Long queue at drive-in soup kitchen

Long queue at drive-in soup kitchen

"George Bush's America is the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever known, but at home it is being gnawed away from the inside by persistent and rising poverty. The three million Americans who have lost their jobs since Mr Bush took office in January 2001 have yet to find new work in a largely jobless recovery, and they are finding that the safety net they assumed was beneath them has long since unravelled. There is not much left to stop them falling.

Last year alone, another 1.7 million Americans slipped below the poverty line, bringing the total to 34.6 million, one in eight of the population. Over 13 million of them are children. In fact, the US has the worst child poverty rate and the worst life expectancy of all the world's industrialised countries, and the plight of its poor is worsening.

The ranks of the hungry are increasing in step. About 31 million Americans were deemed to be "food insecure" (they literally did not know where their next meal was coming from). Of those, more than nine million were categorised by the US department of agriculture as experiencing real hunger, defined by the US department of agriculture as an "uneasy or painful sensation caused by lack of food due to lack of resources to obtain food."

That was two years ago, before the recession really began to bite. Partial surveys suggest the problem has deepened considerably since then. In 25 major cities the need for emergency food rose an average of 19% last year.

Another indicator is the demand for food stamps, the government aid programme of last resort. The number of Americans on stamps has risen from 17 million to 22 million since Mr Bush took office.

In Ohio, hunger is an epidemic. Since George Bush won Ohio in the 2000 presidential elections, the state has lost one in six of its manufacturing jobs. Two million of the state's 11 million population resorted to food charities last year, an increase of more than 18% from 2001.

It is hardly surprising the very poor feel they have no one to turn to. A string of local factories have closed in the past two years to relocate to Mexico, a delayed consequence of the North American Free Trade Agreement established by Bill Clinton in 1994. And two years later, it was Clinton, in cooperation with a staunchly Republican Congress, who dismantled much of the welfare system built in the New Deal and the Great Society. Clinton's welfare reform set a time limit on how long the poor and unemployed could draw social security payments. It helped force people back into work with the encouragement of an array of federally funded job training programmes.

It worked well while the economy was booming, cutting the number on welfare from 12 million to five million in a few years. But now there are no jobs. Those who went to work under welfare reform are among the first to be fired, and often find that welfare is no longer available to them. Some have used up their lifetime maximum. Some have accumulated too many assets to qualify, such as a car or a house that they do not want to sell for fear of falling yet further into destitution.

Others have had difficulty dealing with the welfare system's more demanding requirements. A few in the line at Logan said they were struggling without success to extract vital documents from former employers, who have either gone bankrupt or gone abroad.

The government still distributes food stamps, but they are worth on average only about $160 (£100) a month, not enough to buy food for a family with no other income. Furthermore, more than 10 million "food insecure" Americans, at risk from hunger, do not apply for them. Often they are unaware they are eligible. Welfare reform pushed them out of a system that they have lost contact with.

A study this year by Washington-based think tank the Urban Institute found that 63% of this forgotten category sometimes or often run out of food each month. All these factors explain why, although the current slump in America has not been as deep as the last major recession a decade ago, the food lines this time are longer. They also explain why hunger remains a largely invisible problem. The Americans in the food lines often do not show up in the statistics and usually do not turn up for elections.

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