Thirty-five million Americans - a number roughly equal to the entire population of California - faced hunger or the risk of hunger in 2005, the latest year for which data is available.

That figure represents a four million person increase since 1997 in the number of people in the U.S. who lived in households that suffered from some form of food insecurity - meaning they couldn’t afford an adequate and consistent supply of food - according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The number of children who lived in such households also increased during that time, rising from 12.0 million to 12.4 million.

Nonprofit groups simply don’t have the resources to pick up the slack. For instance, the non-partisan organization I run, the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, is an umbrella group for more than 1,200 charitable food pantries and soup kitchens in New York City; more than half of those agencies are forced to ration food because they can’t keep up with the growing demand.

The number of adults and children who suffer from the more severe lack of food - what the Bush administration now calls “very low food security” and what used to be called “hunger” - also increased in that period from 7.7 million to 10.7 million people - a 40 percent increase in just six years.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that the nation has the ability and the resources to solve this problem rather easily should it choose to do so.

In the 1970s, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the federal government undertook bold new steps to reduce domestic hunger. It created the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Program to provide babies with better nutrition. It improved access to food stamps. It greatly increased school breakfasts and lunches for low-income children.

These programs were created as a result of a broad, bipartisan consensus. Conservatives including Bob Dole and liberals like George McGovern worked together to move the measures through the Senate. Most importantly, the programs actually worked, all but wiping out the nation’s last pockets of Third World style starvation.

In the more polarized politics of the last two decades, platitudes and stale debates have replaced a search for solutions. Conservatives tried to slash funding for federal nutrition programs, ignoring their proven track record of reducing hunger. Progressives were unwilling to propose reforming now-outmoded programs because they feared (often rightly so) that their proposals would be hijacked by conservatives as an excuse to cut benefits. The debate narrowed to a stark choice between cuts and more money, with the real world result being an increase in hunger nationwide.

I propose that the next president work with Congress to get beyond this debate with two bold moves that could win broad bipartisan support:

1) The federal government should enact an innovative new program that would simultaneously increase the scope and effectiveness of federal nutrition programs and decrease the size and complexity of the government bureaucracies that run them.

A top priority for any plan to end hunger in America should be to simplify and better coordinate federal nutrition assistance programs. The nation should combine the existing Food Stamp Program with most of the existing other federal nutrition assistance programs.

My colleague Tom Freedman has suggested that such a new program could be called the “American Family Food, Opportunity, and Responsibility” (AFFORd) program. More low-income Americans would be eligible for this program than the existing, separate, programs - and eligibility determination and application processes would be dramatically simplified.

Under current federal law, families must earn below 130 percent of the poverty line to get food stamp benefits and free school meals, but they must live below 185 percent of the poverty line to obtain WIC benefits and reduced-price school meals. These conflicting guidelines result in both increased government bureaucracy at the federal, state and local levels and decreased access to food. Eligibility for all these programs under the new AFFORd program should be set at 185 percent of the poverty line. There should be a single, short, universal federal application for AFFORd benefits, which Americans could complete easily online or during an office visit. Not only would this reduce government paperwork and bureaucracy, it would dramatically increase the amount of nutrition provided to low-income families, particularly working families.

2) The federal government should make school breakfast universal, and provide it to all students free of charge - regardless of family income - in every one of the nation’s homeroom (first period) classrooms.

Research proves that children who eat breakfast at school have higher test scores, fewer school nurse visits, act up less in class, and may even suffer less frequently from obesity. Yet, according to a recent report by the Food Research Action Center (FRAC), out of 23 big cities in the United States, fully 21 had rates of free and reduced price breakfast participation (compared to lunch participation) below 65 percent. In 11 of those cities, the rate was below 50 percent. Many suburban and rural districts have even lower rates - and some don’t even offer school breakfasts at all.

Both universal rules and in-classroom breakfasts have already proven their success in select school districts nationwide. For instance, in Newark, New Jersey - where both are utilized - the district has a 94 pecent breakfast participation rate. Given that most school districts must now have a complex system in place to collect forms and data on the income of each student’s parents to determine the eligibility of each child, when a district adopts a universal breakfast policy, not only does it reduce the stigma faced by children and thereby increases participation, it also reduces the paperwork and bureaucracy, saving the district time and money. When kids eat breakfast in a classroom instead of a lunch room that is a hallway or two away, they have more time to focus on their studies and are protected from the stigma of having to leave their friends to go to a special breakfast room for the “poor kids.”

Given that textbooks are widely understood to be a critical educational tool, public school districts typically give them out free of charge to all students. The time is ripe for the nation to view school breakfasts in the same way.

Taken together, these steps could elevate the notion of ending child hunger in America from a once-a-year holiday platitude to a reality.

This entry was posted on 9.06.2007 at 11:03 am and is filed under Helping Families, Ending Poverty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.