Institute Notes: A Dialogue on Overcoming Hunger and Poverty

Moving Closer to a Coordinated Global Strategy to Reduce Hunger

Congratulations are in order for Ann Tutwiler, who will now head a USDA team supporting the U.S. Global Food Security Initiative. Tutwiler has been a leader in pushing the food security initiative forward. As the USDA representative, she will collaborate with colleagues from other agencies, including USAID, the Treasury Department, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

Here is the official USDA announcement:

Ann will be advised by a Food Security Council comprised of experts from across USDA to ensure that the entire department contributes to the initiative and works closely with other USG partners at the State Department, USAID, and Treasury, among others. The Global Food Security Initiative was launched in 2009 by President Obama as a multi-agency and international effort to reduce hunger and malnutrition in some of the world's poorest countries. Ann will ensure that the department's expertise in creating functioning markets and improving productivity throughout the value chain is brought to bear on one of the greatest challenges of our time. The U.S. and other donors will work with the world's poorest countries to reduce hunger by building strong agricultural sectors. Over the long term, the department's engagement will contribute to the economic growth and market orientation of these countries, which will benefit U.S. farmers and agribusinesses. 

Meanwhile, we still anticipate USAID will take a leadership role in the initiative. Hopefully USDA’s announcement will be the first of many about how the food security initiative will function and who will serve as a coordinator.

Obama's Initiatives on Hunger and Health: The Case for an Integrated Approach

The president is hip-deep in the process of reforming U.S. foreign aid, with multiple initiatives, ongoing studies, and congressional scrutiny. If Secretary Clinton’s speech at the Center for Global Development is any indication, the role of U.S. development assistance will be significantly elevated over the coming months and years.

Guiding principles abound for what reform should look like. One clear need is better coordination within aid programs and across development and diplomacy efforts. The State Department is tackling the question of how to coordinate development and diplomacy agendas, which will likely receive considerable attention in the upcoming Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). Unfortunately, a year into the new administration, the QDDR is still at least a month away.

In the meantime, the administration has launched two large initiatives that will create a blueprint for how aid efforts will work together internally. First, the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative (GHFSI) is an outgrowth of the announcement made at last year’s G8 meeting to increase assistance for agriculture; the U.S. has committed $3 billion over the next three years. Since the announcement, an task force comprised of the National Security Council, State Department, USAID, the Department of Agriculture, the Treasury Department, and the Millennium Challenge Corporation have been working to clarify what a “whole-of-government” approach to development (and food security, in this instance) looks like in practice. The task force is expected to release a revised strategy document later this month.

The other major effort is the Global Health Initiative (GHI), an attempt to integrate U.S. global health efforts into a single coherent program of action. Currently, different funding streams, offices, and actors within the U.S. government tackle different aspects of global health, including the Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator, the Centers for Disease Control, and USAID. The GHI is intended to promote better coordination and cooperation among these groups and to create a more coherent approach to funding different health programs overall. The president plans to spend $63 billion on the GHI.

Where these two initiatives overlap is on the critical issue of nutrition.

Housing and Hunger

Lack of affordable housing is directly related to child hunger, reports Children’s HealthWatch, a Boston-based group, in a new study. Indeed, this may seem like plain old common sense. Now we have good research to make a compelling case for more and better housing assistance as a necessity for reaching the President’s goal of ending child hunger by 2015. 

The study also reinforces the recommendations Bread for the World Institute offers on housing policy in the 2010 Hunger Report, A Just and Sustainable Recovery. 

Children's HealthWatch compared two groups of children in Boston over a 10-year stretch, 1998-2008. One group was families with children receiving public housing support; the other was families with children at the same income level as the former but not on housing assistance. In the households getting assistance, the children were:

• More likely be food secure.
• Less likely to be seriously underweight.
• More likely to be classified as “well” on a composite indicator of child health.

“The research also found that subsidized housing made the greatest difference in protecting the growth of children living in families struggling to put enough food on the table (households classified as food insecure). Food insecure children living in subsidized housing were 52 percent less likely to be seriously underweight than food insecure children on the wait list.” 

Housing is normally a family’s greatest expense. It’s not uncommon for families to spend 50 percent of their income on housing in an expensive metropolitan area like Boston. A housing subsidy reduces housing costs to 30 percent of family income, freeing up money that can be spent on food. No matter what the family earns, they only pay 30 percent of their income on housing. Compare this to families not on assistance:

“In 2008, a family living in the Boston metropolitan area needed to make $54,120 or approximately $26.00 an hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment renting at the fair market rent of $1,353.8 Members of a family earning minimum wage would need to work a combined 130 hours a week to afford this same apartment—an impossible challenge for families with one or two adults. Boston’s low-income families clearly are looking for a needle in a haystack when it comes to finding an apartment they can afford.” 

The lack of affordable housing available to low-income families has only gotten worse since the recession. Remember, the recession started with a bust in the housing market, which has led to record numbers of foreclosures. This has pushed more families out of homes and into the rental housing market and driving up the cost of rents.

A pediatrician quoted in the study, when asked about treating undernourished children, explained, "What do I really wish I could do? I wish I could write a prescription for affordable housing."

New Hope for Malnourished Mothers and Children

The Administration continues to refine its Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative. The announcement at the G8 and subsequent emphasis on agriculture and food security is exciting and a welcome return to investing in areas that are critical to help people escape from poverty.

Bread for the World is urging the administration to include nutrition as a core area of emphasis in the new Initiative. The initial consultation document includes a substantial focus on nutrition, but as with all first drafts, it needs refinement. A recent briefing paper from the Institute, New Hope for Malnourished Mothers and Children, outlines further recommendations for the new initiative. Our recommendations include:

SNAP to attention, America

The New York Times has an article about the dramatic rise in the number of people enrolled in the Food Stamp Program. In fact, this is a misnomer the Times perpetuates. The nation’s flagship nutrition program is now named SNAP, i.e. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Several hundred words into the article, authors Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff explain the change had to due with the stigma associated with food stamps. Why then continue to perpetuate the food stamp brand by using the outdated name of the program instead of SNAP in the title of the article: "Food Stamp Use Soars, Stigma Fades"?

My concerns about the title aside, the article does a decent job of humanizing the problem of hunger in the United States. It includes some compelling stories. One of the people profiled is an electrician, whom I guess we could describe as the protagonist in the story, formerly too proud to seek help. Now, given his own troubles, he has had a change of heart about the people he used to think were just chiselers.

With most of his co-workers laid off, Greg Dawson, a third-generation electrician in rural Martinsville, considers himself lucky to still have a job. He works the night shift for a contracting firm, installing freezer lights in a chain of grocery stores. But when his overtime income vanished and his expenses went up, Mr. Dawson started skimping on meals to feed his wife and five children. 

He tried to fill up on cereal and eggs. He ate a lot of Spam. Then he went to work with a grumbling stomach to shine lights on food he could not afford. When an outreach worker appeared at his son’s Head Start program, Mr. Dawson gave in.

“It’s embarrassing,” said Mr. Dawson, 29, a taciturn man with a wispy goatee who is so uneasy about the monthly benefit of $300 that he has not told his parents. “I always thought it was people trying to milk the system. But we just felt like we really needed the help right now.”

For readers who want to pour over lots of data, the article includes, or at least the online version does, SNAP usage rates in every county of the country, broken down by several useful indicators, like race, children, and rates of program growth since the start of the recession.

It's Not All About Unemployment

There's definitely more information worth highlighting in the new government food security data released on Monday.

"Fifty-five percent of the food-insecure households surveyed in 2008 said that in the previous month they had participated in one or more of the three largest Federal food and nutrition programs--the National School Lunch Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, the new name for the Food Stamp Program), and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).

The thing is, why only 55 percent? Here's some other information:

Among households reporting food insecurity, 42.2 percent had incomes below the official poverty line.

Once again, I'd ask why only this much? Presumably, most food insecure households you'd think would be poor, right?

These two findings from the study, I think, set into focus something we have to think about if we want to get really serious about reducing hunger in this country. Plenty of people above the poverty line go hungry because they earn too much to qualify for nutrtion programs, but not enough to cover basic living expenses. So they scrimp on food, one of the most fungible items in any household's budget. 

Lots of people lost their job during the recession. Of course the number of people on food assistance skyrocketed. But for those people who didn't lose their jobs and whose income was between 100-200 percent of poverty (and higher in some high-costs areas of the country like New York City, San Francisco, Washington, DC), they continued to struggle, as they always struggle, because of exorbitant costs of living. Among people surveyed in the study with incomes between 100-130 percent of poverty and between 130-185 percent of poverty, food insecurity rates were 42.5 percent and 37.5 percent respectively.

The food insecurity numbers will decrease once people start going back to work. But for those people still earning too much to qualify for public assistance, but not enough to get the food they need, their problems will not go away, not unless we come up with a better, and more accurate, description of what poverty means in the United States. 

Obama responds to dramatic rise in hunger

The Obama administration responded yesterday to the release of new government data on domestic food security that revealed a dramatic rise in hunger since the start of the recession.

Below is the entire statement with a short commentary afterwards.

“As American families prepare to gather for Thanksgiving, we received an unsettling report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that found that hunger rose significantly last year. This trend was already painfully clear in many communities across our nation, where food stamp applications are surging and food pantry shelves are emptying.

It is particularly troubling that there were more than 500,000 families in which a child experienced hunger multiple times over the course of the year. Our children’s ability to grow, learn, and meet their full potential – and therefore our future competitiveness as a nation – depends on regular access to healthy meals.

My Administration is committed to reversing the trend of rising hunger. The first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day. But we are also taking targeted steps to prevent Americans from experiencing hunger. Earlier this year, we extended help to those hit hardest by this economic downturn by boosting SNAP benefits. And Secretary Vilsack is working hard to make sure eligible families are able to access those benefits as well as the School Lunch and Breakfast Program. In addition, a bill I signed into law last month invests $85 million in new strategies to prevent children from experiencing hunger in the summer.

Hunger is a problem that we can solve together, and I look forward to working with Congress to pass a strong child nutrition bill that will help children get the healthy meals they need to grow and succeed – and help keep America competitive in the decades to come.”

I want to underscore one sentence in the above: "The first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day."

Indeed, Mr. President. Bread for the World Institute is here to offer your administration some advice.

Next week the Institute will be releasing the 2010 Hunger Report: A Just and Sustainable Recovery, laying out an agenda to restore job growth. The 2010 report is a follow up to our 2008 Hunger Report: Working Harder for Working Families in which we looked at the programs and policies that make up the safety net working families depend on. We cover a little bit of that ground in the 2010 report, but A Just and Sustainable Recovery is focused much more on the U.S. economy writ large and what it will take to get it growing again and continue to grow sustainably for everyone.

Lots more is coming on the new report starting in a few days.

 

Huge rise in domestic hunger reported by US government

Today, the government updated current information of food security in the United States, revealing a huge rise in the number of Americans that are food insecure, meaning they were at risk of hunger or had experienced hunger during the annual period data were collected.

It is the largest jump in food insecurity and the most number of people that are food insecure at any time since 1995, when the government began keeping track of domestic food security.

Here's a quick breakdown - keep in mind these numbers are for 2008 and don't cover the deepest period of the recession:

• 49.1 million Americans were food insecure in 2008 - up from 36.2 million in 2007

• 16.67 million were children - up from 12.43 million from 2007

• 22.5 percent of all children were food insecure - up from 16.9 percent in 2007

• 14.6 percent of all households were food insecure - up from 11.1 percent in 2008

• 5.7 percent of households experienced "very low food security," a term the government has been using the last few years as a stand in for hunger - and this was up from 4.1 percent in 2007.

While these numbers were not entirely unexpected, they still present a terribly alarming piece of news, depicting the grim toll this recession is having. 

Congratulations to Sharon Thornberry

Normally, the focus here at the Institute is on national issues or international food security or poverty in the developing world, but sometimes anti-hunger efforts at the local level speak to larger issues in such a clear and riveting way, their importance beyond what’s happening locally resonates instantly.

The Oregonian published a story on November 9 about Sharon Thornberry, who works with the Oregon Food Bank and also happens to be a Bread for the World board member, and was recently named a public health genius by the Community Health Partnership.

The citation of the award reads:

The 2009 Billi Odegaard Public Health Genius is Sharon Thornberry, Community Food Programs Advocate at the Oregon Food Bank. Sharon has been influential in policy advocacy, coalition building, and incubating many ‘grassroots’ food-related efforts from conception to completion. She has tirelessly dedicated herself to increasing access to healthy food for low-income communities – particularly in often overlooked rural Oregon.

What Thornberry has been doing for years, or more like decades, is connecting the problem of hunger with the problem of food systems. “The failure of our food system has such an affect on our health,” Thornberry says. “Without working on the food system, we will never be well.”

A food system approach to hunger, as spelled out by the Community Food Security Coalition, where Thornberry has also been a board member, “might address the problem of child obesity  by looking at the lack of fruits and vegetables in the diet; the lack of fresh fruit and vegetable vendors in a neighborhood (and the surplus of calorically dense food); the dearth of local gardening opportunities, farms, and farmers’ markets as sources of fresh fruits and vegetables; the diminishing knowledge base regarding fruit and vegetable recognition and preparation; and a decline in school-based physical education programs.”

More than a Billion Hungry

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN came out with new numbers late last week on the state of global food insecurity, and the bottom-line message is there are now more than a billion chronically hungry people in the world. To be exact, the number is 1.02 billion, or roughly one of every six people on the planet. 

Every year FAO publishes a report on the state of food insecurity, and this year's was released on the eve of World Food Day, October 16. It seems apt given the historic crossing of the threshold. This is the first time the number of hungry in the world has crossed over a billion, and while in recent decades the percentages of chronically hungry people have been decreasing (in the1960s, one out of every three people was hungry), the trends over the last 15 years or so suggests progress has become much tougher to come by.

 
The financial crisis and the severity of the global recession have had a profound effect on the dramatic rise in hunger from 2008 to 2009. If things seem rough here at home, where Americans spend between 5-15 percent of their income on food, the situation is downright grim in the developing world, where poor people spend 70 percent of their income on food in good times.