I have no heart for somebody who starves his folks. --George W. Bush discussing North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and US food donations on CNN (January 2, 2003)

Getting to Root Causes

Hunger, of course, is symptomatic of a deeper problem--inadequate income, which hits even the US military at a time when the country has chosen guns over butter. The WIC office located at Offutt Air Force base near Omaha serves 650 servicewomen, wives of military personnel and their children each month. To qualify for free food, a family of three, for example, must have a gross income this year that's less than $28,231. "Most people don't have enough money. That's why they're in the program," says a WIC official. Through the years, however, feeding people through special programs rather than dealing with their lack of money became the palatable political choice.

Those who favor the route of special programs say it would not take a lot of money to insure that all Americans are fed. "Six billion dollars more could cut hunger in half in two years," says David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World. "It's an eminently solvable problem." But more government money is not likely. In fact, there will probably be less. Earlier this year House Republicans passed legislation that would transform the food-stamp program into a block grant, yet another way of pushing responsibility to the states and letting them decide when and if they have sufficient revenues to feed people. It's a way of converting an entitlement into revenue streams for states. After a few years they can divert money to other programs. It's not hard to imagine what will happen to the needy if the recession and budget deficits continue for several years. At the same time, the Agriculture Department hopes to make it more difficult to qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches, because, it says, some kids are getting cheap lunches even though their families are not eligible. Data, however, show that when more income documentation is required, it reduces participation among eligible children.

Today it's hard to find a champion for the hungry in Congress, much less in the executive branch. Hunger is not seen as a pressing political problem. In January, representatives of food advocacy groups met with Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and were told there were no extra dollars for food. "We were told it's going to be a tight budget year," says Beckmann. "They said there would be no more money for child nutrition, and we had to think about how to do more with the money we've got." Robert Blancato, a food-advocacy group lobbyist, says food programs must be recast to generate Congressional interest. "In this environment, programs need additional buzzwords to survive," he says. "If you can repackage the meal programs so they don't look like meal programs, they have a better chance. There's a whole new priority structure in where the money is going."

Meanwhile, no one in Washington talks much about living wages, increasing the minimum wage, indexing it for inflation or expanding the earned-income tax credit. But living wages are the only solution if people are ever to move toward the self-sufficiency and personal responsibility that politicians and the public demand of them. It's hard to buy food when the money you have goes for ever-increasing shelter costs, healthcare because you have no insurance and childcare because there are few low-cost options.

No modern industrial nation should protect the nutritional well-being of its citizens through handouts. But until an outraged public decides that hunger is unacceptable in the richest country in history, there will be more Ellen Spearmans asking why they cannot feed their families.

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