Rebuilding Food Security After a Wildfire

When wildfires swept through southern Oregon in 2020, Maria and her family lost 14 years of hard work almost overnight. Their home, their car, and most of their belongings went up in smoke. In the four years since, in their efforts to rebuild, they have also wiped out most of their savings, Maria says through an interpreter. (We are not using her full name due to immigration concerns.)

Maria and her husband both work in restaurants in the sparsely populated Rogue Valley. Already hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, which had left them both with fewer hours at work, the family has struggled to rebound.

The Almeda wildfires, which were supercharged by hot, dry weather caused by climate change, left thousands of homes in southern Oregon destroyed. In rural cities like Talent and Medford, farmworker families in particular faced a brutal choice: Stay and work through the haze of smoke that was growing thicker as the fires got closer, or lose out on their daily wages, which had already been cut because of the pandemic.

“We need to work three times as much,” Maria says, reflecting on her financial situation of late. “The cost of everything—rent, food—is so much higher.”

To offset the inflated cost of living since the wildfires, Maria has relied on a weekly farmers market run by a local nonprofit called Rogue Food Unites, where she can receive staples like eggs, vegetables, and fruits for free. The organization was founded after the Almeda fires and initially worked with local businesses to provide hot meals and food boxes to survivors of the disaster. Since then, it has evolved to provide long-term support for families who are still facing food insecurity as recovery stretches on.

By purchasing local produce, Rogue Food Unites is not only feeding families but also supporting the small, independently owned farms that are working hard to rebound after the pandemic and wildfires. The produce and eggs they provide happen to be low-carbon foods, which can help solve the community’s food insecurity as well as reduce its climate impacts. The group has also started working with local growers to make emergency dried food kits for residents to prepare for the next climate disaster.

It’s an ironic twist that the climate crisis is fueled in part by the food system in the U.S.—namely the land use and emissions from concentrated livestock operations—and so many of the climate effects are felt first and worst by farmworkers and their communities. That’s why Rogue Food Unites redistributes local produce to residents at no cost—and no questions asked about need, income, or immigration status.

A significant portion of Rogue Food Unites’ clients are undocumented families, and many are farmworkers who work seasonal jobs. “The intention is to welcome all families,” says Jesus Rios, the client liaison manager at Rogue Food Unites. “It’s open to anybody.”

Connecting Food and Home and Climate

The Almeda fires destroyed some 2,400 homes, of which three-quarters were in mobile home parks. The region was already facing an affordable housing crisis; in Medford, more than half of all renters paid more than one-third of their income on housing.

Many families Rios works with were living in mobile homes, which they owned outright before the fires. “That’s a lot more affordable than paying for an apartment or residential home,” he says. Now, people’s budgets are becoming tighter with higher rents for the available apartments or houses post-disaster. “Usually, toward the end of the month at the market, we hear families saying, ‘We’re really grateful for this food because we don’t have any more money left for groceries.’”

Maria says she has noticed the lines getting longer at the market in the past couple years, as more and more families rely on the market to make ends meet. Maria says it’s been harder for young people who normally haven’t needed to access aid like this: “I talked to a young lady [in line] who said that even with two jobs, she couldn’t afford her studio apartment.”

Maria and her family were able to catch a break in at least one way: During the worst of their financial woes, her two teenage children, who are U.S. citizens, were able to apply for benefits through the Supplementary Nutrition Access Program, commonly referred to as SNAP. The federal program provides monthly funds to purchase groceries to more than 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.

Receiving SNAP benefits made it easier for Maria to stretch her and her spouse’s paychecks to cover other household necessities like toilet paper and soap—and to start putting away savings to fix up their house. Additionally, in Oregon, local farmers markets often offer a matching program for SNAP users, called Double Up Food Bucks, through which every dollar in SNAP funds counts as $2 at a farmers market.

But across the state, many undocumented or noncitizen households may not have the ability to access those benefits, particularly among farmworker communities who were displaced by the wildfires.

Farmworkers in southern Oregon consistently say that the cost of housing is their biggest issue, says Reyna Lopez, the director of Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste (PCUN), a statewide farmworkers union. “Within our membership, at least a quarter of folks say they have gone to a food bank over the last year,” she says.

The average farmworker’s take-home pay in the state is below $25,000 a year, according to state data. “It’s pretty devastating that the same population that ensures America is being fed, that a big chunk of them are food insecure,” Lopez says. “And it’s no secret that a majority of that workforce is from Mexico or Latin America.”

Across the United States, at least 1.2 million low-income immigrants are shut out of this essential food aid program due to immigration status. That isn’t just limited to undocumented residents; legal permanent residents aren’t eligible until they’ve established residency for five years. As many as 5 million people may live in mixed eligibility households—meaning that some family members are citizens, and others aren’t, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“Immigration status is connected to everything,” Lopez says. “There’s so many doors that are shut for you, like SNAP benefits, health care services, social security benefits—even if you have worked there your entire life.”

Opening Up Food Access

In 2023, PCUN and a coalition of food justice and immigration justice organizations backed a bill in the Oregon legislature called “Food for All Oregonians.” The bill would set aside state funding for a SNAP-like program for Oregonians who can’t access federal benefits due to their immigration status. “The basic premise is that if you’re human, you deserve food,” says Susannah Morgan, the president of the Oregon Food Bank, which is one of the largest organizations involved in the coalition.

Though the bill didn’t pass in the 2023 session, advocates plan to reintroduce it in the 2025 session, which begins in January.

“Not providing food assistance to folks working in the food industry is cruel and unusual,” she says. “The impetus for this [advocacy] was realizing that pandemic-level resources, like the $1,200 checks and extra SNAP benefits or extra unemployment benefits we were getting—that wasn’t available to our neighbors who didn’t have full citizenship.”

More than 60,000 people in Oregon could benefit from the expanded benefits, at a cost of $120 million every two years, Morgan says. As proposed, the program would allow people to use the same applications for state or federal food assistance; applicants who are citizens would qualify for federal benefits, while those who are undocumented would qualify for the state-subsidized benefits instead.

“If we’re able to ease the eligibility requirements and streamline the application process, many more families are going to be able to access these essential nutritional supports,” Lopez says.

A More Just Future

In 2022, the coalition successfully pushed the legislature to pass a bill that expands overtime benefits to farmworkers. And after the Almeda fires, PCUN pushed for stronger heat and smoke rules, protecting outdoor workers from unsafe conditions during climate disasters. In 2022, the state adopted the strongest protections in the country, mandating that employers provide access to shade, cold water, and rest breaks during extreme conditions. This is all the more important in a changing climate.

“Having higher wages and making sure that people are able to live a better quality of life is really important when it comes to food justice,” Lopez says. “Financial insecurity leads people to rely on less nutritional food—or maybe people just go without eating, because the fear of deportation can prevent undocumented workers from seeking help.”

SNAP benefits and other food aid programs have never gone far enough in the first place, Morgan says. “SNAP benefits run out between the second and third week of every month.”

Across Oregon and southwest Washington, more than 1 million people—about one in four residents—rely on the Oregon Food Bank’s services at least once a year. “We are the very last line of defense against hunger,” Morgan says. “When large numbers of people are coming to us, that tells me the federal safety net is very hole-y.”

Now, with the re-election of Donald Trump as president, observers fear that the new administration may target these already inadequate safety nets, slashing what conservatives see as wasteful government spending. The plans, outlined in a conservative manifesto called Project 2025, are frustrating but not surprising, says Morgan. “Immigrants and refugees—our neighbors, coworkers, friends—experience some of the highest rates of hunger in our state. It’s unacceptable that federal policies continue to exclude our communities.”

There’s virtually no chance that the Trump administration, which campaigned heavily on the idea of “mass deportations,” would extend those benefits to undocumented workers.

“We are not trying to take advantage [of benefits programs],” Maria, the undocumented restaurant worker from the Rogue Valley says. “But life is hard. The government should think about that—our children suffer the consequences of hunger the most. If there is money available, people shouldn’t go hungry.” 

This story is part of an ongoing series of reporting on a just and climate-friendly food system produced in collaboration with the Guardian, Nexus Media News, Sentient and Yes! Magazine with funding from the Solutions Journalism Network, advisory support from Garrett Broad (Rowan University) and audience engagement through Project Drawdown’s Global Solutions Diary.

This article originally appeared in Yes! Magazine.

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