Ricky Minor receives $16 worth of food stamps every month.

The 54-year-old, who lives in Aliceville, a small Pickens County town in Alabama's impoverished Black Belt region, is certified as 100 percent disabled, unable to work because he has lung cancer.

"If you buy the chicken and the bread with the $16, you don't have enough to get the grease to cook it," he said Thursday.

Moses Jackson, also of Aliceville, used to get $16 in food stamps - also known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits - on his EBT card each month, but the monthly infusion dropped to $15 when his disability benefit increased earlier this year.

The dollar amounts may be small, but for the two men and many other Alabama residents who cannot work, every buck counts and equals food in their stomachs.

Minor and Jackson are just two faces of the food stamp program's impact on the Black Belt, but their stories illustrate the desperation of many government assistance recipients throughout the state.

Aliceville food stamp recipients Johnnie Lindsey (left), Moses Jackson (second from right) and Ricky Minor (right) pose at The Lord's Pantry in Aliceville with the pantry's lead organizer, Marie McKinzey.

Struggles like theirs have become a political flashpoint in recent months. The number of people on food stamps in 13 Alabama counties - most of whom are in the Black Belt - has dropped 85 percent since Jan. 1, when an exemption from a requirement that able-bodied adults without dependents work to receive recurring SNAP benefits was lifted in those counties.

Last month, President Donald Trump rolled out a federal budget plan that includes a new round of deep cuts to nutrition assistance programs including SNAP.

If Trump's proposed budget is approved, the impact on many poor families across the state would be drastic, according to Jean Rykaczewski, executive director of the West Alabama Food Bank in Tuscaloosa, which serves people in eight Alabama counties including Perry, Greene, Hale and Sumter in the Black Belt.

"The real world impact on a family is the cabinets and the refrigerator are going to be empty," she said.

"We're going to turn into a Third World country where people are starving in Alabama, and people just don't like to admit it. If these benefits are cut drastically, that could become the reality."

'A blessing'

Johnnie Lindsey, a 72-year-old retired Aliceville grandmother who is no longer able to work, currently gets $66 a month in SNAP benefits, assistance she describes as "a blessing."

Having worked for decades and raised a family without ever being on welfare, she says she now relies on Social Security, food stamps and monthly distributions from a local food pantry to survive.

"I can eat for a month on $66, as long as my grandkids don't come over. I know $66 is not much but it is to me," she said.

"It's a struggle, for real. You've got to be penny-pinching to survive, and it's still hard to survive. I would hate for them to cut mine off. Like my grandmamma said, every little bit helps."

Like Minor and Jackson, she said she believes there are many SNAP beneficiaries who take advantage of the system and should be purged from its ranks.

But all three of them say they are barely making it as it is, and that any further cuts to food stamp programs would be catastrophic for their lives and those of thousands of other disabled, elderly and minor Alabamians.

They also note that it was not always so difficult to earn a living wage in places like Aliceville.

Hard times

The town's 20,000-square-foot Fruit of The Loom plant - opened in 1930 as the Aliceville Cotton Plant - paid livable wages to hundreds of area residents until it shuttered in 2000.

Since then the plant has sat empty as poverty has ravaged the depressed town, and Jackson, Lindsey and Minor say that most of the jobs left in Aliceville are low-wage posts at a handful of chain stores like Piggly Wiggly and Subway.

Many Aliceville businesses have closed in recent years.

"When the cotton mill was running, it was the backbone of Aliceville," Minor explained. "Everything was running smoothly in town, and when they closed the mill, all the people that didn't have enough time in to retire were left behind."

Some local folks commute an hour to Tuscaloosa for better-paying gigs, but many are left with few options to pay the bills.

Thousands of Alabama families and individuals rely on government assistance to fill the gap, but in recent years, the amount of help available to them has undergone a sharp decline.

Most recently, food stamp participation in 13 Alabama counties - most of which are in the Black Belt - has dropped 85 percent since Jan. 1, when an exemption from requiring able-bodied adults without dependents to work in order to receive recurring SNAP benefits was lifted in those counties.

On Jan. 1, there were 13,663 able-bodied adults without dependents getting food stamps in Alabama; by May 1 that number had fallen to 7,483. In the 13 counties where the exemption was lifted on Jan. 1, the number of such adults getting food stamps had dropped from 5,538 to 831 as of May 1.

And another blow may be coming soon if Congress approves Trump's proposed budget, which would cut $192 billion from the SNAP system nationwide over 10 years and billions more from other social safety-net programs.

The Lord's Pantry

Luckily for many struggling people in Pickens County, a food pantry called The Lord's Pantry opened its doors at Aliceville First United Methodist Church on Sept. 5, 2012.

The brainchild of a group of church members, the pantry now distributes food to between 235 and 280 people once a month, according to the pantry's lead organizer, Marie McKinzey.

McKinzey's mother lived in Aliceville and had a difficult time getting by in her later years, a circumstance that helped to spur the creation of the pantry.

The Lord's Pantry distributes food to Aliceville residents every month.

"My mother was on Social Security and that was about all she had, and by the end of every month she would run out of money and her children would help her," McKinzey explained.

"Not just my mother, you could see that all her friends and everyone else who was on Social Security and didn't have much retirement saved needed help."

The pantry plays a key role in ensuring that many local people, most of whom are seniors, have food to put on the table.

Jackson, Lindsey and Minor all say that The Lord's Pantry has been a lifesaver for them, and Minor and Jackson both work at the pantry each month, helping pack food bags and hand them out to other recipients.

"I've got to make $15 stretch. It ain't much, so I depend on the food pantry. They're a big help," Mason said. "For a single person like me it's a struggle trying to make it because of your low income and the little food stamps, so the food pantry's a big help."

But the facility would be hard-pressed to fill the need if every person on food stamps in the surrounding area were to lose the benefit or see it significantly slashed, according to McKinzey.

So she, Jackson, Lindsey and Minor say they are praying that there will be no further cuts to Alabamians' SNAP benefits.

"For people who are younger and able to work and everything it probably might not hurt them as much to lose their check," Lindsey said. "But for me, I can't go work a job. I'm 72 years old, who's going to help me? No one."