Concerning the Importance of the Distribution of Food in School to Hungry or Malnorished Children Around the World
CONCERNING THE IMPORTANCE OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF FOOD IN SCHOOLS TO HUNGRY OR MALNOURISHED CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD -- (House of Representatives - July 14, 2004)
Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and concur in the Senate concurrent resolution (S. Con. Res. 114) concerning the importance of the distribution of food in schools to hungry or malnourished children around the world.
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Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I thank the eloquent gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos) for yielding me this time and thank him for his great work on this and so many other issues, including humanitarian concerns around our globe. Also to the gentleman from Illinois (Chairman Hyde) and the gentleman from New Jersey (Chairman Smith), who is with us here tonight, for moving this legislation, and to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), who has been such a faithful leader as well. It is a joy to be with them.
Mr. Speaker, I will share a story about the idea that anchors this program and how it originally started. In February of 2000, I had the pleasure of visiting with Senator George McGovern while he served as U.S. Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. At that time he shared with me an editorial that he had written that he was hoping would get published in the Washington Post at the end of that month, and it was.
Referring to our own school lunch program here in our country, he asked a simple but provocative question, this man of the world and a decorated fighter pilot from World War II. He said, "Why not provide a similar modest meal every day for every needy child in the world?" He was thinking big, as he always thought big, and he knew that hunger and poverty was at the root of desperation, that it is at the root of what makes young people susceptible to the siren cry of all that is horrible, including terrorism. And he knew this before 9-11 because he had worked on it throughout his career, from his days as director of the Food for Peace Program through his days in the Senate and to this very moment as one of the world's most eloquent proponents on behalf of people who ask only for a fair chance at a decent life.
We came back to Washington, and when Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman was Secretary and Under Secretary for Farm and International Agricultural Programs was Gus Schumacher, we were able to move legislation through the administration and this House as part of the fiscal 2001 appropriation bill to support the beginnings of this program.
Later that summer, President Clinton announced the creation of the program, encouraging other nations to join with us; and this all culminated in the McGovern-Dole Global Food Program, established as one of the greatest accomplishments of the 2002 Farm bill.
We started with $300 million, but unfortunately that declined every year, bottoming out in the current fiscal year of $56 million. The bill that we had on the floor yesterday raised it to a level of $75 million but serving only a fraction of the need that Senator McGovern had originally imagined; that well over $1 billion, we spend all of that on weapons, but here is food. Just imagine if we could put food in schools that would counter the madrassas in some of the most troubled parts of the world, what a difference we could make.
So I am pleased to join with my colleagues tonight to commend the gentlemen for bringing this wonderful bill to the floor to recognize the McGovern-Dole Global Food Program and to provide the kind of funding and support for it that could affect the lives of literally millions and millions of the young people of the Earth who will be our leaders of the future.
So as Senator McGovern said in his original editorial, there is no more useful task in the modern world than feeding the children on whom the future depends, and it is the right thing to do.
I include the following material for the Record:
[From the Washington Post Web site, Feb. 27, 2000]
Too Many Children Are Hungry. Time for Lunch
(By George McGovern)
ROME.-On a recent fact-finding trip through Africa that took me to some of the most painfully destitute areas of the planet, I visited villages where conditions were heartbreaking: overcrowded shacks, no water safe to drink, no medical care, primitive agriculture, emaciated women and children. What touched my soul most deeply was one village school. Hungry youngsters yawned or stared vacantly, seemingly unable to concentrate on anything other than their empty stomachs. During recess, there was no childish laughter, no running or playing-only the same lethargy and weariness that pervaded the classroom.
The saddest part of that scene was its terrible familiarity. In the 40 years that I have observed food assistance programs, I have seen similar poverty in Asia and Latin America. Conditions are nearly as bad in parts of Russia and the Balkans.
There are now an estimated 790 million chronically hungry people in the world, of whom 300 million are school-age or younger. Most of them live in Africa and Asia.
We in the United States can do something about it. We can emulate one of the most beneficial programs ever launched on behalf of children-the U.S. school lunch program. For the past 22 years-through legislation I cosponsored with former senator Robert Dole-America has provided a nutritious meal to almost any student who can't afford one; currently, about 27 million children are fed every day. By any reasonable criteria, this program has been a smashing success. It attracts children to school and keeps them there under conditions in which they are able to learn and grow.
Why not provide a similar modest meal every day for every needy child in the world? Could not such a program of health, healing and hope be the centerpiece of the current U.N. commitment to cut world hunger in half by the year 2015?
The U.N. World Food Program already has launched some efforts in this direction. After considerable discussion with some of the world's experts in nutrition and food assistance, I have concluded that it would be both practical and right for the United States, within the U.N. framework, to take the lead in organizing a worldwide school lunch program.
There is precedent for success in this approach. In 1961, shortly after President John F. Kennedy named me the first director of U.S. Food for Peace, I received a telephone call from a dean at the University of Georgia. He told me that in his judgment, the federal school lunch program had done more to advance the development of the South than any other federal program. He pointed out that malnourished children seldom make good strudents-it's difficult to concentrate on reading, writing and arithmetic when you are hungry. He concluded: "If I had to preserve one federal program above all others, I would choose the school lunch program." And he urged me to draw on its example in extending Food for Peace help to our fellow humans abroad.
I soon found a place to experiment with the dean's conviction-the poverty stricken Puno area of Peru. Puno had an illiteracy rate of 90 percent-unsurprising, since nine out of 10 students dropped out of school by the sixth grade. Even those brief years of education were blighted by malnutrition, lethargy and dulled minds.
With the cooperation of a remarkable priest, the Rev. John McClellan of the Maryknoll Fathers, I launched a school lunch program in Puno in October 1961. The United States made the food available, and the Maryknoll Fathers-with the help of local parents-prepared and served it. The government of Prime Minister Pedro Beltran built kitchens and dining halls and assisted with distribution. Forty-five Peace Corps workers contributed to the effort.
We began by feeding 30,000 children. Within six months, school attendance had increased 40 percent and academic performance had improved by 50 percent. That kind of success inspired expansion: By 1965, Peru was feeding more than 1 million schoolchildren a day.
And it wasn't just happening in Peru. Three years after the first program was launched in Puno, Food for Peace was providing 12 million children in Latin America with meals. Today, with local governments carrying most of the cost, the figure has more than doubled.
It is difficult to locate an informed person in Latin America who doesn't sing the praises of the school lunch program. Study after study shows that a higher percentage of children attend school and remain through graduation when lunch is provided. Academic performance improves. Children are not only smarter but stronger.
And there is another benefit in an overcrowded world: As a society's educational level rises-especially among girls-the birthrate goes down. Education is the surest foundation for responsible family planning.
Some may ask: Can the United States, even with the help of other nations, afford all this? What will it cost American taxpayers? These are legitimate questions, and they deserve thoughtful answers.
Having studied a number of cost analyses, I believe that we could launch a start-up program, providing lunches to millions of hungry schoolchildren not now being fed, for about $3 billion a year. This would expand some existing U.N. and local programs, and would include a three-tiered price system similar to the one in the United States: Depending on what their families can afford, students pay all, part or none of the cost of their meal. That $3 billion would be provided in the same way as funding for most international relief programs-with 25 percent paid by the United States, and the rest by other donor nations.
In addition, I would recommend that the United Nations copy another wonderfully successful American program-the supplementary feeding program for pregnant and nursing women and their children below the age of 5, known as WIC.
It is in these early years that a child is most likely to be scarred and handicapped for life by malnutrition. I estimate that a serious attempt at beginning a worldwide WIC program would cost close to $1 billion a year, with the United States again paying 25 percent.
For both programs, therefore, the initial cost to American taxpayers would be about $1 billion a year. Over the subsequent years, the programs would grow in scope-and presumably in cost.
But the United States would benefit, too. First, since most of the U.S. contribution would be in the form of agricultural commodities, the market for cereal grain, dairy products and livestock would be strengthened. Second, since U.S. law requires that at least half of all foreign assistance must be carried in American ships, our Merchant Marine would benefit materially-as would the trucks and trains carrying the commodities to ports for shipment.
Over the past year, I have talked with ranchers and farmers in my home state, South Dakota, and in Montana who tell me they can't hold on for more than another year or two unless there is some relief from price-depressing surpluses. Ironically, it is the efficiency and productivity of American farmers, the best in the world, that breeds the low prices now threatening to put them out of business. It would be a happier irony if feeding hungry children became the means of helping to save American farmers, ranchers and dairymen.
Other farm surplus countries such as France, Canada and Australia would experience similar benefits.
We now that the emergency demands of World Wars I and II greatly stimulated the farm and industrial economies of the United States. The cost of these gigantic wars was enormous-vastly larger than what is proposed here for a war against hunger. But they greatly enriched the American economy. We could expect proportionate benefits from a school lunch program.
More than half a century ago, I flew 35 missions as a bomber pilot, operating from a base in Cerignola, Italy. I never doubted the soundness of our cause in helping to smash Hitler's terrible war machine. But I'm especially proud of my final mission: At the end of the war, we filled our bombers with unused military rations and flew them to the devastated cities of Europe. I will never forget the grateful people, some of them our recent enemies, waiting eagerly to receive and distribute the boxes of surplus food. I imagined some of these same people taking cover from our bombs only a short time earlier, now looking into the skies for hope and deliverance.
That postwar food delivery was practical: There would have been no point in hauling unused C-rations back to the United States. It was effective: We fed people who might have starved, and we began the process of rebuilding war-torn Europe. Most of all, it was the right thing to do.
For the same reasons, we should enlist today in the effort to provide a daily meal to every needy student around the world. Having returned to Italy after so many years, I believe that my mission again is practical: Americans produce more food than we can eat or profitably sell. It can be effective: There is no more useful task in the modern world than feeding the children on whom its future depends. And it is the right thing to do.
George McGovern is the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. His book, "Ending World Hunger in Our Time," will be published this fall by Simon & Schuster.