UNALASKA STRONG

UNALASKA - In 1955, four years before Alaska entered the Union, its farms and ranches, forests and waters produced 55 percent of the food its residents ate. Today, 65 years later, they produce just 5 percent, the rest is imported, delivered by planes and barges from hundreds of warehouses in the Green River Valley just south of Seattle.

"In 1955 we were pretty self-sufficient," a representative from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Services Agency in Alaska told The Redoubt Reporter in 2012. Now, he added, the state is "completely vulnerable, completely dependent on the next plane."

In the far north supply chains matter. If they sever or stall, Alaskans don't eat. Thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic we all learned what that's like, surprised, even shocked when our grocery stores ran out of toilet paper and paper towels, but their shelves and freezers once full to overflowing with food emptied.

Not just in Alaska, but also in the Lower 48 supply chain have sputtered and even stalled. People panicked. Worse still, because of the pandemic many family breadwinners lost their jobs or their hours cut back, reducing their incomes. Food instability - i.e., families that can't put enough food on their kitchen tables - has always been a problem. Thanks to COVID-19 in communities big and small it's become a crisis.

Communities like Unalaska, Alaska, also known as Dutch Harbor and, by the native Aleuts who first settled there, as Ounalashka. With almost 4,400 residents at the last Census, it's some 1,100 miles southwest of Anchorage and is the biggest city in the Aleutian Archipelago which extends another 1,100 miles southwest.

If you're a fan of The Discovery Channel's The Deadliest Kill, chances are you've visited Unalaska at least virtually. It's homeport for most of the vessels. Since the 1990s the largest fisheries port in the United States and, in many years, the world. But despite all that abundance, it's got a food-instability problem.

Ask the nonprofit Unalaskans Against Sexual Assault and Family Violence (UASAFV) which operates the community's main food bank. From January to June of 2019 to the same period this year, KUCB-FM reports, its home food deliveries rose 27 percent. "Nationwide, statewide, and also locally," says Alysha Richardson of the Federally recognized Qawalangin Tribe, "the need to access food is going up."

Which is why the Tribe has decided to use $392,000 in Indian Community Development Block Grant funds awarded by HUD from the CARES Act passed by the Congress and signed into law by President Trump to build a state-of-the-art food bank in Unalaska. It's a two-step project.

First, the Tribe in collaboration with the Aleutian Housing Authority will upgrade electrical and heating systems and install refrigeration too so it can to provide "nutrient-dense foods, including fruits and vegetables, as well as fish, berries, and other plants harvested locally" which UASAFVC's food bank has been unable to provide. Second, with other HUD funds it expects to be able to support home deliveries to tribal "elders or those who do not have access to a car," through June 2021.

Best of all, the assistance isn't limited to members of the Tribe. "Our intention is to serve anyone and everyone on the island that has food or nutrient needs, because we are all deeply affected by each other's health and wellbeing, especially during this pandemic."

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