More Americans are suffering from hunger this year than during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Wednesday.
A survey asked around 1,200 US household heads in February whether they had to dip into savings or emergency accounts to cover expenses, struggled to find enough food, had children who missed meals, or received food donations or government aid to buy food.
"There have been meaningful increases in the shares of households reporting that they'd experienced the four situations described above," the New York Fed said.
"We find a remarkable increase in food insecurity, particularly among lower-educated and lower-income households and households with young children."
The survey was conducted before the Iran war, which has hiked the price of groceries in the United States to their highest rate since 2023.
More than one third of households told the Fed that they had dipped into savings to get by, up from 21.8 percent in June 2020.
That month, the number of Americans receiving unemployment benefits peaked at more than 33 million at the height of Covid-19 shutdowns.
The pandemic rattled the global economy and sent shoppers scrambling to empty store shelves, prompting surges in product prices across the board.
Ten percent of households in this year's survey said they did not have enough food or had children missing meals, compared with four percent in June 2020.
More than 15 percent said they had received food donations, up from 10.6 percent.
The New York Fed said that consumers were "pessimistic about their own financial circumstances and outlook."
"Current levels of consumer sentiment... have fallen near or below the low levels seen during the Great Recession and pandemic," it added.
"While many households are doing fine and economic activity overall has been expanding at a solid pace, large segments of the population are facing high levels of economic insecurity and financial strain, and consumer sentiment on the whole has dropped to low levels."
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