Subcommittee on Specialy Crops, Rural Development and Foreign Agriculture Hearing House Committee on Agriculture

TESTIMONY PRESENTED BY
THE HONORABLE JAMES P. McGOVERN (MA-3)
MAY 10, 2007

SUBCOMMITTEE ON SPECIALTY CROPS, RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND FOREIGN AGRICULTURE
HOUSE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE
1300 LONGWORTH HOUSE OFFICE BUILDING
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

I want to thank Chairman Mike McIntyre, Ranking Member Marilyn Musgrave and the members of the Subcommittee for granting me this opportunity to testify on the important contributions of the George McGovern - Robert Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program (McGovern-Dole). I am especially pleased to be joined by my distinguished colleague from Missouri, Representative Jo Ann Emerson, who has played such an important role in helping to establish and promote this program.

McGovern-Dole is among the newest of U.S. food-related development programs. It was launched in 2000 by President Bill Clinton as a pilot program, the Global Food for Education Initiative (GFEI). The purpose of the program is simple and straightforward: to reduce the incidence of child hunger among school-age children and to increase their access to education by providing at least one nutritious meal each day in schools. The GFEI was administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and provided $300 million to 48 school feeding projects in 38 countries, reaching nearly 7 million children. These projects were carried out in 2001 - 2002 by U.S. non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), and one national government, the Dominican Republic.

The pilot program proved so successful and received such high evaluations that it was established as a permanent program in the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 and named in honor of former senators George McGovern of South Dakota and Robert Dole of Kansas for their tireless commitment to end child hunger here at home and around the world. The McGovern-Dole made a number of improvements over the GFEI pilot program - expanding the universe of U.S. commodities available for projects; providing financial and technical assistance for transportation, storage, and to strengthen nutritional and educational inputs; emphasizing the enrollment and attendance of girls and other marginalized children; requiring family and community engagement in the project; requiring elements of sustainability to be built into the projects from the beginning; and strengthening USDA's monitoring and evaluation criteria and capacity for each project. The projects must target low-income and poverty areas with low school attendance, especially among girls, and where there is a high incidence of child hunger and food insecurity. The program continues to be administered by the office of Foreign Agricultural Services in the USDA.

Over the past five years, the McGovern-Dole programs have received stellar evaluations, both from USDA and from non-governmental studies. On average, enrollment rose by 14 percent in schools served by McGovern-Dole projects, with enrollment of girls increasing by 17 percent. Teachers and program administrators report a greater ability of children to concentrate after receiving school meals, a general improvement in academic performance, and improved test scores. The McGovern-Dole Program has increased local communities' concern for and participation in their children's education. In addition, both households and schools have benefited from training on food preparation, health - including HIV/AIDS education and prevention - and hygiene provided through the program.

Rather than report a variety of statistics and results, I encourage the members of the subcommittee who have not yet had a chance to review the USDA evaluations of the GFEI and the McGovern-Dole Program to ask USDA to provide you with copies. There you will see the wide variety of commodities, projects, and best practices employed by the implementing NGOs and WFP. Each program is tailored to meet the needs of the local communities, region and country; each receives additional financial and in-kind support from national governments, other country and international donors, private sector or individual contributors, and/or the local communities themselves. Several programs have already "graduated" and achieved sustainability, including projects initiated in Lebanon, Moldova, Vietnam and Kyrgyzstan.

Leaders on both sides of the aisle in Congress agree that the McGovern-Dole Program is one of the best programs the United States has to end poverty and hunger in the developing world. I have attached to my testimony copies of letters and cosponsors of legislation that verify this broad bipartisan support. Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas has stated that the McGovern-Dole Program serves U.S. national security interests. Terrorism breeds where there is hunger and poverty, ignorance and despair. McGovern-Dole addresses all of these by providing children not only with food, but the hope and promise that come with education.

Over the April recess, I traveled to Ethiopia, Kenya and eastern Chad to look at food aid and food security programs that address child hunger, HIV/AIDS and nutrition, and meeting emergency humanitarian crises. In Kenya, I was privileged to visit two McGovern-Dole projects, both administered by the World Food Program.

WFP, in collaboration with the Kenyan government's goal to provide universal education to its children, carries out a school feeding program that reaches 1.1 million children in 3,800 schools. On average, it costs about 9 cents a day to provide these children with a hot lunch each school day made up of pulses, corn and vegetable oil. The U.S.-funded McGovern-Dole Program provides about half of the funding in the form of commodities for this nation-wide program, and directly serves over one-third of these children. The Kenyan government, other international donors - like the UK and Japan, the private sector, individual contributions from the US Friends of WFP, and contributions from the local beneficiary communities provide the remaining funding for the overall national program.

The first school I visited is the Mukuru Kayaba Primary School, a public primary school situated in the Mukuru slums in Nairobi. The school started in 1985 as a non-formal school, with only one shanty room, two teachers and 10 pupils. It has grown to the current population of 1,300 children, including 653 girls and 647 boys, and became a public school in 1990.

These children live under very poor conditions, in shanties, with no regular food to eat, given that the majority of their parents are without jobs. Girls are at great risk in the community. Sometimes they are abducted on their way home from school, and their security is always an issue. The school has about 70 children orphaned by HIV/AIDS who are being taken care of by their relatives or well-wishers. I was told that the school loses at least one parent every two weeks due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. But I'm pleased to inform the Committee that HIV/AIDS education and prevention are provided at the school to all the pupils. Finally, there are frequent fires in the slum community, which often leaves many pupils homeless.

When school feeding was introduced, the school population increased rapidly and allowed for the children to remain in school the whole day. Mrs. Faith Wachira, the formidable woman who is the School Head Teacher, wanted me to know that there has been a significant reduction in truancy after the introduction of lunch, given that the majority of the pupils were formerly from the streets. Despite the poor backgrounds of the children and the community at large, the parents assist in the daily preparation of the food and provide firewood, salt, water, feeding utensils, and other essentials. Mrs. Wachira is rightfully proud of the progress of her pupils and her staff.

I had the privilege to serve the children their lunch, and to join them during lunchtime. It's a simple meal of corn and soy meal, maize and yellow split peas, and vegetable oil - cooked into a thick porridge. One of the children I sat next to, I'm sad to say, was hoarding some of his food, whether for himself to eat after school or for another family member at home, I don't know.

The second school I visited is Kajiado Girls Primary School, run by the African Inland Church. Located over two hours outside Nairobi in Maasai country, the school originally began as a rescue center for Maasai girls who were being forced into early marriage. Over the years, enrollment has increased exponentially from the initial 20 girls to the current total of 637 girls. The McGovern-Dole program began in 2001 and is administered by WFP.

In the Maasai community, there exists a belief that girls don't deserve an education and should remain at home doing chores. There is also a tradition of arranged marriages between girls as young as age 12 and much older men. At the Kajiado School, many of the girls actually board at the school out of fear that if they return home, they will be forced into marriage. During holidays and when school is not in session, over 100 of the girls remain at the school because they cannot safely return to their homes and villages.

My guide at the school was Head Teacher Mr. Nicolas Muniu, who has been with the school for the past 27 years. He told me that the McGovern-Dole program has contributed significantly to a reduction in the school's drop-out rate. The retention rate and daily attendance are both very high. Given that the school is also a boarding school to many of its students, the food provided contributes significantly to the daily provision of both lunch and dinner. McGovern-Dole has also freed up funds in the school's budget that were used to hire professional cooks, improve the kitchen facilities, purchase local produce, and reduce or eliminate the modest school fees for the neediest pupils.

I was particularly moved by a girl named Grace, who refused her father's demand that she marry an older man when she was only 13.

In response, her father bought a sword with which to kill her, and actually demanded she bring him the weapon to end her life. She fled - and she is now at the school doing exceptionally well. She is the prefect of her class - or "head girl," and is the leading student in mathematics. She is safe, healthy, well-fed, and with an education, will have a bright future. When I talked with this modest, composed young woman, I genuinely felt like I was seeing the potential of Kenya's future.

The lunch I helped serve to Grace and several hundred other girls that afternoon consisted of a split yellow pea soup and a heaping serving of bulgur wheat. All provided through the bounty of our own farmers. I tried some myself, and I must admit it was both filling and very tasty.

When I returned to Washington, I saw a report produced by the Center for Global Development entitled, "Inexcusable Absence: Why 60 million girls still aren't in school and what to do about it." One of the success stories it reviewed is the universal education program in Kenya. And one of the statistics cited said that "In Kenya, school feeding programs raised attendance in program schools 30 percent relative to schools without a free lunch; and test scores were also higher." From my brief visits, I can certainly affirm the likelihood of these results.

Regrettably, since 2002, funding for the program has never come close to its initial $300 million budget. The last farm bill reauthorization provided $100 million for FY 2003, which was to serve as a funding "bridge" for a smooth transition from the GFEI pilot program to the McGovern-Dole Program. In FY 2004 it received only $50 million; $91 million in FY 2005, an increase due largely to strong bipartisan efforts in the House and Senate to increase the funds; and it has been funded at $99 million in FY 2006 and FY 2007. The president's FY 2008 budget proposal once again requests only $100 million for the program.

Erratic funding levels are a serious concern. Even as the program's budget increased from 2004, annual funding is still only a third of what it was in the pilot phase. McGovern-Dole presently reaches less than half the number of children as in the first year, and is operating in less than half the original countries.

I have seen first-hand how devastating these cuts have been for some of the poorest and most vulnerable children in Colombia and Ethiopia. Each country received substantial GFEI projects in 2001 and 2002, but those programs were eliminated when funding was cut to $50 million in 2004 and have never returned. Luckily, in Colombia, USAID stepped in and picked up the former GFEI school feeding programs that were addressing the needs of internally displaced communities. I travel fairly frequently to Colombia, and I still hear requests from the WFP, NGOs and local communities for a return of McGovern-Dole funding and projects. One mother thanked me and the United States for the meals and schooling provided to her children. She told me that the school meals program not only allowed her to send her children to school, but kept her son from being recruited as a child soldier by the paramilitaries and the FARC guerrillas.

Over the April recess, I traveled to Ethiopia to review food aid and food security programs. Ethiopia also benefited from the GFEI pilot program, receiving $5.3 million over 3 years and reaching over 300,000 children. Ethiopia is one of the educationally least developed countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Household food insecurity is a national problem, with an estimated 90 percent of rural household affected either by chronic or transitory food shortages. In food insecure areas of Ethiopia, school children walk an average of three to four kilometers - or one hour - to reach school on an empty stomach each morning, primarily due to food shortages at home. These nutritional and hunger problems reduce the learning capacity of school children, weaken their commitment to school, and hinder their active participation in educational activities. In April, the WFP coordinator for Ethiopia told me that he keeps submitting proposals to USDA for McGovern-Dole programs, but they are not accepted. The reason is simple: the McGovern-Dole Program lacks adequate funding.

Congresswoman Emerson and I have introduced legislation, H.R. 1616, which we believe provides a blueprint for the Committee on how to restore funding for the McGovern-Dole Program back to its original $300 million level over a 5-year period. Currently, the bill has 111 bipartisan cosponsors. I encourage you to review its provisions as you move to take up the farm bill reauthorization in the coming weeks.

Restoring such funding would allow for the McGovern-Dole Program to award multi-year grants of 3-to-5 years in duration, which would greatly increase local confidence in the program and strengthen the ability of projects to build in self-sustaining elements. Such funding levels would also allow for existing programs to expand their reach and for new projects to be funded. And finally, it would allow for funding to be awarded to projects focused on pre-K and early childhood education, projects that are authorized under the McGovern-Dole but which the lack of funds has prevented from moving forward.

I would simply like to conclude by saying that I have traveled to some of the poorest areas of the world, city slums and remote rural areas. Not once did anyone ever ask me for a bomb or a missile or a military base. Instead, mothers and fathers literally beg for help simply to keep their children alive, fed and in school.

When we provide young children with the health care and nutrition they need, we invest in the future potential of every child. When we put a meal in the belly and a book in the hand of a student, new dreams, aspirations and opportunities are born. When we help a community sustain its own school feeding program, then they have often worked out ways to increase overall food production. And when educating girls becomes valued by a community, then they inevitably marry later, have fewer, healthier children, and generate greater income for their own families.

The 9/11 Commission Report recommended significantly greater investment on the part of the United States in economic, social and development programs as a critical part of winning the war against terrorism. Our nation has not taken that recommendation to heart. I believe the McGovern-Dole represents America's very best values, and I urge the Committee to continue its support of this program and to authorize increased funding during consideration of the farm bill reauthorization.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

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