This week, the Senate and House committees in charge of agriculture passed farm bills—mammoth bills that will last for five years if passed and signed—and sent them to their chamber floors. The bills handle farm policy, but the vast majority of their spending goes to a program that has proven a rich target for a Washington drunk on spending cuts—the food stamp program. The House bill would lower benefits across the board, cutting a fourth of the program’s $80 billion budget. The Senate bill would trim $4.4 billion from food stamps. Many of the cuts in both bills come from getting rid of a program that allowed states to streamline the ways they provide assistance to the poor.
This month, the House agriculture committee finished its work on the farm bill—a massive piece of legislation that sets policy on everything from government subsidies to food stamps. Even though the Senate had passed its version of the farm bill, which must be reauthorized every five years, no one expected House Majority Leader John Boehner to bring the House committee’s version to the floor before the August recess.
Something happened today that, chances are, you know little about yet care about very deeply. It helps pay for the lovely farmers market you frequent every weekend. It’s behind all those corn-syrupy soft drinks you’ve been taught to avoid. It’s the reason you started hiking to that one artisanal shop for grass-fed beef after you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It helps feed America’s hungry, because it authorizes the federal food-stamp program, which feeds 46 million people. It’s the farm bill, usually the concern of only the corn, wheat, cotton, peanut, and soy-bean lobby, but it really should be called the food bill, and it has to be reauthorized every five years.
A reader offers some additional context on whether restricting food stamp purchases is necessary to ensure healthy eating on part of recipients:
On food spending among food stamp participants: there is evidence that food stamp receipt does alter how households spend their money on food. Journal article here and ungated report here.
Mark Bittman is apparently a fan of Republican state senator Ronda Storms, who wants to prevent food stamp recipients from buying junk food:
When she introduced a bill to prevent people in Florida from spending food stamps on unhealthy items like candy, chips and soda, she broke ranks: few of her party have taken on Big Food. […]
Yet she makes sense. “It’s just bad public policy to allow unfettered access to all kinds of food,” she told me over the phone. “Why should we cut all of these programs and continue to pay for people to use food stamps to buy potato chips, Oreos and Mountain Dew? The goal is to feed good food to hungry people.”
In October 2008, Michael Pollan, a food writer and critic of American agriculture policy, wrote a letter in The New York Times Magazine addressed to the president-elect, whom everyone then assumed would be Barack Obama, on how to make our food more healthful. Obama wouldn’t win the election for another month, but the lithe, urbane candidate had earned a reputation for eating well on the campaign trail; he eschewed hot dogs for salmon, arugula, and Honest Tea. Food policy had not been at the forefront of the campaign, Pollan argued, but was key to a number of policy goals Obama had raised: “Unless you [reform the food system], you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.
Yesterday, the House and Senate released their final appropriations bill for the current fiscal year. Like the House bill passed in June, the bill, which provides funding to the Department of Agriculture, cuts a number of programs. The National Sustainable Agriculture coalition discusses the programs most hurt in a detailed blog post. One of the areas most hurt is conservation: On the whole, programs that help preserve land were cut by almost $1 billion.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes the GOP's refusal to rest in its battle against food assistance for poor children:
House Republicans are proposing a cut in the WIC nutrition program that would force WIC to turn away 325,000 to 475,000 eligible low-income women and young children next year. This cut — part of the 2012 appropriations bill that Rep. Jack Kingston, chairman of the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee, unveiled today — would break a 15-year commitment by Administrations and Congresses of both parties to provide enough WIC funding to serve all eligible women, infants, and children who apply.
Tim Fernholz, whom you'll remember from his Prospect days, reported at the National Journal today that the House Agriculture Committee has endorsed a cut to the food-stamp program, known as SNAP. SNAP is dealt with within the USDA, and the committee likely wants to deflect potential cuts to direct-payment programs made to farmers, Fernholz notes. President Obama and others have endorsed cuts and reforms to the subsidies program as a way to curb spending, but some of the representatives on the committee likely have wealthy constitutes who benefit.
I'm still poring through Obama's budget proposal, but one thing stands out: the summary says the budget restores the funding cut from food stamps (SNAP) when the childhood nutrition bill passed.
House Republicans delayed a vote on the childhood nutrition bill yesterday by attaching amendments that would change the legislation and therefore kick it back to the Senate. That would probably kill it since there's little time left in the lame duck, and the House wants to pass it as is so that it can go straight to President Obama's desk instead. The bill provides a little more money for the school lunch program and makes it easier for students to enroll in free lunches. It also, importantly, sets new nutritional guidelines for school meals and bars junk food from schools.
As early as tomorrow, the House is poised to reauthorize the Childhood Nutrition Act, which was passed by the Senate before the midterms, to preserve the legislation as is. Of course, the Senate-passed version offset the cost of increased spending on school lunches and other food programs by ending the increased spending on food stamps in the stimulus package earlier than it would have ended otherwise. That has angered anti-hunger advocates and progressive representatives like Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.
Tom Laskawy at Gristran across this CBSreport on school lunches in France. The gourmet, five-course meals that every child eats offer a sharp contrast to our mostly horrible school-lunch system and, as Laskawy notes, it seems impossible for us to institute even modest reforms. The reauthorization of the Childhood Nutrition Act, which the Senate has passed but the House has not, is mired in politics; its fate relies on what happens in November.
