Food Benefits Available for New Mexicans Dealing with Disaster

• Author: William Asher
• Posted: 2024-07-18

Michelle Lujan Grisham, Governor of New Mexico, announced yesterday that New Mexicans who were affected by the recent wildfires at the end of April will be eligible to apply for disaster food benefits. This application process will be carried out over a seven-day period that begins on Tuesday and ends on Monday, June 13. The way these disaster benefits will be handled is via handing out SNAP cards (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) to people who qualify, and they will have to go pick up their own food. This might be difficult for some people who lost their transportation in the fire, or were injured and cannot travel, but the Governor claims that she's doing all she can in order to help disaster victims here. "No method of aid and relief is perfect," claimed an employee on the staff. "Our job is to do what is best for the largest number of people affected."

Although these wildfires did not make national news like California's fires usually do, they raged on for many days and claimed many acres and homes and displaced a lot of people. In fact, over 600,000 acres were burned and destroyed. As a state, New Mexico comprises around 78 million acres, so it wasn't as if the wildfires tore through a significant part of the state. They did manage to affect thousands of people, however, killing at least two people and wrecking hundreds of structures.

The wildfire relief being offered is available for any who qualify, up to the 27,500 residents who live in the affected counties of COlfax, San Miguel, Valencia, Lincoln and Mora.

Food Relief Has Changed a Lot in a Short Amount of Time

Surprisingly enough, the critics of the Governor's plan have made more news than the wildfires themselves. They point out how this sort of disaster relief isn't really relief at all. "It's like dropping a check off at someone's house who has had their legs broken, and telling them to go pay their bills. Look, we gave you money!" said one Twitter user, whose post went semi-viral at the start of the month. There was a time in America where disaster relief mainly meant food drives. People, especially grassroots charities, would put together boxes of food. Mostly comprised of canned food and other nonperishable items, these boxes of food would then be delivered to people who were affected. The idea behind doing things this way was that you never knew if someone was injured and couldn't travel, emotionally damaged, etc. So, by delivering food to them, this meant that the person or people receiving the aid would not have to go out of their way to get nourishment.

Today's way of handling things, however, seems to be the government just throwing money at a problem and expecting the people affected to do most of the work. This is especially worrisome when you consider that victims of the wildfires have to physically apply for food relief, thus having to somehow prove that they're hungry and struggling. America witnessed a lot of this during the initial pandemic phase of COVID-19. Instead of officials visiting businesses to see if they were struggling, they instead stood back from the issue and put in an application process. To date, of all the tens of billions earmarked for struggling businesses, less than 20% of applicants have received money, but the money is all gone. All of it. Over $7 trillion was spent in 2020 for COVID aid, and nobody knows where it went. What's worse: Nobody's really asking where it went.

This same sort of thing could easily happen with disaster food relief in New Mexico. Albeit on a much smaller scale, handling giving money to people to buy food, instead of actual food, causes many extra steps in the process that an obese bureaucracy must oversee. The potential for fraud and scandal here is large, and there's a very strong likelihood that people who are actually struggling and hungry will not end up getting any food relief due to some automatic denial of their application.

The Wastefulness Critique

As many have pointed out, doing things this way promotes wastefulness. If the government wants to give people money, claim some critics, then give it to charities who will put food boxes together and drop them off. By just handing them a debit card, you're making victims do the actual work here.

Hopefully the people who need food will get it, but if past government initiatives are any gauge, there's a strong likelihood that many will still go hungry.