation’s most populous state.
Uma Outka | November 13, 2023
In his first month in office, President Biden signed an executive order, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” recommitting the federal government to climate action and environmental justice. In April 2023, an additional executive order, “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All,” reinforced the administration’s commitment to a “whole-of-government approach to environmental justice.” The renewed commitment to environmental justice is gratifying for all who care about these issues — and the challenge of accomplishing whole-of-government implementation is real. Among numerous complicating aspects of this shift, one key challenge is state resistance — even outright hostility — to federal environmental justice priorities.
Shelley Welton | November 8, 2023
This summer, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ most significant climate change law. Many advocates for environmental justice, myself included, were disappointed by several features of the Act, including the greenlighting of certain fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, the law unlocked unprecedented streams of investment into clean energy via tax credits and direct spending mechanisms.
Lemir Teron | November 6, 2023
Energy justice mandates that renewable energy transitions center marginalized and historically overburdened households, including fenceline and extraction communities, that have faced heightened burdens from the prevalent fossil fuel-based energy system, and further have been mostly overlooked by the burgeoning renewable energy sector.
Carmen Gonzalez, Rebecca Bratspies | November 1, 2023
Member Scholar John Knox's article, Environmental Justice as Environmental Human Rights, recognizes the many accomplishments of U.S. environmental law while pointedly acknowledging its greatest shortcoming: the failure to address environmental racism. As a solution, the article proposes stronger linkages between environmental justice movements and international human rights law. As the article explains, international human rights law provides an important tool for understanding how environmental racism undermines U.S. environmental law.
Daniel Farber | October 30, 2023
A forthcoming article by John Knox and Nicole Tronolone brings international human rights law to bear on the issue of environmental justice. They argue that international human rights law provides a basis for treating some types of environmental inequities as human rights violations. In particular, they argue that the government has a duty to redress racial disparities in exposure to pollution and toxic chemicals. In their view, the government has conspicuously failed in this duty. In a recent article of my own, I tried to work through questions about how regulations could address economic and racial inequality.
Sidney A. Shapiro | October 25, 2023
According to conventional expectations, the idea of incorporating stories in rulemaking will seem radical, but it is conventional expectations that have led to the country’s failure to effectively promote environmental justice. International norms highlight this failure. There cannot be a “right to participate” if the best method of participating — storytelling — is devalued or ignored. Now is the time — past time, really — to build the procedures we need to listen to the environmental justice stories no one hears.