May 2008 Update

I was looking forward to talking about the passage of the Farm Bill for this month’s blog so I kept holding back on writing it. Well, it is now Memorial Day weekend and the Farm Bill has passed, kind of….The House and Senate pounded out an agreement, got enough votes in both houses to override a veto, the president Vetoed the bill as expected and then, in the process of overriding the Veto, they discovered an incomplete bill was voted on! The process has to be fixed by a new set of votes, a new veto and then a set of votes to override the veto. If congress was like the guy who fixes your car and forgets to put the tire on, it would stay until the work was done. But, short of a national emergency, government doesn’t work like that. Government is in recess for the Holiday so it will probably be two more weeks before the final bill becomes law and the increased volume of food we’ve been hoping for will begin flowing our way. Two weeks delay means another 50,000 pounds of commodities we won’t have available to distribute in spite of a drastically increased need in the communities we serve. If these were normal times human error of this sort would not have had such a significant impact. Because the Farm Bill is already a full year late, each delay is significant.

The rising price of fuel is continuing to spread problems across the nation. For several years the trucking industry has placed a fuel charge on bills to show their rate plus the additional fee incurred due to the rising cost of diesel. For us, each 5 cent per gallon rise in diesel increases our freight bill for the year by $2,000. Thinking back to the costs six months ago when we prepared our budget, we’re spending well over $50,000 more than we thought we would just to get donated food into the warehouse. And not one dime of that has gone to help the trucker do his job. Of course we’re now seeing the cost of processing food impact the cost of the food when it reaches the grocer. More people are finding it harder to make ends meet and are turning to church pantries for help. So, we need to bring in more food even though it costs more for each load that arrives at the same time our generous donors are seeing their own pocketbooks becoming a little emptier than before. Wind power, solar power, nuclear power and new drilling will take years to work through the research, environmental impact and exploration processes. The need for help is not going to go away any time soon and may continue to grow.

I spent time this week attending the Mississippi/Alabama Hurricane Conference in Mobile. It is good to know government leaders in both States are thinking about plans and are also adjusting plans because they know the cost of fuel is going to impact decisions by citizens related to the cost of evacuation when a call to evacuate is made. A false alarm can cost a family a week’s wages due to missed work as well as hundreds of dollars in fuel, hotel and meal costs. For many working families an evacuation robs them of any chance to take a family vacation. Spending 15 hours (each way) crawling along the interstate and eating meals in overcrowded fast food restaurants is not relaxing and can’t compare to a week at Disneyworld, but it costs just a much! With everything else going on, we need a quiet storm season.