The social safety nets in Mexico and the United States rely heavily on food assistance programs to ensure food security and access to safe and nutritious foods. To achieve these general goals, both countries' programs are exclusively paid for out of internal funds and both target low-income...

The Food Stamp Program saw an unprecedented decline in participation from 27.5 million participants in 1994 to 18.2 million participants in 1999. A strong economy and changes in social welfare programs drove this change. An econometric model with State-level data calculated that 35 percent of...

Diverse needs and preferences across the United States provide justification for the devolution, or decentralization, of many Federal Government programs to the State or local level. The move toward devolution, however, has not been evidenced in U.S. agricultural policy, despite significant...

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is the largest nutritional assistance program addressing food insecurity in the United States. Due to the program’s reach, SNAP has been called upon to address other nutrition-related challenges facing low-income Americans, including...

In this paper we first study where food purchases are made by SNAP recipients in comparison to eligible and ineligible non-SNAP recipients. Particularly, we analyze whether SNAP recipients use retail food outlets which generally have lower prices and how far they travel to purchase food. We next...