Perhaps no Bronx community represents a bigger dichotomy in the city’s food infrastructure than Hunts Point.
Home to the city’s largest food producer, the Hunts Points Market — providing nearly five billion pounds of food to city restaurants, supermarkets and bodegas, and 25% of the city’s produce — located in the South Bronx neighborhood is also in one of the nation’s biggest food deserts.
Food insecurity, a measure of the availability of food and individuals’ ability to access it, has been a prevalent issue in the South Bronx where more than 40% of its resident live in poverty.
As federal lawmakers rework the U.S.’ Farm Bill, a package of legislation passed quinquennially, U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is hoping to not only include a health initiative that increases access to healthy foods for food deserts like the South Bronx, but boost annual and mandatory funding of that program to $50 million by 2028.
The Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI) Reauthorization Act has made it into the past two farm bills in 2014 and 2018, but funding from the initiative has always been discretionary. Despite the Bronx having longstanding issues with food insecurity, the borough has never received funding from HFFI.
Gillibrand, who has served as New York’s junior senator since 2009, told the Bronx Times that by making funding mandatory and boosting annual funding from $25 million to $50 million, it can give bodegas in the supermarket-thin Bronx, an opportunity to be a healthy food source. HFFI funds, through loans and grant financing, are meant to entice grocery stores and other fresh food retailers to provide options for underserved urban, suburban and rural areas.
“My legislation aims to create more funding for bodegas and markets to be able to offer healthy, nutritious food to communities that are often left behind in our food deserts,” said Gillibrand, who visited the Hunts Point Market on Tuesday. “A lot of places like the Bronx don’t have…
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