Food insecurity worsens and House Ag Committee cuts food stamps

Charles Abbott of Reuters has the story:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On a party-line vote, a Republican-run U.S. House of Representatives committee voted to cut food stamps by $844 million on Friday, just hours after a new government report showed more Americans are struggling to put food on the table.

About 300,000 Americans would lose benefits due to tighter eligibility rules for food stamps, the major U.S. antihunger program, under the House plan. The cuts would be part of $3.7 billion pared from Agriculture Department programs over five years as part of government-wide spending reductions.

Agriculture Committee chairman Bob Goodlatte defended the decision, saying only a sliver of food stamp spending was affected and, for the most part, the cuts would eliminate people not truly eligible.

"This is not a giveaway program that results in windfall profits," said North Carolina Democrat G.K. Butterfield in opposing the cuts. "That is not moral. That is not American."

Antihunger activists said hunger rates were up for the fifth year in a row, so the cuts were a mistake.

Abbott's story quotes me about how this year's new USDA food security statistics compare to previous years' numbers.

Household food insecurity deteriorated in 2004 by a record amount

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported today that household food insecurity increased by a record amount in 2004, and now equals the worst levels since data collection began. Household food insecurity improved from 1995 until 1999, and then worsened steadily every year from 1999 until 2004. USDA said today that 11.9 % of U.S. households were insecure in 2004, up from 11.2 % in 2003. This increase represents the largest one-year deterioration in U.S. food insecurity since data collection began in 1995.

USDA reported that 3.9 % of U.S. households experienced "food insecurity with hunger" in 2004, up from 3.5 % in 2003.

Household food insecurity is measured with a battery of 18 survey questions about symptoms of food-related hardship. According to the official definition, "food security" means access by all household members at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life. "Food insecurity" means the household was not classified as food secure.

In the Fall of 2004, the Bush administration delayed release of food insecurity numbers from October until after the election in November. In this Friedman School policy point last October, I tried to press USDA to make the results public before the election, but with no success. This year, the statistics were released in October as scheduled.

The 37 references in today's USDA report do not include this 2002 USDA report about progress toward the official federal target of 6 percent food insecurity by the year 2010. The omitted 2002 report described the solemn commitment the United States made to improve food security:

At the World Food Summit in 1996, the United States, along with 185 other countries, adopted the “Rome Declaration,” which begins with this commitment:

"We pledge our political will and our common and national commitment to achieving food security for all and to an ongoing effort to eradicate hunger in all countries, with an immediate view to reducing the number of undernourished people to half their present level no later than 2015."

Here below is a chart showing how today's new statistics compare to the federal government's official goals, as expressed in the "Rome Declaration," the Healthy People 2010 objectives, and USDA's strategic goals.

Moving in the WRONG Direction:
Household Food Insecurity Deteriorates
Faster than Ever

The top line shows actual rates of household food insecurity, and the bottom line reproduces the trend line contained in the 2002 USDA report describing intended progress toward the national goals. Because the .jpg image did not work so well, here is a better Acrobat version of the same image.

For more information on how household food security measurement can be used by federal policy makers, see my report to a panel of the National Academies last summer. For information on food stamps and food security, see this conference paper, published in the Review of Agricultural Economics, which I wrote in collaboration with Mark Nord, the lead author of today's USDA report.

Update: I think this story may be a U.S. Food Policy scoop. It does not appear to be on the wires yet. But this AP story was posted to the Fox website a couple hours ago -- the Agriculture Committee in the Republican controlled House of Representatives apparently is considering a cut in food stamps today.

Befuddle an economist

I am drafting a two-minute “stewardship moment” speech that I have been asked to give in church this coming Sunday.

Some of you know that I am by profession and training an economist. It is not always something I am eager to mention in church.

Many lay people think economics is the study of money or finance. Economists themselves define their science as a particular outlook on the social world. For example, one of the best and simplest ways to understand the behavior of businesses is to imagine that the business owners seek to pay as little as possible for their raw materials, and to earn as high a price as possible for their products, thereby making as much profit as possible within the constraints of existing technology. Similarly, economists typically imagine that families like yours and mine seek to maximize our happiness by buying as much as possible within the constraints of our budgets. Everybody wants to maximize something as much as possible within their constraints.

Sometimes this thinking is carried to extremes. An economist got a Nobel Prize in part for an economic model in which men and women choose between marriage and divorce based on a comparison of their likely earnings as married people or single people, with some adjustment for whatever pleasure they might take in each other’s company.

So you can imagine that economists have sometimes been befuddled by our common practice as people of faith, in synagogues, mosques, and churches, of giving away large fractions of our money – larger fractions, I believe, than people give away in the wider secular society. Perhaps, our donations are a form of assistance to our extended clans, frequently related to us by blood. Perhaps, some economists have suggested, these donations are part of a quid pro quo, in which I help you now in return for your help later. Perhaps, some have suggested, these donations are just part of an informal mutual insurance scheme. The problem is that some people are giving more money away, to more distant beneficiaries, than can be explained by these theories.

Perhaps, some economists have suggested, some people just get happy giving their money away, so that’s why these selfish church people give and give and give. But even other secular economists realized this argument had become a tautology, begging the question of why some people are happy giving their money away.

Two weeks ago, in one of these “stewardship minutes,” Mike P___ eloquently offered some of the most common reasons why people of faith say they give generously. He explained that his wife gives simply out of heartfelt gratitude for the many gifts she has been given. He explained that he himself gives from a feeling of the importance of stewardship, knowing that God wants these gifts to be used for God’s purpose.

Since the important reasons have already been taken by Mike, let me offer my own humble additional reason. Have some fun! Befuddle an economist! Give generously! Somewhere, some day, in some windowless room, in front of a flickering computer screen, some economist will scratch her head and wonder what she is missing.

Former FDA chief Lester Crawford held biotech stocks

Following on our earlier coverage of Lester Crawford's sudden resignation from FDA, Reuters reported yesterday that the former administrator or his wife had owned stock in companies regulated by his agency. Reuters cited a Wall Street Journal article that we cannot find free online, so we quote the Reuters report:

An ethics official sought more information on the June disclosures and noted on the form that Crawford's broker would be sending more information, the report said.

Unlike prior disclosures, the June form lacks an ethics official's signature. A signature would indicated that the information complied with laws and regulations, the paper reported.

It is not known whether ethics officials viewed the holdings as a conflict of interest or whether these transactions were a cause of Crawford's decision to leave the agency.

Both the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, and Crawford declined to comment, the paper said.

And in other surprising news ....

"Cheeseburger Bill" passes the House of Representatives

The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed the federal "Cheeseburger Bill," to protect restaurants and other food sellers against obesity related litigation. Sponsors say the bill would still permit lawsuits when manufacturers or advertisers broke a contract or a law in selling their product, such as by lying in nutrition information provided about the product. Critics fear the law is drawn too broadly and will protect companies from legitimate lawsuits in addition to its intended effect of preventing frivolous lawsuits. The bill is supported by the administration, but may not have sufficient support to pass in the U.S. Senate.

The bill's lead sponsor in the House, Rep. Rick Keller (R-FL), "was unable to vote on his own legislation because he was in an Orlando hospital for treatment of a heart condition," according to an article by Bob Dart in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

"There are no plans in the works for lawsuits against the fast food restaurants" that his boss has frequented, joked the congressman's spokesman, Bryan Malenius. He said the surgical insertion of a heart monitoring device was "non-cheeseburger related."

Thanks to the CalorieLab weblog for the link. According to the weblog:

“I have a choice to make when I visit my favorite fast food restaurant,” the rotund, 41-year-old Rep. Keller has said. “Do I order the triple cheeseburger and ice cream sundae? Or do I order the grilled chicken salad and Diet Coke? Obviously, my waistline tells you which choice I make more often. But that’s the point — it’s my decision to make.”

Associated Press: Senate rejects food stamp cuts

The House and Senate Agriculture committees were under instructions to find $3 billion in cuts over five years from programs under their jurisdiction. This led to suggestions by the farm lobby that the cuts should come disproportionately from food stamps. As recently as yesterday, there was talk that the fiscal conservatives were gaining the upper hand over W. Bush conservatives in budget arguements. Yet, today, the more sober house of Congress seems to have rejected these food stamp cuts.

According to an AP report this morning (via the Washington Post):

Senate Republicans have dropped plans to cut the popular food stamp program, as the chamber's leaders scrambled to assemble a $35 billion spending cut measure to implement the budget plan it adopted in April.

After protests from Agriculture Committee members Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) and James M. Talent (R-Mo.), panel Chairman Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) dropped more than $500 million in food stamp cuts from a farm and food subsidy measure coming to a committee vote today. The cuts could have meant a loss of benefits for 300,000 working families benefiting from more generous eligibility rules in some states.

No more "donkey bollocks"

Following up on an earlier post, New York Magazine reported recently:

‘Naked Chef’ Cafeteria Duty
No more “donkey bollocks” for kids! Jamie Oliver’s on NYC schools recon mission.

Naked Chef *Jamie Oliver* is thinking of bringing his school-lunch crusade to New York. Earlier this year, he did a four-part TV show in England called /Jamie’s School Dinners/, during which he blendered entire chickens to show where nuggets come from and danced around in a corn-on-the-cob costume. Eventually, he got *Tony Blair* to set aside $536 million to improve school meals. “America’s kids have some of the worst health issues because of eating junk and not exercising,” he says. “I thought maybe we could help here. Help them eat real food instead of packaged lies. You know, turkey which is real turkey and not donkey bollocks.” Brokers at Mark David rented him a five-story West Village townhouse (at over $35,000 a month) as his headquarters for a monthlong recon of the city’s cafeterias (most of which are presumably far from Greenwich Village). —Beth Landman