What determines how much federal assistance a recipient agency receives in commodities each year?
Each recipient agency receives commodities based on the number of reimbursable lunches that that agency served the previous year, multiplied times the per meal assistance level for the current year. The per meal assistance level (PAL) for the 2002-03 school year is 15.25 cents per reimbursable lunch. If a recipient agency served 100,000 lunches the previous year, the agency would be entitled to $15,250.00 worth of entitlement commodities during the current year. The USDA also makes some additional commodities available to recipient agencies that are called bonus commodities. Bonus items are provided due to an over supply of a particular item. This effort assists the agricultural community by pulling some of the excess off the commercial market and helps to stabilize the price of that item. These bonus items are extra and do not count toward meeting the recipient agencys total entitlement figure discussed in the paragraph above.
