March 10, 2020 3:15 a.m.
Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley has announced the expansion of a pilot program that will allow Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program recipients in Oregon to use their benefits to purchase food online from Amazon and Walmart.
A release from Merkley said the program is administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service.
Merkley serves as the top Democrat on the funding subcommittee that oversees the US Department of Agriculture.
Merkley said “for hundreds of thousands of Oregonians, SNAP benefits are the difference between being able to afford food or going to bed hungry”. He said between coordinating transportation, working multiple jobs, or staying at home to take care of loved ones, accessing a grocery store can be a big challenge, especially given the lack of full-service grocery stores in many low-income neighborhoods. He said the pilot program will test “an innovative way to overcome that problem, so we can help more families keep food on their tables”.
The release said Oregon is the twelfth hungriest state in America, with over 600,000 SNAP recipients and countless food deserts, including urban areas where residents have to travel over a mile to access a grocery store. In rural areas residents sometimes have to travel over ten miles to get to a store.
The FNS pilot program was launched in April of 2019 in New York.