Some New Yorkers on welfare assistance are using their food stamps to buy and ship groceries to relatives in Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic,
The New York Post reports.
They buy food with their benefit cards and pack the goods in 45- to 55-gallon barrels.
The barrels are then shipped to the Caribbean islands, according to the newspaper.
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"Everybody does it," a worker at one Associated Supermarket in Brooklyn, N.Y. told The Post.
The US Department of Agriculture is urging states to go after welfare cheaters who are caught shipping food out of country.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the Post, "The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid."
The United States shelled out $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean in the last fiscal year.
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