COVID-19 is exposing the food deserts around Native American reservations
The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 in Native communities around the United States is the result of historical and current systemic racism that has siloed Tribes and prevented them from using their resources effectively, experts say. One place where this manifests is in food security.
For Native people who live in remote areas, the ongoing pandemic’s interruption to food supply has made getting food complicated. In normal times, many remote Tribes need to drive to grocery stores that are an hour or more away. With pandemic-related panic buying, what’s there when people arrive isn’t always even helpful.
“You’re driving two hours to get to a place where there’s bare and empty shelves,” says Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, who is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation and the executive director of Oklahoma State University’s Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy. “You also have, due to the COVID situation, higher prices,” she says.
“We’ve seen increased reliance on the federal nutrition programs,” says Carly Griffith Hotvedt, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the director of tribal enterprise at the University of Arkansas’s Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative. Nationwide, the increase looks like about 10 percent, but in some areas, she says, the increase is more like 50 percent.
Food insecurity isn’t exactly the same as hunger: As the USDA defines it, food insecurity is “a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life.” Among the general population, about 11 to 14 percent of Americans are food insecure, says Blue Bird Jernigan. For Native people around the country, the rate is three to four times higher.
It’s an issue directly related to a bunch of other factors that affect somebody’s wellbeing: where they live, how well-supplied their community is, and how much money they have, to name a few. “Food insecurity does not exist in isolation,” as Feeding America documents.
The pandemic has also hit Indian Country disproportionately hard, both in terms of job loss and in terms of infection rates. The COVID-19 crisis “hasn’t broken anything,” Hotvedt says. “It’s just revealed what was already broken.”
Read the full story from Popular Science here.