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Connecticut Food Banks Enter Bidding War

Food Pantry
Davis Dunavin
/
WSHU

Connecticut Commissioner of Agriculture Bryan Hurlburt says local food banks are competing for supplies in the same way states were in a bidding war for medical equipment.

“Just like we saw with the PPE, each organization is trying to outbid the other for additional food, and that can’t be the solution.”

Hurlburt was speaking on a conference call with U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, state food banks and nonprofits. 

Blumenthal says just as the health care system needs a national tsar to coordinate the pandemic response, someone at the federal level should coordinate the food system.

“We need a kind of tsar in the food security area to make sure that all of these programs are coordinated and targeted at the places that are hot spots of hunger.”

He says he wants to make sure resources to ensure food security are included in the next federal stimulus package to address the COVID-19 crisis.

Read the latest on WSHU’s coronavirus coverage here.

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Cassandra Basler, a former senior editor at WSHU, came to the station by way of Columbia Journalism School in New York City. When she's not reporting on wealth and poverty, she's writing about food and family.