An abbreviated version of this story appeared in the Austin American-Statesman.

According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the entity that officially measures economic cycles, the “Great Recession” ended in June 2009, although you’d never guess that the U.S. economy is supposed to be on the upswing, as many folks are still feeling the pain with poverty and hunger at record levels.

Case in point; the U.S. Labor Department just reported that the current average duration of unemployment at 40 weeks, is the longest in more than 60 years. And while Texas’ unemployment rate dropped to 8.1 percent in November 2011, it is still almost double the 4.4 percent in December 2007 when the recession began.

Here at the Capital Area Food Bank, we deal with the effects of harsh economic cycles and unemployment daily. In fact the recent U.S. Conference of Mayors 2011 Status Report on Hunger & Homelessness found that unemployment led the list of causes of hunger cited by the survey cities, followed by poverty, low wages and high housing costs.

The impact on our food bank has been dramatic. Since the recession started, we are now distributing 50 percent more food to the growing ranks of the hungry in our 21-county service territory. To put that into perspective, we distribute the equivalent in food of the weight of a Boeing 737 airplane every day, 365 days of the year.

Hunger doesn’t discriminate. We serve children, seniors, the working poor, and the unemployed. Food bank clients cross every race, color, education level, and increasingly the middle class. None of these folks want to wait in a long line to receive food. However, they have little choice.

I track a lot of policy issues in my job—from our food bank’s primary concerns of hunger and food insecurity to corresponding issues such as housing, health care, and unemployment. All of those issues affect the demand for emergency food assistance.

The recent showdown over extending federal unemployment benefits—those benefits triggered when an unemployed worker has exhausted their state unemployment benefits-highlighted the fact that more than 100,000 unemployed Texans faced losing their unemployment insurance assistance at the end of the year.

The unemployment benefits extension does delay some suffering. However, without an ongoing commitment from our congressional leaders to act on behalf of the unemployed, more of our friends and neighbors will struggle to put food on their tables and we expect the food lines to get even longer.

Texas has more workers than jobs, and the current rate of job creation is not sufficient to make a dent in the economic downturn and speed up the recovery. In November, Texas had 997,162 (8.1%) unemployed workers according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but only added 20,800 new jobs that month. At this rate, it will take four years to get unemployed Texans back to work.

Until we turn this job shortfall around, unemployment insurance is a critical protection against hunger and poverty. Without it, it is likely many more Americans will not be able to feed themselves or their families. They will go hungry and that should be a national disgrace, because hunger is unacceptable.

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Tagged Kathy Green, unemployment