[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
FISCAL YEAR 2008 BUDGET PRIORITIES
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
HEARING HELD IN WASHINGTON, DC, FEBRUARY 15, 2007
__________
Serial No. 110-8
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on the Budget
Available on the Internet:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/house/budget/index.html
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COMMITTEE ON THE BUDGET
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina, Chairman
ROSA L. DeLAURO, Connecticut, PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin,
CHET EDWARDS, Texas Ranking Minority Member
LOIS CAPPS, California J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina
JIM COOPER, Tennessee JO BONNER, Alabama
THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine SCOTT GARRETT, New Jersey
ALLYSON Y. SCHWARTZ, Pennsylvania THADDEUS G. McCOTTER, Michigan
MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio MARIO DIAZ-BALART, Florida
XAVIER BECERRA, California JEB HENSARLING, Texas
LLOYD DOGGETT, Texas DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon MICHAEL K. SIMPSON, Idaho
MARION BERRY, Arkansas PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
ALLEN BOYD, Florida CONNIE MACK, Florida
JAMES P. McGOVERN, Massachusetts K. MICHAEL CONAWAY, Texas
BETTY SUTTON, Ohio JOHN CAMPBELL, California
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey PATRICK J. TIBERI, Ohio
ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia JON C. PORTER, Nevada
BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina RODNEY ALEXANDER, Louisiana
DARLENE HOOLEY, Oregon ADRIAN SMITH, Nebraska
BRIAN BAIRD, Washington
DENNIS MOORE, Kansas
TIMOTHY H. BISHOP, New York
Professional Staff
Thomas S. Kahn, Staff Director and Chief Counsel
James T. Bates, Minority Chief of Staff
C O N T E N T S
Page
Hearing held in Washington, DC, February 15, 2007................ 1
Statement of:
Hon. John M. Spratt, Jr., Chairman, House Committee on the
Budget..................................................... 1
Hon. Paul Ryan, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Wisconsin............................................... 2
Hon. Mike Johanns, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture. 3
Prepared statement of.................................... 7
Dr. Deborah A. Frank, director, Grow Clinic for Children at
Boston Medical Center, and principal investigator,
Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP).. 52
Prepared statement of.................................... 58
Denise Holland, executive director, Harvest Hope Food Bank... 64
Prepared statement of.................................... 68
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
FISCAL YEAR 2008 BUDGET PRIORITIES
----------
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2007
House of Representatives,
Committee on the Budget,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to call, at 2:08 p.m., in room
210, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. John M. Spratt, Jr.
[Chairman of the Committee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Spratt, DeLauro, Cooper, Allen,
Kaptur, Becerra, Doggett, Blumenauer, Berry, Boyd, McGovern,
Etheridge, Hooley, Moore, Bishop, Ryan, Bonner, Hensarling,
Lungren, Tiberi, Alexander, Smith.
Chairman Spratt. I would like to begin this hearing, the
first thing, I welcome and thanks to our three distinguished
witnesses, on the first panel, the Secretary of Agriculture,
Mike Johanns, in addition, Deputy Secretary Conner and Budget
Officer Scott Steele, and Chief Economist Keith Collins.
Furthermore, I would like to welcome our witnesses on the
second panel, Dr. Deborah Frank and Denise Holland of the
Harvest Hope Bank in South Carolina.
Thank you, all of you, for taking time out to meet with us
today. Your testimony and your answers to our questions will
help us as we move forward with our own budget, and we value
your contribution and your addition to the budget process.
The purpose of this hearing is twofold. In the first panel,
we want to discuss both USDA's 2008 budget request and USDA's
proposals for reauthorizing the Farm Bill that expires at the
end of this year, a major hurdle as we go forward in this
fiscal year.
This hearing will provide the members of this Committee a
chance to ask the Secretary in greater detail and depth how his
budget and the Farm Bill will impact important programs that
provide valuable services to our communities.
For example, Mr. Secretary, we would like to explore with
you in greater detail your proposals for the Department's food
and nutrition programs. We are likewise interested in
understanding how your proposals will impact rural communities
which many of us represent, such as your proposed changes in
the Rural Housing Program.
Because the Farm Bill is expiring this year, we are given a
significant opportunity to improve the programs that provide
safety nets not only for the nation's farmers and ranchers but
also for natural resources, for rural communities, and for low-
income citizens.
I know, Mr. Secretary, that you and your Department have
spent considerable time and energy over the past two weeks
meeting with interested groups and explaining your proposals to
those of us here in Congress.
I appreciate your willingness to meet with us on this
Budget Committee and give us an opportunity to learn in greater
detail how your proposals would reform the Farm Bill.
We are particularly interested in discussing with you
USDA's proposals on the commodity, conservation, and nutrition
titles of your bill. There are some inconsistencies with your
budget request for 2008 also that members may wish to explore.
We have a second panel, and we will hear on the second
panel from two guests who have taken the problem and tackled
the problem head on of poverty in their communities, and hunger
in their communities.
According to the USDA, in 2005, 34 million Americans were
food insecure. Nearly 11 million were hungry, went to bed
hungry, 606,000 of them children. Unfortunately, many of the
families struggling with hunger live in my State of South
Carolina and I know the problem firsthand. I have seen it
firsthand, but it is one that afflicts the whole country.
Dr. Deborah Frank spends her days treating poor children
suffering from malnutrition at her Boston clinic. Another part
of the country, but still no part of the country escapes this
problem.
Denise Holland is the Executive Director of the Harvest
Hope Food Bank which provides food for 149,000 people in
central South Carolina who otherwise would have to do without.
I look forward to hearing from both witness, Dr. Frank and
Mrs. Holland, about the real people who they are trying to help
and their suggestions for how we in the Congress can help also.
Mr. Secretary, we welcome you here today. We will accept
your statement for the record so that you can summarize or
paraphrase as you please. But before going to you, let me offer
the floor to Mr. Ryan for any comments he may wish to make.
Mr. Ryan. I thank the Chairman.
I also, too, want to extend our heartfelt welcome to
Secretary Johanns. It is nice to have you here.
There is no question that the Farm Bill provides programs,
a critical safety net for our family farmers across the nation.
This is certainly true in my home State of Wisconsin where
agriculture is a $51 billion industry in our State's economy.
And in my district where we contribute heavily to the nation's
output of dairy, corn, and soybeans, it is a big issue where I
come from.
That said, there is no question that these programs can be
reformed and improved to better meet the needs of the family
farmer. Not only do we need to make these programs more cost
effective, we need to do a better job of allocating resources
for these programs to those who actually need them.
I do not believe that we should be sending federal support
checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to any one farmer
who is probably pretty well off already. That was never the
point of these programs.
We have got to ensure that we are focusing this assistance
to helping the family farmer who for reasons completely outside
of their control, weather, disease, pest damage, et cetera, are
going to run into trouble every now and then.
Those are the people these programs were intended to help
in the first place. Along these lines, I am pleased to see in
the President's budget a proposal to means test for farm
program assistance.
One of the main provisions of this plan would be to
prohibit commodity program subsidies to producers who are among
the top 2.3 percent of American farmers with adjusted gross
incomes above $200,000 or more.
I also support the President's proposal to update the
financial instruments that are available to family farmers.
And, finally, I believe we should return to a freedom to farm
model which allows our nation's farmers to make their own
production decisions without interference from the federal
government.
There are a lot of ideas out there on how Farm Bill
programs can be improved, and I think we need to have those
discussions. The key is to ensure that we are helping those who
actually need help while at the same time providing enough
freedom and flexibility for farmers to respond to the ever-
changing marketplace and run their farms as they see fit.
I look forward to this upcoming debate on the
reauthorization of the Farm Bill, and this process will come
through the Budget Committee. So this is something that each
and every one of us in the Budget Committee are going to have
to be mindful of and hopefully can help shape this discussion
and send it in the right direction as we move forward.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the Secretary for
coming. I look forward to your testimony.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you, Mr. Ryan.
Mr. Secretary, the floor is yours, and we look forward to
your testimony.
STATEMENT OF MIKE JOHANNS, SECRETARY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
AGRICULTURE; ACCOMPANIED BY CHARLES F. CONNER, DEPUTY
SECRETARY; W. SCOTT STEELE, BUDGET OFFICER; KEITH COLLINS,
CHIEF ECONOMIST
STATEMENT OF MIKE JOHANNS
Secretary Johanns. Mr. Chairman, thank you. It is an honor
to be before this Committee.
And to all the members, I look forward to your questions.
What I would like to do is provide the Committee at the
outset here with an overview of the Department's programs and
maybe a few highlights from the 2008 budget request. I will
begin, though, by providing a brief overview of the 2007 Farm
Bill proposals that we announced on January 31st. In doing so,
I will be better able to explain how the Farm Bill and the
budget fit together.
So starting with the 2007 Farm Bill proposals. The 2007
Farm Bill proposals and the 2008 budget were developed on
parallel tracks. The Administration's Farm Bill proposals
represent the final phase of what has been nearly a two-year
process.
We listened closely to producers and stakeholders all
across the country and took a reform-minded and a fiscally-
responsible approach to making farm policy more equitable, more
predictable, and protected from challenge in the world trade
arena.
While I firmly believe that the current law was the right
policy for the times, times do change and they have changed.
When the 2002 Farm Bill was passed, commodity prices were low,
exports had declined for several years in a row, and the debt-
to-asset ratio on agriculture was right at 15 percent.
Now, today, we just see a vastly different economic
picture. Commodity prices are strong for most program crops.
Exports have set records now several years in a row, including
a record 68 billion in 2006. And projections are that we will
reach another record this year, $77 billion.
We are experiencing the lowest debt-to-asset ratio in
recorded history. We have never been at this level before. It
was at about 11 percent in 2006. Add to all of this the
enormous impact that renewable energy has had on our Ag economy
and it is pretty clear times have changed.
The time has come to move forward with a farm program that
is market oriented and considers more than commodity prices
alone when determining the appropriate level of governmental
support.
Farm Bill proposals bolster this Administration's
commitment to conservation programs that protect our natural
resources. That would be an increase of $7.8 billion over the
ten-year score.
We propose an additional $1.6 billion over that same time
frame to advance the development and the advancement of
renewable energy. This is targeted at cellulosic ethanol. This
will help us to achieve the President's goal of reducing annual
gasoline use by ten percent in ten years.
We propose funding to support $1.6 billion in loans to
rehabilitate more than 1,200 rural critical-access hospitals.
Another $400 million would be focused on trade and making sure
our producers have a level playing field in the global market.
These are just a few highlights. I could do a couple of
hours on these proposals. I will not do that. But when
combined, the proposals would spend about ten billion less than
was spent in the 2002 Farm Bill over the past five years
excluding ad-hoc disaster assistance.
Importantly, they uphold the President's plan to eliminate
the deficit in five years. On the other hand, looking forward,
our proposals would provide about five billion more than the
projected mandatory spending if the 2002 Farm Bill were just
simply extended.
And this comment brings me to our budget proposal. The 2008
budget accommodates our Farm Bill proposals, and here is how it
is done.
It includes an additional 500 million per year in the total
for the Commodity Credit Corporation. This, if you will, is a
placeholder in the budget, and it would be spread over the
various titles of the bill. This level extended for ten years
would cover the full estimated cost of the proposals.
The President's 2008 budget funds our highest priorities
while exercising the kind of fiscal discipline that is
necessary to achieve the goal of strengthening the economy and
balancing the budget by 2012.
Before I present the highlights, let me take a moment to
explain how USDA expenditures are divided. USDA outlays are
estimated to total about $89 billion in 2008. That would be
roughly the same level as for 2007.
Of the total outlays for the Department, 59 percent support
domestic nutrition assistant programs. Spending for farm and
commodity programs, although we are probably best known for
that, account for about 19 percent of our budget.
Conservation and forestry account for about 11 percent and
the remaining 11 percent represents a whole host of other
programs from rural development to research to food safety,
animal and plant health, international programs, and
administration.
Another way to look at our budget is the breakdown between
the mandatory side and the discretionary side. For 2008,
mandatory outlays represent 75 percent of the Department's
total while discretionary programs account for about 25
percent.
Mandatory outlays are actually dominated by a few programs.
The nutrition assistance programs, including food stamp and
child nutrition programs, actually account for 76 percent of
our mandatory outlays for 2008.
Farm programs funded by CCC and crop insurance account for
about 24 percent of our mandatory outlays. Funding for
nutrition assistance programs has grown from about 60 percent
of our mandatory spending in 1999 to 76 percent in 2008.
During the same time period, total spending on farm
programs has declined from about 40 percent to 24 percent of
the mandatory spending.
Farm program spending through CCC is very highly variable.
It reflects impacts of weather and changes in commodity
markets, as well as emergency spending that may be allowed to
address natural and economic disasters.
The dramatic increase in ethanol production has
significantly increased the demand for corn, and what that
does, of course, is it pushed corn prices higher. This is
expected to significantly reduce CCC outlays in the next few
years.
Both the Administration and the Congressional Budget Office
January baselines for CCC showed this effect. We are not really
in much disagreement there. CCC outlays are estimated to
continue at an average of 12.4 billion from 2008 to 2017 under
a simple extension of the current law.
Mandatory costs of the Crop Insurance Program are estimated
to be five billion in 2008, which is roughly double the level
of ten years ago. These costs are expected to grow roughly two
percent a year from 2008 to 2017.
Turning now to our food and nutrition programs, the 2008
budget fully funds the expected requirements of food stamps and
child nutrition programs. Total outlays for these programs are
expected to continue to increase by about four percent a year
over the next several years due to inflation and changing
demographics of the nation. Most significantly, an increase in
school-age population.
Although no program changes are sought for the child
nutrition programs, a number of legislative changes are
proposed for 2008 to improve access to food stamps as well as
target them to those most in need.
On the discretionary side of the ledger, outlays for USDA's
2008 discretionary budget are estimated to be about 22 billion,
about the same level as 2007, and I might add the same level as
2006.
The 2008 budget for discretionary programs reflects the
President's priorities to encourage economic growth, increase
our security while recognizing that fiscal discipline is
absolutely necessary.
The budget requests the resources necessary to protect the
food supply and agriculture from a variety of threats that
could have a devastating effect on animal and human health.
This includes increased monitoring and surveillance of the food
supply and development of technology that will enhance our
ability to detect and respond to emergencies. That would
include avian influenza and bovine spongiform encephalopathy,
BSE.
A record level of funding is also requested for meat,
poultry, and egg product inspection. Another priority for the
Department is a continued focus on expanding renewable energy
resources. Funding for research that will improve cellulosic
ethanol production and conversion of biomass into biofuels is
increased.
In addition, our rural development programs will increase
the amount of financial support available to leverage private-
sector funding for small- and large-scale renewable energy
generation activities.
The budget also reflects the resources necessary to meet
the requirements of the neediest in our nation. It supports
average monthly participation of 8.3 million participants in
the WIC Program, Women, Infant, and Children, an increase of
100,000 participants per month over 2007.
We are also providing 15 billion in rural development
loans, grants, and other assistance for rural America. The
Department will continue to foster environmental stewardship by
providing conservation technical assistance to farmers and
ranchers and landowners.
The budget also includes four billion in mandatory spending
for the Department's major conservation efforts which will
support a record cumulative enrollment of 250 million acres in
the various conservation programs.
The budget for the Forest Service provides sufficient
wildlife fire resources to protect communities and natural
resources and provides for sustainable forests and communities
through full funding of the Northwest Forest Plan and
continuation of the Payments to States Program.
We made difficult choices to keep spending under control
while funding our priorities and balancing the budget. The 2008
budget includes proposals to terminate low-priority or
duplicative or poorly-performing programs.
Let me just wrap up and say I look forward to working with
Congress on the 2008 budget. I also look forward to working
with Congress in crafting new farm policy. We are eager to
ensure appropriate level of funding is made available to
strengthen U.S. agriculture in rural America.
With that, I will conclude my statements, and all of us
here at the table look forward to answering your questions.
[The prepared statement of Mike Johanns follows:]
Prepared Statement of Hon. Mike Johanns,
Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee, I am here today to
discuss the programs and budget of the Department of Agriculture. I
appreciate your interest in the Department of Agriculture and the
benefits the Department's programs have for farmers, consumers, and a
variety of other constituents. I am joined today by Deputy Secretary
Chuck Conner; Scott Steele, our Budget Officer; and Keith Collins, our
Chief Economist.
The Administration has recently released two important documents
that highlight our priorities for 2008. On January 31, 2007, I
announced a comprehensive set of Farm Bill proposals to replace the
expiring Food Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 (2002 Farm
Bill). On February 5, we released our 2008 budget. The Farm Bill
proposals will modify some of the projected spending in portions of the
budget. The Farm Bill proposals and the 2008 budget were developed on
parallel tracks. Our priorities, including conservation, renewable
energy, rural development and others, are covered in both the Farm Bill
proposals and the 2008 budget. I will assure you that we are upholding
the President's plan to eliminate the deficit within five years.
I would like to provide the Committee an overview of the
Department's diverse programs, review some key trends in our mandatory
programs, including an overview of our 2007 Farm Bill proposals, and
provide the highlights of our 2008 budget request for discretionary
programs.
2008 total budget outlays
USDA outlays are estimated to total $89 billion in 2008, roughly
the same as the level estimated for 2007. Of the total outlays for the
Department, 59 percent supports domestic nutrition assistance programs,
including: food stamps, school lunch, and the Special Supplemental
Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children--better known as the
WIC Program. Spending for farm programs, including commodity payments,
farm loans and crop insurance, accounts for about 19 percent.
Conservation and forestry programs account for about 11 percent. The
remaining 11 percent represents all of the other programs operated by
the Department--rural development, research, food safety, animal and
plant health, international programs and administration.
Another way to look at our budget is the breakdown between
mandatory and discretionary spending. For 2008, mandatory outlays are
$67 billion, or 75 percent of the Department's total. Outlays for
discretionary programs are estimated to be $22 billion, or 25 percent
of total outlays for the Department. The Department's largest
discretionary program is WIC. Other programs in the discretionary
category include the Forest Service, rural development, research, food
safety, and plant and animal health.
mandatory outlays
Mandatory spending is dominated by a small number of relatively
large programs. Nutrition assistance programs, including Food Stamps
and Child Nutrition Programs, account for $51 billion, or approximately
76 percent of mandatory outlays. Crop insurance and farm programs
funded by Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) account for $16 billion,
or approximately 24 percent of mandatory outlays.
Within the mandatory category, the trend has been an increase in
the share of outlays associated with the nutrition assistance
programs--from 60 percent of mandatory spending in 1999 to 76 percent
in the 2008 estimate. Mandatory nutrition assistance programs are the
Food Stamp Program and Child Nutrition Programs, which includes the
National School Lunch Program. The increase in nutrition assistance
outlays is largely due to food cost inflation and increasing
participation.
farm program spending
During this same period, outlays for farm programs and crop
insurance have declined from 40 percent to 24 percent of mandatory
spending. Farm program spending can be highly variable, largely
reflecting changes in commodity markets as well as emergency spending
to address natural and economic disasters in the agriculture and rural
economy. Mandatory spending on farm programs funded through CCC,
including the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), has decreased from a
record-high of $32.3 billion in 2000 to just over $20 billion in 2006.
We expect this trend to continue with CCC outlays estimated to decline
to $11.7 billion in 2008 under current law, which assumes a simple
extension of the 2002 Farm Bill. CCC outlays under the current law
baseline are estimated to increase to an average of $12.4 billion
annually from 2008 to 2017.
The reduction in CCC outlays in 2007 to 2008 is driven largely due
to higher crop prices. Prices are higher because of the dramatic
increase in the demand for corn for ethanol production. Additionally,
most of the other major commodities are also at relatively high price
levels. These high commodity prices have lead to a significant
reduction in CCC outlays, which indicates that farmers are relying more
on the market for revenue than payments from the Government. Both the
Administration and the Congressional Budget Office January baselines
for CCC commodity programs show this effect. The rising demand of farm
products for biofuel production coupled with strong export demand are
expected to keep prices of most of the major CCC supported commodities
at high levels for the coming years.
The 2002 Farm Bill authorized a major expansion of other
conservation and environmental programs administered by the Natural
Resources and Conservation Service. These programs are authorized by
Title II of the 2002 Farm Bill and include: the Environmental Quality
Incentives Program (EQIP), the Conservation Security Program (CSP), and
the Wetland Reserve Program (WRP). For 2007 and 2008, nearly $2 billion
in mandatory funding will be spent each year on these programs. From
2008 to 2017 the annual costs for these programs are estimated to
average between $2 billion and $3 billion, assuming extension of the
2002 Farm Bill. Within the amount for total CCC outlays, CRP accounts
for $2 billion per year in 2007 and 2008 and will average approximately
$2.5 billion annually over 2008 to 2017 under current law.
crop insurance
The other major component of USDA mandatory outlays is the Federal
crop insurance program, a significant element of the farm safety net.
Through the crop insurance program, farmers and ranchers are able to
reduce the impact of natural disasters. Crop insurance is delivered
through private insurance companies that share in the risk of loss and
opportunity for gain. The companies are reimbursed for their delivery
expenses and receive underwriting gains in years of favorable loss
experience.
The mandatory costs associated with the crop insurance program
include premium subsidies, indemnity payments (in excess of premiums),
underwriting gains paid to private companies, reimbursements to private
companies for delivery expenses and other authorized expenditures.
While these costs are considered mandatory, they are subject to the
annual appropriations process. Recognizing the uncertain nature of
forecasting crop losses, in recent years, appropriations acts have
provided ``such sums as necessary.'' For 2008, the budget estimates
about $5 billion for the mandatory costs of the crop insurance program,
which is roughly double the level of ten years ago. These costs are
expected to grow roughly 2 percent a year from 2008 to 2017 with
estimated total costs of over $6 billion in 2017.
food stamps and child nutrition programs
The 2008 budget fully funds the expected requirements for Food
Stamp and Child Nutrition programs. For Food Stamps, the budget
includes nearly $37 billion to fully fund estimated Food Stamp
participation and food cost inflation. Food Stamp participation is
projected to decline modestly from 26.3 million in 2007 to 26.2 million
in 2008. The budget provides over $14 billion for Child Nutrition
Programs. This will support National School Lunch Program participation
of 31.5 million children each day as well as food cost inflation.
Total outlays for Food Stamps and Child Nutrition Programs are
expected to continue to increase approximately 4 percent a year over
the next several years due to inflation and the changing demographics
of the Nation, most significantly, an increase in the school-age
population growth.
Although no program changes are sought for the Child Nutrition
Programs, a number of legislative changes are proposed to improve
access to Food Stamps as well as target them to the neediest. The 2008
budget includes proposed legislation to continue to exclude special
military pay when determining food stamp benefits for deployed members
of the armed services. Military personnel often receive supplements to
their basic pay when they serve in combat. This proposal supports the
families of servicemen and servicewomen fighting overseas by ensuring
that they do not lose Food Stamp Program benefits as a result of this
additional income. Further, the budget includes a proposal to exclude
all retirement and education savings accounts from being counted as
resources for eligibility determinations. This will help families
access food stamp assistance without putting their future security at
greater risk in their time of need.
In addition, the budget reproposes legislation to restrict
categorical eligibility for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF) recipients to those receiving actual cash assistance. Under
current law, households that receive TANF services, including receipt
of an informational pamphlet published with TANF funds, but which do
not receive cash assistance, can be deemed categorically eligible for
food stamps. Those receiving in-kind benefits under TANF could still
qualify for food stamps by meeting the income eligibility criteria.
2007 farm bill proposals
I would like to take this opportunity to briefly outline the
Administration's 2007 Farm Bill proposals, their potential budgetary
impact, and how they are accounted for in the President's 2008 budget.
The Administration's Farm Bill proposals represent the final phase
of a nearly two-year process. We listened closely to producers and
stakeholders all across the country and took a reform-minded and
fiscally responsible approach to making farm policy more equitable,
predictable and protected from challenge in the world trade arena.
We started with the 2002 Farm Bill and propose to improve it by
bolstering support for emerging priorities and focusing on a market-
oriented approach.
While the current law has served its purpose, the time has come to
move forward with a farm program that is more market-oriented and
considers more than commodity prices alone when determining the
appropriate level of Government support. The proposals continue this
Administration's commitment to increase conservation programs that
protect our natural resources and focus support on renewable energy
that will help lead us to the President's goal of reducing annual
gasoline use by 20 percent in ten years.
Let me touch briefly on a few areas where specific increases in our
resources will help us continue to make progress in strengthening
agriculture, rural America and environmental protections.
Highlights of the proposals include (funding reflects ten year
totals):
Reforming commodity programs to save $4.5 billion through
modernizing marketing assistance loans, tightening payment limits and
closing loopholes, while enhancing the safety net with a revenue based
countercyclical program and increased direct payments.
Increasing conservation funding by $7.8 billion,
simplifying and consolidating conservation programs, redesigning the
Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) to include a Regional
Water Enhancement Program;
Providing $1.6 billion in new funding for renewable energy
research, development and production;
Targeting nearly $5 billion in funding to support
specialty crop producers by increasing consumption through food
assistance programs, funding specialty crop research, and expanding
export markets;
Supporting beginning farmers by increasing their direct
payments by $250 million, reserving a percent of conservation funds,
and providing more loan flexibility for down payment, land purchasing
and farm operating loans;
Strengthening disaster relief by establishing a revenue-
based counter-cyclical program, providing gap coverage in crop
insurance, linking crop insurance participation to farm program
participation, and creating a new emergency landscape restoration
program;
Simplifying and consolidating rural development programs
while providing $1.6 billion in loans to rehabilitate all current Rural
Critical Access Hospitals and $500 million in grants and loans for
rural communities to support high priority rural infrastructure
projects;
Dedicating nearly $400 million to trade efforts to expand
exports, fight trade barriers, and increase involvement in world trade
standard-setting bodies; and
Modernizing and renaming the Food Stamp Program to improve
access for the working poor, better meet the needs of recipients and
States, and strengthen program integrity.
These proposals would provide approximately $5 billion more over
ten years from 2008 to 2017 than the projected mandatory spending if
the 2002 Farm Bill were extended. The 2008 budget makes accommodation
for this by including an additional $500 million per year to the
funding total for CCC. This level extended for ten years would cover
the full estimated cost of the proposals. Under these proposals, we
would spend approximately $10 billion less than what was spent under
the 2002 Farm Bill over the past five years, excluding ad-hoc disaster
assistance, upholding the President's plan to eliminate the deficit in
five years.
2008 discretionary budget request
Outlays for USDA's 2008 discretionary budget are estimated to be
approximately $22 billion, about the same level as 2007 and 2006. The
2008 budget for discretionary programs reflects the President's
priorities to encourage economic growth and increase our security,
while recognizing that fiscal discipline is absolutely necessary.
The budget requests the resources necessary to protect the food
supply and agriculture from a variety of threats that could have
devastating effects on animal and human health. This includes increased
monitoring and surveillance of the food supply and development of
technology that will enhance our ability to detect and respond to food
emergencies, including threats from avian influenza and bovine
spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). A record level of funding is also
requested for meat, poultry, and egg product inspection.
Another priority for the Department is a continued focus on
expanding renewable energy resources. Increased funding is
significantly increased for research to help lead to more efficient
production of cellulosic ethanol and conversion of biomass into
biofuels. In addition, our rural development programs will increase the
amount of financial support available to leverage private sector
funding for small and large-scale renewable energy generation
activities.
The budget also requests the resources necessary to meet the
requirements of the neediest individuals in the Nation. It supports
average monthly participation of 8.3 million participants in the WIC
program, an increase of 100,000 participants per month over 2007. We
are also proposing $15 billion in rural development loans, grants and
other assistance. At the proposed level, over 39,000 homeownership
opportunities would be provided and 16,500 multi-family housing
projects that provide housing for 460,000 low-income tenants, most of
whom are elderly, would be maintained.
The Department will continue to foster environmental stewardship by
providing conservation technical assistance to farmers, ranchers, and
landowners. As I mentioned earlier, the budget includes nearly $4
billion in mandatory spending for the Department's major conservation
programs, which will support a record cumulative enrollment of 215
million acres in these programs.
The budget for the Forest Service provides sufficient wildland fire
resources to protect communities and natural resources, and provides
for sustainable forests and communities through full funding of the
Northwest Forest Plan and continuation of the Payments to States
Program. Fire suppression funding is at the ten year average. In
addition, the budget provides funding to continue implementation of the
President's Healthy Forests Initiative to mitigate the threat of
catastrophic wildfires. Resources proposed in the budget will reduce
hazardous fuels on an estimated 2.95 million acres of land, an increase
of 50,000 acres over the acres expected to be treated in 2007.
Tough choices had to be made as well to keep spending under control
and achieve a balanced budget. This means doing more with less,
eliminating programs that are not getting the job done, or cutting out
wasteful spending. Therefore, the 2008 budget includes proposals to
reduce funding or terminate low-priority, duplicative, or poorly
performing programs. These include a reduction of $438 million in
earmarks in research programs and research facilities construction.
In closing, I want to emphasize that the USDA budget fully supports
the President's goals to strengthen the economy, increase security, and
restrain spending. The budget addresses these goals by funding our
highest priorities. These funding priorities strengthen agriculture and
rural economies, protect our food supply, build on our conservation
efforts, and provide for the neediest individuals.
That concludes my statement. I will be glad to answer questions you
may have on our proposals.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Secretary, you touched upon the so-
called baseline for mandatory programs. The baseline based upon
current expenditures is substantially lower than it was several
years ago when the existing Farm Bill was adopted.
That baseline is important to us in projecting what the
budgetary costs of different provisions is going to be and,
frankly, in the House whether or not we have a PAYGO
application and assuming that certain things will be provided
for.
How confident are you that the baseline we are working with
this year is a firm, reliable number given the fact that it is
based upon commodity prices that are at historic highs?
Secretary Johanns. Mr. Chairman, we are confident of that
baseline, and here is what I would offer in that regard. And I
might even ask, if you do not mind, for Dr. Collins to offer a
thought.
We will be spending a lot of time in the months ahead
talking about baseline for this Farm Bill. The reason why the
baseline is at the lower level is very straightforward.
Commodity prices are high.
We look at our carry-over and all of the other information
that we look at in terms of making projections about prices and
when it is all said and done, there is not going to be that
much difference between us and where CBO is at.
We all have to start from some place. We started trying to
figure this all out as we were thinking about our Farm Bill
proposals because we had to have a number. You are going to go
through pretty much the same process. And, again, I think when
it is all said and done, there is not going to be a lot of
disagreement about our baseline.
Dr. Collins may offer a thought on commodity prices, but I
am confident in telling you I think we are at that baseline and
I think it is a good baseline.
Mr. Collins. Mr. Chairman, as you well know and members
know, baselines are both art and science. They have been very
variable over the years. At the Department of Agriculture, we
follow the convention of the Congressional Budget Office
starting last year and we started using, quote, stocastic or
probablistic baselines.
That alone adds a couple of billion dollars as kind of a
cushion to our baseline spending. We went in that direction
because we felt that just picking one specific scenario of
prices in costing out based on that was a little too
unreliable.
Nevertheless, we are using one specific scenario of prices,
high corn prices, as you mentioned, but we do provide a
probability distribution around that and estimate outlays based
on a number of alternative outcomes.
I would say, commenting on the Secretary's point, if you
look at our ten-year score for commodity programs, it is only
several billion dollars different than the Congressional Budget
Office's score. So we are in this together, hopefully
accurately.
We have lower corn costs. That is the most sensitive and
the most expensive commodity program. We have lower corn costs
than the Congressional Budget Office because of the high demand
for ethanol. But we offset that with much higher cotton costs,
and that is mainly the difference between our two baselines. In
sum, the aggregate total is very, very similar.
Chairman Spratt. The budget that you sent us includes $500
million a year over the time frame of the budget. Is this
largely to give you some cushion in case the commodity prices
you are assuming do not obtain?
Mr. Collins. No. The 500 million a year simply represents
our total ten-year budget expenditure or, excuse me, the
increase in budget authority that we expect our proposals would
result in over ten years. That is $5 billion over ten years. So
we annualized that and made it $500 million and put that in our
budget as a placeholder. So the concept there is budget
authority, $500 million in 2008, reflective of----
Chairman Spratt. For all titles of the bill?
Mr. Collins. For all titles of the bill, yes, sir.
Chairman Spratt. The deficit impact over five years is
about $489 million. Are you aware of that?
Mr. Collins. What impact, sir?
Chairman Spratt. The impact on the deficit over five years
is about $489 million.
Mr. Collins. You are talking about the total outlays
associated----
Chairman Spratt. Yes, sir.
Mr. Collins [continuing]. With all titles of the Farm Bill?
I do not know the exact number, but it is something very large
like that.
Chairman Spratt. Let me ask you, Mr. Secretary, about rural
development programs. I represent lots of small towns in the
rural south, between Charlotte, North Carolina and Columbia,
South Carolina. I have got all the small towns and rural
communities.
And, frankly, your Rural Development Administration has
been a Godsend to these towns. They provide financing, funding
that otherwise is simply not attainable. They do not have the
credit rating, the standing, the capacity to repay. And both
with respect to rural development and rural housing, these
programs are critically important.
I am dismayed to see that there are some fairly significant
cuts in rural development and rural housing. What is the
philosophy behind that?
Secretary Johanns. You are absolutely right. As we did our
Farm Bill forums across the country and I started commenting on
this, I heard no negative comments about our rural development
programs. And I literally went through all of my forums, not a
single negative comment. If anything, people were lining up to
say this is doing a great job for my community or my county. So
they are very popular.
Let me approach this in a couple of ways. One is that from
the standpoint of the 2008 budget, the 2008 budget includes
about $14 billion for rural development programs. This is
essentially the same level as 2007. The entire 15 million will
be directed into those rural programs. It may be job
opportunities. It could be a variety of things.
The 2008 budget includes 4.8 billion for single-family
housing to support home ownership opportunities, 1.5 billion
for water and waste water disposal loans and grants, 690
million for telecommunications, 4.1 billion for electric loans.
And I could go on and on.
But then going on to our Farm Bill proposal, we are
proposing some things that we heard about when we were out
there doing the forums and things we are very excited about.
For example, we have in this country about 1,283 rural
critical-access hospitals that really need to be brought up to
standard. We are proposing to fund a $1.6 billion loan program
so all of these hospitals can be rehabilitated. And these are
in the most rural areas of our country.
And we will submit for the record a list of the states and
the number of hospitals.
[The information follows:]
critical access hospitals (cahs)
A Critical Access Hospital (CAH) is a hospital that is certified to
receive cost-based reimbursement from Medicare. In order to qualify for
CAH, a hospital must meet the following criteria:
Located in a rural area
Provide 24-hour emergency care service
Average length of stay of 96 hours or less
More than 35 miles from a hospital or another CAH or more
than 15 miles in areas with mountainous terrain or only secondary roads
or certified by the State as being a ``necessary provider'' of
healthcare services to residents in the area
Beginning on January 1, 2004, CAHs may operate up to 25
beds for acute (hospital-level) inpatient care, subject to the 96-hour
average length of stay for acute care patients.
Alabama...................... 3 Alaska......... 10
Arizona...................... 12 Arkansas....... 27
California................... 21 Colorado....... 25
Florida...................... 11 Georgia........ 35
Hawaii....................... 9 Idaho.......... 26
Illinois..................... 51 Indiana........ 36
Iowa......................... 82 Kansas......... 84
Kentucky..................... 30 Louisiana...... 27
Maine........................ 15 Massachusetts.. 4
Michigan..................... 35 Minnesota...... 80
Mississippi.................. 28 Missouri....... 35
Montana...................... 45 Nebraska....... 65
Nevada....................... 10 New Hampshire.. 13
New Mexico................... 6 New York....... 13
North Carolina............... 22 North Dakota... 31
Ohio......................... 34 Oklahoma....... 34
Oregon....................... 25 Pennsylvania... 12
South Carolina............... 5 South Dakota... 38
Tennessee.................... 16 Texas.......... 74
Utah......................... 8 Vermont........ 8
Virginia..................... 7 Washington..... 39
West Virginia................ 19 Wisconsin...... 58
------------
Wyoming...................... 14
Total........ 1,283
As of October 2006
We are also proposing additional new money, if you will, to
use that terminology, $500 million additional to try to deal
with the backlog of water and waste disposal systems and other
rural infrastructure.
We think this will conservatively bring that backlog down
by 30 percent, maybe more. And this was done in the 2002 Farm
Bill. It is something we are continuing here. That would be in
addition to the other programs we are doing.
We are doing about $500 million for renewable energy and
energy efficiency grants, $210 million in budget authority to
support loans for this purpose.
So I guess what I would say to you, Mr. Chairman, if you
look not only at the budget, which is about the same where it
was at in 2007, but look at some of the things we are doing in
terms of our proposals, you can see we have a very robust
proposal here.
Chairman Spratt. Well, I am dismayed to see that, for
example, rural development, if my numbers are correct, is cut
by $226 million, 18 percent below the 2007 level, in the name
of streamlining and consolidating.
Do you really think you can save that amount of money in
streamlining and consolidating and still have as much money to
use for actual grants and loans?
Secretary Johanns. Part of our Farm Bill proposals, for
example, are to do some streamlining and just a better job of
delivering these programs. Those are things that we just feel
obligated to do. How can we manage the program better, more
efficiently and, therefore, get money to people who really need
it out there in rural areas?
I could keep going. I mean, I could talk about some of the
things we are doing in terms of targeting funding for
cellulosic ethanol. That is very clearly going to help rural
areas much like corn-based ethanol has helped in the corn
belts.
So there are a lot of exciting things in our proposal that
I think make a lot of sense, have a lot of support from farmers
and stakeholders out there. As we did our Farm Bill forums,
they talked to us about these things.
Chairman Spratt. I could go on and on and on, and we could
have this exchange.
Section 515, for example, a lot of these section numbers
stand out to me because I have seen the very projects that are
represented and they are still taking hits. And I will take
your word for it that the puts equal the takes in this bill,
but I am concerned about programs that I have seen work very
well.
And you may be able to streamline them from your
administrative standpoint, but your local loan officers, your
local State officials, and your borrowers are fairly well
familiar with things like Section 515, like business and
industry, the old B&I, guaranteed loan. And I sort of go by the
philosophy that if it is not broke, do not fix it. But we will
take your word for it for today.
We have got other members here who have questions to you,
some of whom are on the Ag Committee, and I will come back a
little bit later today and ask you some further questions.
Mr. Ryan.
Mr. Ryan. Thank you, Chairman.
First, Secretary, I just want to commend you for putting
milk on an equal playing field with the other commodities. That
expired before the other programs in the Farm Bill did. That to
me seemed like an unfair thing. And the fact that you put milk
in your budget tells me that we are going to treat milk fairly
like we should do the other commodities. Then let us get on to
the business of reforming all of these commodity programs on an
equal playing field. So I just wanted to commend you for that,
number one.
I want to ask you about the ethanol quotas. In the
President's State of the Union address, he recommended, and
correct me if I am wrong, going from the current 7.5 billion
gallon quota by 2012 to 35 billion gallons by 2017. Am I right
on those numbers? Is there enough corn to plant in America to
meet that?
Secretary Johanns. That is a great question. We are not
going to do that all with corn, not unless something dramatic
happened. That is why in our Farm Bill proposals, we are
proposing to target the funding at cellulosic development.
Mr. Ryan. How soon or how well developed is cellulosic
ethanol technology such that it can contribute to, you know,
reaching that quota?
Secretary Johanns. I have been surprised at how far along
it is. I think many people, including myself, have been saying
sometime within the next five years, this will be efficient,
cost-effective production.
But having said that, companies come to my office and talk
about being ready to build a cellulosic plant. I know that
there are companies working with the Department of Energy for
grants.
So I am very optimistic based upon what they are telling
me, based upon the research that is going on there. But very
clearly the point here is you have got to develop that industry
to reach those goals. It cannot all come from corn. It is not
possible.
Mr. Ryan. Actually, the wood chipping in Wisconsin is a big
forestry industry.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah.
Mr. Ryan. And the wood cellulosic looks like it is fairly
promising. But having said all of that, pretty much the only
game in town right now is corn. And the big talk that I hear
in, you know, Wisconsin is in the past, the conservation people
along with the corn and beans people all kind of got along with
each other.
And so now you are beginning to see some friction between
the priorities of conservation, you know, CRP, things like
that, and these ethanol programs. And I think there is a
concern out there that you are going to see one displace the
other because of these quotas, because of these prices.
Would you care to comment on that and give me your
prediction?
Secretary Johanns. We share that concern. You know, we
support all of agriculture, whether that is the dairy farmer,
the fat cattle guy, or whoever it is, the corn grower, soybean
grower.
But very definitely this has ramped up very quickly and
today you have corn prices that are in the vicinity of $4.00.
So that means that the input cost for that dairy farmer has
basically doubled relative to corn very, very quickly.
But having said that, here is kind of our best read on this
situation. Very definitely there is a period of adjustment
going on, and I think that is going to last for the next 12 to
24 months. Those high corn prices are doing what the market
tends to do; they are causing more farmers to make a decision
about moving acreage from some other commodity into corn.
We certainly have some flex there. If you look at, for
example, soybeans, we grew the largest crop ever last year. We
have the largest carry-over ever. So you literally would have
some flex.
It is possible that some of the conservation contracts
coming up, maybe somebody will look at that and say, well, I
had it in conservation, but it is a corn crop. You know, that
is not going to be one for one acres.
And then really on a more long-term basis, and I am not
talking about a decade, I am talking about what I believe will
be sometime in the next five years, if not sooner, I do think
you will see a robust cellulosic ethanol industry develop.
For example, in your State, this would be very helpful. One
of the things that we proposed in our Farm Bill proposal in
addition to other cellulosic projects is a new $150 million
wood to energy program. That material laying on the bed of that
forest, does it make sense to convert it into cellulosic
ethanol? It may make sense. It may make good economic sense and
it may be good for that forest.
Mr. Ryan. If I could go into that then. And in Wisconsin,
because, you know, the top half of the State is pretty much all
forest and it is forestry paper, the wood to ethanol cellulosic
production cost is 55 cents a gallon.
So if it costs a cellulosic wood ethanol refinery 55 cents
to produce a gallon of ethanol, and that ethanol, I am told, is
more efficient than corn ethanol, why do we have to subsidize
ethanol at 1.26 a gallon and why do we have to guarantee, you
know, that kind of a markup?
Secretary Johanns. I was asked a similar question before
the House Ag Committee. And today the subsidy is directed at
corn-based ethanol and that sunsets. I think that runs until
2010, if I am not mistaken.
There may be a point in 2009 or something where Congress
looks at this and tries to make a decision about whether that
should or should not continue.
Mr. Ryan. Correct me if I am wrong, but it is sort of a
triple layer of incentive. There is a tariff, a 54 cent a
gallon subsidy, and then the quota on top of it, the production
quota. Those are sort of the big three incentives.
Are all of those necessary now given that we have got this
new quota on top to foster this kind of production and if we
are going to go to a 35 billion gallon quota of just domestic,
would it not make good sense to allow some imports in if we
literally do not have enough, you know, ground to plant the
stuff on?
I mean, do we need all three of these incentive programs to
make this industry vibrant and work? And, look, I come from
corn country. But, nevertheless, I think it is important to ask
these questions.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. My deputy reminds me that these
programs would be available for other biomass products. They
would be available for that wood to ethanol idea that you are
talking about.
The answer to your question is this. Three years ago, if
you read articles about ethanol, you would probably be reading
will it survive. It has been around a long time. I mean,
ethanol production has been around a long time, but not very
efficiently, not very effectively, not very cost effective.
That changed very quickly here. And, yes, admittedly, the
last couple of years have been good years for the ethanol
industry. We like to see that.
Congress has made a policy choice that until 2010 that that
support should be there and that support will help the industry
and help the industry stabilize. And there is a lot of other
good purposes, less dependence on foreign oil----
Mr. Ryan. Absolutely.
Secretary Johanns [continuing]. Environmental, et cetera.
So we sit here today not taking issue with that policy choice.
We have not proposed any changes in any of those items that you
have mentioned.
Now, like I said in our proposal, though, we say let us
focus on cellulosic ethanol. Corn-based ethanol is doing pretty
well here. Let us focus on cellulosic. So our dollars are
really directed at that.
Somewhere out there, long after this Secretary is gone,
Congress may look at that policy and say we can make
adjustments here. But for the time being, through 2010, you
have that in place.
Mr. Ryan. Well, I guess that is the question. You know,
like I said, I come from ethanol country. We are building
eleven ethanol plants right around my area.
So the question is, this industry, has it succeeded to the
level now where it is mature enough to sort of stand on its own
or to better stand on its own or not? You just basically
answered that question, but I think that is a question we need
to think about.
I just want to finish with one quick question. DOHA may be
back on track now. I mean, you hear this stuff. You know, one
day, DOHA is dead, the next day, it is revived. We had over the
Ways and Means Committee Ambassador Schwab here yesterday who
said, you know, we may have a chance at DOHA again. And I hope
we do.
But the EU Commissioner for Agriculture, Fisher Bohl--I
think I am pronouncing that correctly--has complained that this
new Farm Bill proposal is contradictory toward DOHA. I am not
sure that she is correct, especially when you compare our
programs to European programs.
But would you care to comment as to whether or not you
believe your proposed reauthorization of the Farm Bill and the
farm programs is in keeping and consistent with our direction
to try and make DOHA work?
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. I read those comments. In fact,
when Maryanne Fisher Bohl was here in Washington, I took the
opportunity to meet with her, and she had a lot of questions
about the Farm Bill. And interestingly enough, after our
meeting, she made a comment that she thought it was a better
Farm Bill.
I was asked a similar question yesterday near the end of
the testimony by Bob Goodlatte before the House Ag Committee,
and I said this. We want more market access from the European
Union. They also have very high subsidies that need to come
down.
And I will just be very candid in my response. I think they
were trying to talk our proposal down. That is just my personal
opinion of it.
There is no doubt that something like direct payments, for
example, that are not tied to price or production, that are
decoupled from that are generally regarded as non-trade
distorting and trade compliant.
Our increase in our conservation programs, $7.8, I suppose
we could have put that into something really trade distorting.
We did not in our proposal. And what does that mean?
Conservation programs again are generally regarded as trade
compliant, green-box programs.
So if you tip down through the list of things we are
proposing, although I will not tell you we wrote a Farm Bill
based upon trade; we wrote a Farm Bill, we hope, based upon
good policy and good for farmers and good for rural America,
but I do believe that this Farm Bill approach makes a lot more
sense in terms of the trade issue.
Final thing I will say. It is important. I do not know
where every member stands on trade. Maybe there are some people
anti-trade. Maybe there are some people pro- trade. I do not
know.
But I will tell you this. Eighty percent of the cotton we
grow in this country is exported, eighty percent. Fifty percent
of our rice is exported. About every third row of our row
crops, the crops you are interested in, go into the export
market. That is changing because of ethanol, but it is still a
major piece of what we do.
And we keep setting records in selling our products
overseas. We are good at it and we have great products. So I
just think you have to pay attention to that. You certainly do
not want to take a step back.
And then the final thing. This cotton case is for real. We
aggressively defended it. We lost. It was taken up on appeal.
We aggressively defended the appeal. We lost. Brazil is now
saying you have not fully complied. We are going to
aggressively defend that.
Canada just filed a case against our corn program, a
commodity that is important to your State, and Canada was
joined by a whole list of other countries almost overnight. I
mean, literally within 72 hours, Canada was not standing alone.
Now, we will aggressively defend that too.
But, again, I just think we need to pay attention. We need
to be mindful that for the American farmer, trade is really
important. Let us do it right. Let us get a level playing
field, all of those things, but this is really important to
agriculture.
Mr. Ryan. Thank you.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you.
Ms. DeLauro.
Ms. DeLauro. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Secretary.
I apologize that we had to cancel the Agricultural
Appropriations Subcommittee this morning, but so many of our
colleagues on that Committee were paying their respects to our
colleague, Mr. Norwood.
Let me try to address two areas in my time here. First, I
just wanted to add in this area my comments to what the
Chairman spoke about in terms of rural America. And as I look
at this budget, we are looking at real budget shortchanges in
terms of rural development and housing programs.
And let me just catalogue for a second. Cut to Rural
Community Advancement Program by 21 percent, $120 million cut
in water line and waste treatment programs, defunding rural
empowerment zone, empowerment communities. We are looking at
the budget terminating Rural Business Enterprise Program, Rural
Business Opportunity Grant Program, an estimate of about 19,000
plus fewer jobs in rural areas in 2008.
And, finally, the comment that my colleague, Mr. Spratt,
made about the Direct Single-Family Housing Loan Program, which
is a request for elimination, and the zeroing out of the
Section 515 Multi-Family Housing Direct Loan Program, which
would result, I might add, in about plus 2,100 fewer units of
rehabbed or built housing in 2008 than in 2006.
I think there are serious problems with what is happening
in the budget on rural development, but I just want to posit
that. And I want to move on to an issue with regard to the
State of Indiana and the Food Stamp Program, Mr. Secretary.
The State of Indiana, I think, as you know, plans to
contract out virtually all of the administration of their Food
Stamp Program and programs like Medicaid. It is a $1.6 billion
contract over a ten-year period. Food stamps share the
administrative cost of $328 million. Project federal food stamp
benefits that the contractor would help to issue in this period
are in excess of $8 billion.
Just flat out for myself, I am opposed to contracting out
these services.
Under the Indiana contract, the State is going to turn over
80 percent of their staff and business operations to a private
company, to IBM, next month. December 18th, USDA's Midwest
Regional Office gave Indiana the approval to roll out the plan.
Their letter said that it had lots of questions. It would
approve the rollout for one year, 2007, 2007 being the key
year. Next month, 80 percent is the shift of that workforce.
How can we shift back to the old system after a year?
So, in essence, USDA's approval has set this in motion for
the long haul. USDA said they had numerous questions on how the
operations on the ground would work. Governor Daniels moved
forward, signed a ten-year contract with IBM. Yet, Indiana did
not answer any of USDA's questions about what the arrangement
entails.
February 8, 2006, USDA asked for another letter, plain
English, narrative description of the certification process,
and that is a quote, that describes what the State and IBM each
would do. The suggestion here is that the agency continues to
be unclear.
Question. I want to understand how USDA approves a contract
in December without understanding what the State is proposing
to do. You have got a February letter. We continue not to know
whether contract compliance complies with the federal law.
How do we grant an approval without knowing the project is
going to comply with federal law? It is a $1.6 billion
contract. They have not answered any questions. And we have got
80 percent of the function and those services moving within the
next 30 days.
Secretary Johanns. Okay. I will offer a couple of thoughts
on that. First thing, if I might just mention, the rural
development issue. I think, and I can go through those account
by account or somebody more knowledgeable even than I am can go
through them, but I think part of what is happening here is
that in many areas, we are moving toward guaranteed loan
programs versus grant programs. We have been doing that for a
number of years. It is probably not the case in all cases, but
I am guessing that is a part of what you are talking about.
We just feel that oftentimes we get more for the dollar in
those programs than just an outright grant. But, again, we can
go through those with you.
In terms of Indiana, we have had a few states, not a lot,
that have looked at the question of how best to administer the
Food Stamp Program, and Indiana is one of those states.
The letter you are referring to, I have in front of me,
dated February 8, 2007, where our regional administrator wrote
to Mitchell Rube--hopefully I am pronouncing that correctly--
and Indiana Family and Social Services Administration, and you
are absolutely right, said we need this information. We need to
have you explain the narrative.
Actually, it is, as you know, a very extensive letter. It
is three pages from this administrator saying explain to us
these items. But the letter goes on to say that they need the
information by February 20th, because it is currently scheduled
to change over, I think, on March 19th.
Ms. DeLauro. Nineteenth, uh-huh.
Secretary Johanns. I can assure you we will pay very close
attention to this. I can assure you that Indiana has to comply
with the law and the requirements and satisfy us that what they
are doing is not going to jeopardize somebody who is receiving
food stamps. And that is how we approach this. If they are not
ready, they are not going to be ready.
Ms. DeLauro. Mr. Secretary, the example in Texas, it has
been a complete failure, so much so that I believe that on a
bipartisan basis, the Subcommittee last year said that we were
not going to take further steps in terms of any kind of funding
until we understood what was going on.
Millions of people, thousands of people, let me say, left
off, eligible people in that area. We are talking about on
March 19th, and you are going to look at something on February
20th, and we have set in motion a process here which is going
to take 80 percent of those services that are going to be
shifted, 1,500 people losing their jobs without knowing how, in
fact, the services are going to be delivered.
This is a radical approach. This is not a pilot program.
You do not deal with 80 percent on a pilot program, and that it
is going to be phased in. There is some impression that there
is a phase-in. That is not accurate.
I am troubled. I have to be honest with you. I am just
troubled by the lack of oversight on what appears to be a
major, major departure from service delivery on a program that
we know after so many years through this--through our
Subcommittee, we have worked very, very hard on a bipartisan
basis to make sure that the Food Stamp Program is working and
working well.
We are now going down a new philosophical, ideological
conceptual basis here about which we have prior example of
failure, and we appear to be moving in that direction again
with failure.
I must tell you that as an appropriator, I am very
concerned as to what we are going to do about being able to
limit what can be done without understanding very clearly what
is going to happen in this area.
I have gone way over my time, but I think you understand
the strength of my feelings on this issue, Mr. Secretary.
Secretary Johanns. I do.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you, Ms. DeLauro.
Mr. Hensarling.
Mr. Hensarling. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, again, I want to thank you for being
responsive to me and other members of Congress that represent
districts that have significant cow-calf operations and for
what you all did six, seven months ago in helping at least
partially reopen the Japanese market. It was certainly
important to a lot of Ag producers in the Fifth Congressional
District of Texas.
Could you just give me a quick update on where we are in
our dealings with the Japanese in fully reopening that market?
Secretary Johanns. I would love to. Thank you for your
compliment.
The Japanese market is open to U.S. beef. However, it is
limited to all beef from animals 20 months and under. That was
an agreement that the Department had reached with Japan
immediately prior to my arrival.
The market opened up. And if you will remember, we had a
problem with one of the shipments and so the market closed, and
it took us about six months to get it back and opened.
Here is the good news. The Japanese consumers responded
very well. We are selling beef in Japan faster than we can keep
it on the shelves. They have responded very, very well.
Here is the problem though. Twenty months is not based upon
any international standard. It is not acceptable to us, and we
need to move that forward.
We had an understanding with Japan that for the first six
months of shipment of beef into their country, we would see how
things were going. That six months is now expired. It expired
in January. And now we are asking Japan and really all of our
trading partners to move to the international standards.
We are going to continue to push that issue, continue to do
all we can to get that market completely opened based upon OIE
standards. So good news, beef is there. Bad news is we want to
sell more there. We believe we can safely and under
international standards. They are not there yet.
Mr. Hensarling. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Having been on this Committee for a number of years, I have
realized that about 90 percent of the time, somebody uses the
term cut. What they really mean is some program did not
increase quite as fast as they hoped it would be.
I have not looked at the programs the gentle lady from
Connecticut was alluding to. I assume she used the term
properly.
But just for the record, do I understand that the
Administration is proposing to increase food stamp spending
three and a half percent, child nutrition, 1.4, and WIC, 4.2
percent? Are those accurate numbers?
Secretary Johanns. I do not have those in front of me, but
you are right. These programs have continued to grow. We also
fund contingencies there. So if the programs grow more than
anticipated, we will have money to continue to respond.
Mr. Hensarling. So no reductions in federal nutritional
assistance programs are being proposed?
Secretary Johanns. Full funding. We fund whatever we
believe the need is going to be, and then in addition to that
fund a contingency program to cover anything additional that
may come along.
Mr. Hensarling. And just for the record, although I do not
know if you have this in front of you, according to OMB, since
the Administration came into office, at least through 2006, I
see where food stamp spending is up 81 percent, child nutrition
up 30 percent, and WIC is up 24 percent from 2001 through 2006.
Do those sound roughly accurate figures?
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Mr. Hensarling. Thank you.
Secretary Johanns. We have never been shorted in these
programs. The President is very supportive of these programs.
And so our outreach has been exceptional, and we continue to
add people to the programs.
Mr. Hensarling. Mr. Secretary, there are those in Congress
who believe the only way to help the Ag producer is by
producing a larger federal assistance check. In my dealings
with Ag producers in the Fifth Congressional District of Texas,
I come to some different conclusions.
You deal with a lot of Ag producers. People I hear from
think it is very important that we get rid of the death tax.
People I hear from, particularly my cattle producers, tell me
we need to create more trade agreements so we can export some
of this good Texas beef.
I hear people say we ought to open up ANWAR and OCS so that
we can achieve greater energy dependence and bring down the
cost of diesel and other fuels to power up their farm
machinery.
So are there other proposals of the Administration that
would help the Ag producer besides increasing the size of the
federal check?
Secretary Johanns. You know, we did Farm Bill forums all
across the country, and I did over 20 of them myself. Did one
in Texas, as a matter of fact, at Lubbock. And what I started
seeing about halfway through those, because this is what
farmers were saying to me, is that good farm policy is
certainly a good Farm Bill, but it is so much more than that.
Good farm policy is good trade policy, good tax policy. It is
all of those things hitting on all cylinders, if you will, and
it makes a huge difference in terms of where agriculture is at.
You know, I draw comparisons between 2001 when we sat down,
or 2002, to write the last Farm Bill and today. And they are
real comparisons. We have set records in trade in that period
of time. We have set records in net farm cash income.
I can tell you the balance sheet for agriculture has never
looked stronger. The debt-to-asset ratio is low. The net equity
is, I do not know, it is above $1.6 trillion. And, actually,
our subsidies have been going down.
If you make the case that it is subsidies, then the all-
time banner year for agriculture should be 2000 because we hit
$32 billion in subsidies. And I think you would not have to
look very far and farmers would tell you that that was not a
good time. In fact, it was a very, very difficult time.
So what is going on? Well, trade was not very good. A lot
of things were not working very well for farmers. A lot of
things are working well now. You know, I am absolutely
convinced that it is so much more than the Subsidy Program. It
is all of the other things. And I started saying that at Farm
Bill forums and farmers would reinforce that, reinforce this
idea that it is a whole list of things that need to work right.
Mr. Hensarling. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Cooper.
Mr. Cooper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for cutting duplicative and
poorly-performing programs, including, as I understand it,
what, $438 million in congressional earmarks because we need to
focus on our budget problems.
I am still worried, though, about efficiency of delivery of
your services. It is my understanding that the Natural
Resources Conservation Service alone has 3,800 offices around
America. Is that true?
Secretary Johanns. I do not have it in front of me. That
would not be a surprising number to me.
[The information follows:]
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) has 3,800 offices
located in all States, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, American
Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Micronesia, Palau and the
Marshall Islands. Of the 3,800 NRCS offices, 98 percent are in the
field. Staffs in these offices either provide direct customer service
or critical technical and administrative support generally located
within conservation districts. Over 2,500 of the total field offices
are USDA Service Centers which are co-occupied by NRCS, FSA and RD.
Mr. Cooper. And then there is the Farm Service Agency, the
Rural Development agencies. Do they have an equivalent number
of offices around the country?
Secretary Johanns. They are collocated. So, yeah, it would
be very comparable. Again, I can get you exact numbers and
would be happy to do it. But that would definitely be in the
ballpark.
[The information follows:]
The Farm Service Agency (FSA) has 2,372 field offices and Rural
Development (RD) has 825 field offices.
Mr. Cooper. Do all these counties have farms located within
them?
Secretary Johanns. You know, we went through and still are
going through the issue of FSA offices. And that is not a
popular thing to go out there and propose the closing of an
office as you might expect.
But the answer to your question is, there are probably some
counties out there where agriculture is fairly limited at this
point, just simply because of urban sprawl and development and
all the things that go on.
We have many offices, probably a third of FSA offices have
less than three employees. And you are talking about programs
that are hugely complex, change a lot. They can change, you
know. And we are asking these three people to master those
programs and answer the phone and run the computer and do all
of the other things.
Mr. Cooper. Mr. Secretary, you are not in office to do the
popular thing necessarily.
Secretary Johanns. Oh, we are going to do everything we can
to be efficient here.
Mr. Cooper. Can you tell me what the rent is that is paid
by these 3,800 offices or the cost of the offices?
Secretary Johanns. We would be happy to supply that. I,
again, do not have that in front of me, but I would be happy to
supply it.
[The information follows:]
The rental payments for NRCS's 3,800 field offices totaled $62.2
million in FY 2006.
Mr. Cooper. Can you tell me productivity per worker? Like
in those counties without any farms, what are these people
doing?
Secretary Johanns. You know, again, if you have very few
farms there, then that is going to impact the workload
obviously.
Mr. Cooper. Is there any other federal agency that has this
many field offices?
Secretary Johanns. I cannot imagine there is. I would have
to believe we are in every county in the United States.
Mr. Cooper. How many offices have you reduced in your
tenure as Secretary of Agriculture?
Secretary Johanns. Here is what happened. We headed out to
consolidate and close FSA offices. It was not popular here on
the Hill. I agree, I am not here to win a popularity contest.
But Congress has added to an appropriations bill as of a
year ago a very specific process now that we have to go
through, and we are doing that. I think 21 states or 22 states
are somewhere in the stage of getting that process done and
other states will follow that. But Congress has spoken to us on
this and given us the rules by which we can engage here with
these offices.
Mr. Cooper. So if we speak to you loudly enough, you just
go away and stop proposing closing offices that have no farms
left in the county?
Secretary Johanns. No. That is not the case at all. I mean,
that very clearly is not the case. We have----
Mr. Cooper. May we look forward to your closure proposal
then or can you give us a list of the offices that have no farm
constituents left?
Secretary Johanns. We would be happy to supply whatever
information you need. I can tell you this. We continue to work
through that congressional mandate literally State by State.
And, yes, you can look forward to hearing from us repeatedly as
we work through that process and bring our ideas to you as to
how best to manage this system.
[The information follows:]
The 732 nationwide counties with no field offices include 28
counties that have been designated as non-agricultural because they
have little or no agriculture and 704 with limited agriculture. Any
USDA program needs for these counties are handled by neighboring field
offices.
Secretary Johanns. And, yes, in some states, there are
fewer offices. There are going to be. But we have to follow the
mandate. I----
Mr. Cooper. What matters is efficient delivery of services.
Secretary Johanns. I agree.
Mr. Cooper. And the IRS code is complicated, too, but we do
not have IRS field offices in every county in America, even
though presumably everyone is a taxpayer.
Secretary Johanns. You and I do not have much debate on
this. I think what I want to achieve is exactly what you want
to achieve, and that is a more efficiently-run system. And we
are going to work to do that.
Mr. Cooper. I look forward to your including it in your
testimony next year.
Mr. Ryan. Mr. Cooper, would you just yield for one second?
Mr. Cooper. I would be delighted to.
Mr. Ryan. Mr. Secretary, when you respond to Mr. Cooper,
would you mind just CC'ing us with the same information?
Secretary Johanns. Absolutely.
Mr. Ryan. Appreciate that. Thanks.
Secretary Johanns. Sure. Of course.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Tiberi.
Mr. Alexander.
Mr. Alexander. Yes, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.
Along the line that Mr. Cooper was talking, if we looked at
efficiency only, we might look at doing away with some of the
435 congressional seats across the nation too.
Secretary Johanns. I will not even go there.
Mr. Alexander. The 502 Direct Loan Program, Mr. Hensarling
said something about some of the programs just being reduced
and not cut or eliminated. But I understand that that 502
Direct Loan Program has been zeroed out. And you suggested
earlier that the Guaranteed Loan Program is more efficient in
your opinion.
But my question is, is the Guaranteed Loan Program worth a
whole lot to some people if they cannot be guaranteed a loan?
It is my understanding that many of those institutions out
there are so upset with the way the SBA Program has been
working that they just do not want to fool with it anymore. So
if you have someone out there that needs a loan and they look
at a program called a Guaranteed Loan Program and they cannot
get a loan, that is a poor guarantee.
Secretary Johanns. Let me offer a few numbers here, if I
might. In the Guaranteed Loan Program, our 2008 budget would
support $4.8 billion in guaranteed loans, and that would be a
$1.7 billion increase over prior years.
The Guaranteed Loan Program does have the capacity to serve
families with very low incomes. About 30 percent of the
homeowners that are currently served by our Guaranteed Loan
Program actually have incomes that are about 50 to 80 percent
of the area's median income. These are people who are quite
poor. The rest have income levels in the 80 to 115 percent. So
even at that level, very definitely these folks are quite poor
also.
We expect under the 2008 budget to provide about 39,000
home ownership opportunities. So I guess what I would say to
you is this. We have actually had good success with this
program, and the numbers seem to back it up. It seems to be
operating well, and we seem to be reaching out to people who
really, really need our help through the Guaranteed Loan
Program.
So I think the USDA is the only federal agency at this
point that had anything left of a Direct Loan Program. But I
will provide you whatever you need to try to assist in your
deliberations. But I think this is a program that is actually
working quite well out there.
Mr. Alexander. Okay. Going back earlier, you were talking
about ethanol production and we talked about corn and wood
chips and cow chips and everything else to convert to ethanol,
but we never talked about sugar cane or sugar from the
production of sugar cane or sugar beets.
In your opinion, is that worth looking at?
Secretary Johanns. Yes. In our cellulosic ethanol
proposals, I use that as kind of a generic description, but
sugar cane and beets would be included in that. They would
benefit from this program. And absolutely it is worth it.
You know, if you go to Brazil, that is the raw material, if
you will, sugar cane that produces their ethanol. And I have
been to a plant in Brazil where literally the trucks were
coming in with the cane to process it into ethanol. So the
answer is yes.
I will also tell you my personal hope is that both cane and
beets look at this as a real opportunity for the future of
these industries. I just think the current program is over time
not going to work very well for them. In fact, I would argue it
is hard for me to imagine it works very well even during the
life of the next Farm Bill. And that is a whole separate
discussion. But they very definitely would qualify under the
cellulosic programs.
Mr. Alexander. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Allen of Maine.
Mr. Allen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here.
I have got two questions and I will try to get those out
and let you deal with them in turn. The farming community in
America is fairly diverse and regional. Flexibility and
management is critically important. I am concerned that the
Farm Bill proposal may decrease rather than increase regional
flexibility.
Let me give you an example. The Senior Farmer's Market
Nutrition Program was a new program in the 2002 Farm Bill that
gives seniors vouchers that they can spend at farmer's markets.
Maine was one of the first states to take advantage of that
program, and it has been a phenomenal success.
For example, community-supported agriculture was not really
widespread in Maine when it began and now we have a large
number of farmers, and participation has increased
dramatically.
Now, under Maine's system, farmers are paid up front with
$100 for each participating senior, and the seniors then get
deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables throughout the
growing season. But when the program became permanent and not a
pilot, USDA approved a set of rules that really crippled
Maine's program. They set a number of different rules that made
it impossible for the program to continue.
So the first question is, how does the USDA plan to address
regionally-specific nutritional and agricultural needs in 2008,
and would you be willing to revisit the idea of flexibility in
the Senior Farmer's Market Nutrition Program?
The second question involves the Regional Equity Program
which provided base funding of about $12 million to each State
for conservation programs. That did help northeastern states
like Maine. But in the Farm Bill proposal, the USDA has cut
that Regional Equity Program.
We are very concerned that Maine may get really very little
money even though farming, we may not export a lot, but the
farming industry in Maine is really critically important.
So I am curious how you would address the problem of the
backlog in conservation funding and in the absence of a
Regional Equity Program, how you would propose to address the
needs of those areas which are historically under-served
agricultural communities?
Secretary Johanns. In reference to your first question, I
would be happy to look at whatever we have done and see if
there is something we can do to try to fix the problem that you
have got there. So let me just answer it that way.
Let me also point out this is probably on the positive side
of the ledger. In one of our proposals, we take that senior
voucher program and we set it off in terms of that being
considered as part of your assets to determine whether you
qualify for any other nutrition program. We do that with the
senior voucher program in our proposal, college savings, and
one other item I am not remembering right now. Oh, military
combat pay. But I will look at that.
In terms of the 12 million, you are right. What we have
proposed to do in our Farm Bill proposal is to base
determination on the merit of the application. The $12 million
that was set aside by previous action, I think, kind of sets a
placeholder for states like yours.
We did approach it differently. We said, look, let us just
look at the merit of the application, see who qualifies based
upon the merit. If your State does better in that application,
that is great, but that is how we approached it.
Mr. Allen. If I could just follow-up there.
Secretary Johanns. Sure.
Mr. Allen. The question we have is, given the diversity of
agricultural communities around the country, what criteria are
you going to use to judge whether a program in Maine is
comparable to a program in Nebraska or Texas? It is that issue.
The base funding to keep agricultural programs going in this
area is very important to us, and we are not sure how a merit
program would work.
Secretary Johanns. We do it now. I mean, our conservation
programs, at least in part, are based upon criteria and
scoring. And so it is part of the charge to the USDA to figure
that out and do it fairly. And I think we do.
Yeah. The criteria, it is not something we just put out
there. It has to go through rule making, and we receive
comments, and then we end up with what the criteria will be.
But we do it now. So the answer to your question is, we do it
now.
But admittedly what we are proposing does not create a
stakeholder place for any State. We say we would go through
that merit-based system that we are familiar with and decide
which applications rank where and which ones then would get
funded.
The good thing about our conservation programs, almost
always there is more demand than we have money for. And so they
have to be scored some way and that is how we do it.
Mr. Allen. Okay. Thank you.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Smith from Nebraska.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, you spoke about rural critical-access
hospitals, and I am glad you did. I believe that in Nebraska--
my district alone has 48 of them, 65 in Nebraska. And it is a
delivery system that is working very well in terms of
streamlining services.
There has been some give and take along the way within
these rural communities, but I would say in large part, it has
been very popular even though there is kind of some
centralizing of services.
And so if you would care to share some of the rationale.
You said it was on renovation, I believe, of some of these
facilities. Would it be limited only to renovation or could you
expand on that a little bit?
Secretary Johanns. New equipment would be a part of that,
but it is basically to bring that hospital up to modern
standards.
As you know, in the Third District of Nebraska is a perfect
example. Many of these hospitals are in small communities and
very, very rural areas. When that hospital closes, healthcare
disappears for a lot of miles.
And that is what we are trying to avoid. We are trying to
not only avoid that hospital closing, but we want it to have
state-of-the-art medical care, life-saving capabilities. So if
somebody has a heart attack or there is a farm accident or a
car accident or whatever, they can get to that hospital and
receive that life-saving medical treatment.
So it is an excellent program. In my judgment, we should
have done these hospitals sooner. But we have got the proposal
to do all of them in our Farm Bill proposal. And I really
think, like your district, it is going to be very, very well
received really across the country.
And we will submit for the record a list of the states and
number of hospitals impacted. I am going to guess that maybe
not every State, but the majority of states have critical-
access hospitals that will benefit from this proposal.
Mr. Smith. Okay. Thank you.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Doggett.
Mr. Doggett. Thank you, Mr. Secretary, for your testimony.
Secretary Johanns. Yes, sir.
Mr. Doggett. Let me say that I think there are some
provisions in your proposal that have great merit----
Secretary Johanns. Thank you.
Mr. Doggett [continuing]. Particularly those that focus on
the question of whether we can continue to make unlimited
amounts of payment.
I know that you have one proposal that picks a figure of
200,000 after appropriate deductions and the like. I am not
sure if that is precisely the right level, but it is certainly
the right direction.
We cannot do all the things you are being asked to do today
and that we are being asked to do as a Committee if it is a
blank check. But I need to center in and have great concern in
the same area that Congresswoman DeLauro raised with you
earlier, and that is the disaster and unmitigated failure of
privatization of food stamp services in my home State of Texas.
Indeed it is an issue that a number of members of the Texas
delegation wrote the Department of Agriculture about before
Texas ever proceeded with its misbegotten contract with
Exensor, a company based in Bermuda that will not even pay the
taxes due that its competitors pay here in the United States,
but wants lots of taxpayer business.
Despite the promise of great savings, this privatization
contract has cost federal taxpayers money in additional
administrative cost.
There is also, I think, serious disruption of service of
low-income families in the area of Texas that I personally
represent as a result of this pilot, including a delay to more
than 3,000 families in the first three months alone.
Now that Texas has revised its contract with Exensor and
limited the privatization scheme, I think we need to draw
lessons from the mistakes made in Texas by Texans and the
mistakes made in Washington by a Department that approved Texas
moving forward with this back-room deal.
In January, as I think you are aware, USDA wrote Texas not
once but twice asking for information before any further
rollout of its more narrowed privatization plan. The State has
apparently provided no answer.
And my question is whether or not we are going to have any
more oversight from your Department than we had in approving
this contract initially and whether the oversight will consist
of anything more than just writing letters that are not
answered of the type that you sent to Indiana.
But in Texas, the answer did not specify any February 20th
date. In fact, the last letter seemed to express the dismay
your regional administrator, just please give us some
information, and Texas has not done that.
Secretary Johanns. I do not have the Texas letter in front
of me, but let me promise you I will. My attitude toward this
is that we want a program that is run well, period.
We think we have made great strides in the food stamp area.
You know, our error rate is as low as it has been really ever.
Mr. Doggett. Well, of course, that is one of the reasons
that I am so concerned about the Exensor contract, because the
error rate went up. We had a good Food Stamp Program before the
current Administration down there started wrecking it by giving
all the work in a privatization scheme to Exensor saying they
would save our taxpayers money when, in fact, it ended up
costing us money.
And I do not quite understand why it is you have only
written letters asking for information and, yet, our old buddy,
Mitch Daniels, who we have had a little experience with in this
Committee and his earlier role, decides he wants to make the
same mistakes in Indiana, and you all are letting them go on
and follow in this case the wrong Texas----
Ms. DeLauro. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Doggett. I yield.
Ms. DeLauro. I thank the gentleman.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary.
I want to take your word that you want to have a program
that is run well. And Mr. Hensarling is not here, but my
problem is not that--we are looking at the process here and how
we are going to put families in jeopardy.
I just really want to ask you, based on the February 20th
date and your own desire to have well-run programs, if you will
give a commitment to this Committee that you will ask the State
of Indiana to delay that transfer until we have had a chance to
be briefed on the specifics on what you are requesting from the
State and are satisfied and that we are satisfied that Indiana
is, in fact, complying with the law.
Can we have that kind of a commitment from you, Mr.
Secretary?
Secretary Johanns. I can give you this commitment, that
until we are satisfied that they are going to comply with the
law and run a good program, they would not go forward. I would
say that about any State.
Now, here is what I would offer to you. I really want to
spend a little bit more time seeing where Indiana is at. This
letter went out, I think, a week ago today.
Ms. DeLauro. February 8th.
Secretary Johanns. And maybe the response is going to be on
our desk by close of business today or tomorrow. Bottom line is
this. We want the program to run right. We are proud of our
Food Stamp Program. It is doing great things out there. We are
enrolling numbers that I would imagine people did not even
think we would ever get to. We are helping a lot of people.
I think in our Farm Bill proposals, for example, we are
doing some very positive things in this area. I want to make
sure what runs what, and I will follow-up on your request.
Ms. DeLauro. And if we can be briefed on this program. If
this Committee can be briefed on this program. It is a hundred
percent federal benefits in this program that are being
transferred, half of the $328 million in federal dollars that
are the administrative costs.
I thank the gentleman. I did not mean to infringe on your
time.
Mr. Doggett. You are willing, as I understand it, to brief
the Committee on that? This is just not being sure you did a
good job like you thought you did a good job or your
predecessor did in approving the Exensor contract, but you are
going to give us a chance to hear about it before all this
happens?
Secretary Johanns. We are always happy to be before this
Committee.
Mr. Doggett. I just ask you to do the same thing for Texas
as well on this new program because those letters did not have
a February 20th deadline. One of them was January 4th. One of
them was January 12th. The latter one said please let us know
when we can expect to hear from you regarding the State's
decision and subsequent information.
As best I can determine, the State has not even told you
when they would tell you. And this is just not acceptable
oversight.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. DeLauro. Thank you. I thank the gentleman.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Johanns. Here is what I can do. I will follow-up
on your comments relative to both states, and we will send
somebody in your direction with the latest information we have
and give you each a briefing. And hopefully we can answer the
question.
Mr. Doggett. Or whatever you get from the states.
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Ms. DeLauro. That is right.
Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Lungren.
Mr. Lungren. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And, Mr. Secretary, and your colleagues, it is good to have
you here.
I have got a whole host of questions all the way from the
California impact from this Farm Bill, since California has a
little different agricultural reality than the rest of the
country, to trade, which is very important to our farmers in
California, and forestry.
Probably the poorest area in my district is a place called
West Point in Calavaras County, has one of the highest
percentage of children on food stamps, one of the lowest per
capita income, and it used to be a thriving community with a
very, very strong forestry industry.
Those are all important questions, but let me ask one that
I do not think has been touched on and I am concerned about.
And I realize you share responsibility with DHS on that, and
that is the area of agri-terrorism.
I am concerned of the vulnerability of our food chain all
the way from the farm to its final delivery point, the
vulnerabilities that we have within that, and whether or not we
are putting enough attention, and that includes funding for
research on that, and whether or not we on the federal level
are coordinating not only with the states but with the private
sector in that regard.
I have had some classified briefings on the potential. It
is enough to concern me. It is enough to suggest, at least in
my mind, that this is a very strong vulnerability that not only
could do damage to us economically in short order but could do
human damage as well.
And could you tell me what your Department does in that
regard and how you coordinate with the Department of Homeland
Security in that regard?
Secretary Johanns. We do. If it is agri-terrorism, we work
with the Department of Homeland Security. But if it relates to
an agricultural product, we would lead on that issue.
Here is kind of how it breaks down. We have in the budget
request about $341 million, and that is all part of the Food
and Agricultural Defense Initiative. That would be our piece of
that. Funding would include a 148 million increase for critical
ongoing efforts.
So we work with Homeland Security. But, actually, it even
goes beyond that. We would work with Health and Human Services,
for example, if there was a threat to human health.
And then there is the piece of this that is hard to
quantify from a budget standpoint, but it is very real, and
that is situations like avian influenza. As you know, Congress
put out a pretty substantial amount of money to deal with avian
influenza issues. There has been an aggressive coordinated
national effort, all departments, doing table-tops, sitting in
the same room, doing their planning together. And that was in
response to avian influenza, but I can tell you all of that
work, all of that planning, all of that effort will serve us if
it is avian influenza or a bioterrorism sort of attack.
So we feel very, very strongly that the cooperation here is
good, the effort between departments is seamless. The money
that has been sent our way by Congress has been appreciated.
And I think we have a very, very robust system here. So it is
an excellent question, and I think we are doing some good
things here.
Mr. Lungren. Something I would love to follow-up with you
about, the level of education that we are focusing on to inform
members of the agricultural community about some of the very
easy ways that you could introduce some very damaging diseases
to our country and how we make sure that that educational
system goes all the way down to the workers.
But let me just ask this about the area of forestry. What
do I tell folks in some areas like West Point about the federal
government's attitude? I know we have the Health Forest
Initiative. We have some programs that try to assist those
communities with payments for the schools.
But I have never seen people that were more devastated in
terms of not having an opportunity for jobs in an area where
there were generations, and some of these people were Native
Americans living in this area, but all of them were people who
wanted to continue to live in the area, but, frankly, they
cannot find jobs because they talk about the restrictions we
have placed on the forests of the United States and the
inability for us to actually allow them to make any
contribution.
Secretary Johanns. I have personally visited areas
throughout the country where at one time, there was a very
robust industry and now there is virtually no industry. Like
you, I have met with families where literally they are facing
the prospect that they are out of work because the industry
simply is dying.
Let me just tell you. I fundamentally believe that you can
have a very robust industry that is sensitive to the forests,
sensitive to the environment. Not everybody agrees with that.
In your State, there is a healthy measure of litigation. It
is incredible.
Mr. Lungren. I plead guilty to being an attorney.
Secretary Johanns. Well, I am an attorney too. Not to speak
ill of our brethren, but any forest issue we address in your
part of the country, you can almost guarantee that not only
will our rules be challenged but everything else that you could
possibly imagine.
Mr. Lungren. I know my time is up, but just one thing. And
that is I wish the President and some members of his cabinet,
when we are talking about alternative energy sources, in
addition to talking about switch grass, would also talk about
the fuel that we have in our forests.
If we could somehow use that as a source of creating
alternative for energy, it would create those jobs in this
area. It would clean up that fuel and it would give us an
advantage in the area of energy independence that would be
extraordinary.
Secretary Johanns. In your State, you are absolutely right,
but that is true all across the country. In our Farm Bill
proposals, forest biomass would qualify for all of the things
that I have talked about with cellulosic ethanol. In addition,
we have 150 million for wood to energy program. We have a grant
program we are proposing for innovative solutions to local
forest management issues.
We share your vision here. We think there is a great
opportunity here. Again, I think you will end up with a
healthier forest, a better managed forest, and you are not
going to have the situations we often face in your State with
forest fires where quite honestly they catch that ground cover
and you are off to the races.
Mr. Lungren. Thank you for the indulgence, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Blumenauer.
Mr. Blumenauer. I would like to follow-up on where Mr.
Lungren and the Secretary left this. In part, there are things
I think we can do in terms of tax and in terms of agricultural
policy that levels the playing field in terms of what we do
with biomass and get away from the specter of too much in corn
that has all sorts of bizarre and unintended consequences, not
the least of which for agriculture.
And I appreciate what is there, and I think there are
things we ought to be doing in terms of how we provide the tax
and subsidy incentives.
I have three questions. I will lead with my first one just
to say part of it, I think the solution is being more
thoughtful and aggressive about how we deal with the problem of
fire fighting. We have had what, three of the six last year and
spent over a billion dollars in fire fighting cost.
There is some work that is absolutely environmentally
benign and, in fact, would be supported by environmentalists if
we put some serious money into it and not pushing the limits
with some legislation you do not have to do, but fine tuning
legislation.
My colleague, Peter DeFazio, has some legislation that is
not controversial, that will not be tied up in court, that will
put people to work in communities like yours, and make those
communities safer and fire resistant.
But there is a flip side to that and that is we have to
stop treating our rural communities like suburban bedrooms
where people are going to get urban level of fire protection by
locating places where they simply are not safe. It is bad for
forest management practices and it puts people at risk and draw
your costs of fire fighting up 100 or 1,000 times.
And when you put global warming on top of this and then you
have people going up into the hinterlands--I think the
estimates are that there will be one million more people living
in suburban Denver in this--we will not have enough money to
fight the fires.
So my first question to you, and I know there will not be
time to do justice to it because I probably will not even get
to my other two questions, but I would like a serious response
about what you are willing to do to redirect some money in
these noncontroversial ways that will put these people to work,
provide some biomass material, and make the community safer,
and concurrently that we start having State and local
governments be responsible for not allowing people to sprawl
into areas where they are not safe. It undermines the
environmental and forest characteristics, and provides huge
fire fighting liability. Question one.
Secretary Johanns. Okay.
Mr. Blumenauer. Question two, shifting gears, and, again, I
will be happy to have something in writing at a later time,
deals with in the international arena. I mean, I love the
authorization of up to 25 percent of our food aid as cash for
local and regional purposes overseas, not spending a gazillion
dollars to take dramatically subsidized crops around the world
and putting local poor farmers out of work so we have got to
give them more aid in the long run.
I would love to have a more detailed response in ways that
would allow our food aid program to reach more people, more
quickly, with a more efficient use of the taxpayer dollar.
This is one, Mr. Chairman, I hope we can get our arms
around and work with.
And last but not least, I would love to have a response in
terms of what you think the future will be if we are unable to
take our farm and trade policies in a way that deals with
things like Brazil whacking us on cotton subsidies or Canada on
corn. What is the likely exposure for American agriculture?
These three questions, if you would, I am keenly interested
and want to work with you. I appreciate the rhetoric that was
advanced and some of the proposals.
I come from a State that, you know, we produce more
agricultural product than my other friend, the other Earl from
North Dakota. We produce more agricultural product. We get one-
sixth, one-sixth of the total federal benefit in subsidies for
commodities, for environmental, all of the things combined.
So I like where you are going. I like the approach. Your
reaction to those three questions would be useful.
Secretary Johanns. All three are great questions, and I
will have to be a little abbreviated because of time, but I
would love to sit down, talk with you more about your thoughts
here.
Mr. Blumenauer. A written response is fine. I do not mean
to impose on my colleagues.
Secretary Johanns. That is all right. I can hit these
pretty quickly.
We set out to do a Farm Bill proposal that simply would be
more equitable, and that meant more equitable across farmers.
Sixty percent of U.S. farmers are not subsidized with cash
subsidies. They are not.
In our proposal, we have about $5 billion for what we call
the specialty crop producer.
Mr. Blumenauer. People who grow food----
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Mr. Blumenauer [continuing]. That we eat.
Secretary Johanns. As you know, it is everything from
research to phyto sanitary, sanitary, purchasing more fruits
and vegetables. The 25 percent food aid issue is something we
believe in. It is in our proposal. And it makes a lot of sense.
We want to buy food here, too, but there are certain
emergency situations where literally being able to get food to
somebody is a life or death situation not in two months or 30
days, today. I mean, literally today. We are not taking all of
the food aid, but we are saying this 25 percent would give us
the flexibility to go out there, purchase food, get it to those
people who need it very, very quickly.
And then in terms of your ideas on forests, we are open to
ideas. The current system, I will just be very candid, is not
working very well. Maybe nobody is happy about this system.
Maybe environmentalists are unhappy. Maybe people whose job
depends upon working in logging are not happy. There has got to
be something we can do here. And I would love to sit down with
you more extensively.
Mr. Blumenauer. I appreciate that.
I appreciate your indulgence, Mr. Chairman. Fifteen
seconds, if I may.
I hope you are also considering with the emergency aid, you
know, you have to do it fast with cash because of time
constraints. I hope you will also consider in some of those
areas where we come in with heavily subsidized American food,
it puts the local farmer out of business and those people end
up starving, unless we do it on a permanent basis. I hope you
will use that as a consideration for cash payments as well.
Secretary Johanns. And under this proposal, you could
literally go into that marketplace and acquire food, and that
is where we would buy it. So we think this would work well in
certain circumstances, not necessarily in every circumstance.
We are not asking for 100 percent.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Berry.
Mr. Berry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, we appreciate you being here today.
And, Mr. Conner, we appreciate you being here.
And my next remarks are not intended to reflect on you two
guys at all, but I worked with Scott Steele and Keith Collins
for a couple of years down at the Department and there are few
people in this town or any place that I have greater respect
for. And I wanted to recognize that.
Secretary Johanns. Great. Thank you.
Mr. Berry. In this Committee, we endlessly hear the
discussion that if you just lower the tax rate that the economy
will bubble up out of the ground and everybody will be eating
rainbow stew and drinking free bubbly.
And, you know, my first thought about that is if it works
like that, how come we are broke, how come the nation is $9
trillion in debt?
My question to you is, the only justification I have ever
been able to see for a farm program was to guarantee adequate
production and processing capacity to be sure that our people
had safe food supply.
Has anyone ever calculated the value to the economy of
having the cheap and safest food supply of any economy in the
world?
Secretary Johanns. I would be confident that somebody has
done calculations and I would be confident in telling you that
I agree with that statement. We are blessed. We are blessed by
exactly what you are saying, a very safe, wholesome food
supply, and we generally spend less of our disposable income
than just about anybody in the world. That is a very positive
thing for people.
Mr. Berry. Well, I think so too. Now, the next question I
have is, most of that is going to change under a Farm Bill
since the 1930s. And we keep tinkering with these Farm Bills. I
am a farmer myself. I have been there. I still own one of those
things. Anybody that thinks it is the road to riches needs to
go buy one and learn a whole lot.
But it is big business. It requires a lot of money, a lot
of capital investment. And you do not have to be a rich person,
but you cannot produce and process the amount of food and fiber
that we are going to be required to produce in this country and
do it on the cheek. The technology demands that you have that
kind of capital investment.
Now, I know there is still a few small operations out
there, and that is just all well and good. But I would wonder
if anyone has considered the value of Farm Bill to getting us
in this position where we do have cheap food and fiber.
And before my time runs out, I have got another issue. You
talked about trade a while ago. The rice industry thinks that
the Department of Agriculture has absolutely walked away from
us on the GMO issue with long-grain rice in Europe. And it is
beyond me why either the USTR or you, Mr. Secretary, cannot
stand up to the Europeans and get us at least an even break on
that issue because there is no health risk or anything
involved. And if we are waiting on them to give us the
information that they have about how this happened and all
that, I will not get any response from them.
But the other thing I would say is, and I got into this
business by getting involved in conservation programs and
working to see that conservation programs were put in place and
learning about those things, the Natural Resource Conservation
Service in Arkansas has the worst leadership of any government
agency I have ever seen. It is a train wreck. The farmers have
come to hate it, and they do not even want to do business with
them. The landowners want nothing to do with them if there is
any possible way to avoid it.
And I have talked to people at your agency over and over
again about it and nothing has been done about it, and I would
encourage you to look into that and see if you cannot do
something to make it better.
Secretary Johanns. I will.
Mr. Berry. And I thank you.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you. I will. I will look into the
last issue you mentioned.
A couple of things I would offer very, very respectfully
because I do not want to launch off into a discussion about tax
policy. But, actually, revenues are up. I mean, double digit.
It is rather remarkable.
And having worked around budgets a long time, you know, you
have your base upon which you tax and you have your rate upon
which you tax that base, and there are a number of ways to
approach this, but one way is if you can get that base moving
and investing and employing and doing all of those things, that
is going to impact the rate upon which you apply, so----
Mr. Berry. If it was working any better, Mr. Secretary, we
are going to be broke.
Secretary Johanns. Well, the fact of the matter is the
revenues are coming in at historic levels. That is probably why
there is so much emphasis these days upon balanced budget and
spending and earmarks and all of those things. But the revenues
are very, very strong.
The other thing I would mention, you know, I share your
philosophy about farm policy. I think we are the beneficiaries
of some really great things that have happened. But the 2002
Farm Bill was not the same as the first Farm Bill passed. Each
Farm Bill tends to build upon the shoulders of the last Farm
Bill, and hopefully we do it a little better each time.
And we feel very strongly that our proposal is that for a
variety of reasons, and I will not launch into that. But just
in terms of dollars and cents, if you reauthorize the 2002 Farm
Bill and just said let us do it all again same way, do not
undot an I, do not uncross a T, you would be spending $5
billion less than our proposal.
Now, we worked to make sure our proposal would fit within
the balanced budget goals, and it does, but the reality is that
we think there are some things here that make a lot of sense in
that Farm Bill proposal.
Last thing I would say, and Keith would probably know this
off the cuff, I think our rice exports have stayed strong.
Now, I would agree with you on the EU. And believe me, we
are standing up to them. We are not going to back down. I do
not care if it is hormones and beef or if it is the rice issue
or whatever else the flavor of the day is with them, we are not
going to back down. This is something we take very, very
seriously because with rice, 50 percent of that crop needs to
be exported.
So I just want to assure you, Congressman, I am not going
away. I am not backing down, and I do not see the USTR backing
down on this issue either.
Mr. Berry. If the Chairman will indulge me this. How have
you stood up to them?
Secretary Johanns. On every issue we have with the EU, we
have either filed claims against them in the WTO, we have
worked to negotiate better results. I will tell you in every
way we can push the envelope with them, we have. We have not
walked away from your rice farmers.
Mr. Berry. But we still do not have access to that market.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. They closed access to that market.
Congressman, here is what I would tell you. Under our rules
here in the United States, we could close access to markets and
we do. And we do not like it, but sometimes you have to do it.
Now, in this case personally, I do not see anything unsafe
going on here, and we are going to do everything we can to push
this issue and force this issue. So I want you to know I am not
walking away from this. We are absolutely committed to getting
rice back into the EU and every market in the world, every
market.
Keith.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. McGovern.
Mr. Collins. Mr. Chairman, the Secretary asked me if I
would amplify one further comment of his----
Chairman Spratt. Yes, sir.
Mr. Collins [continuing]. If that is all right with you. I
would just follow-up on what the Secretary said. Yes, we are
having difficulty with the European Union, but I think if you
want to look at the whole array of activities the Department of
Agriculture has conducted with respect to rice, you have to
look at the other markets besides the European Union, which
could have closed to us and did not because of the work the
Department of Agriculture has done.
I could point to Canada as a good example and the
aggressive efforts we had with Canada to maintain that long-
grain market.
I would also point out that before the rice year started,
we expected to export 97 million hundred weight of rice. Then
we had the problem with Liberty Link Rice. We thought exports
were going to fall off the chart. They did not. And the large
measure is because of the export market maintenance that the
Department of Agriculture conducted around the world.
And as we sit here today, we expect our rice exports will
be 102 million hundred weight for the year, actually more than
we thought before we discovered Liberty Link Rice in the rice
supply.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you.
Mr. McGovern.
Mr. McGovern. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being here, and I
appreciate your testimony.
I want to take my five minutes to say a few words and ask a
couple of questions dealing with the issue of hunger.
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Mr. McGovern. And let me begin by saying that I think the
food and nutrition programs under USDA's jurisdiction are among
the most important programs we have. And they deliver essential
food assistance to one in every five Americans and they address
hunger in communities all across the country and in every
single congressional district.
I am sorry my friend, Mr. Hensarling, is not still here. He
went through kind of quoting a litany of numbers, and I would
just say that the question really should not be about whether a
program is level funded or cut or increased. The question
should be whether these programs are adequately funded to meet
the needs that we have in this country.
And you began by saying that you believe that these
programs are indeed funded to meet the needs. I would
respectfully disagree with that. When I look at this budget, I
have to tell you I am a little bit concerned that it is
inadequate to the task of addressing let alone eliminating
hunger and food insecurity in this country. And the job of
doing that rests not just with your agency. There are other
agencies too. I had this discussion with Secretary Leavitt when
he was here the other day.
But let me start with senior citizens. Many seniors need
special diets and adequate nutrition for their medications to
work. Yet, they lack access to adequate food.
I was explaining to Secretary Leavitt about a visit I had
to an emergency room in Massachusetts, Massachusetts Hospital
about doctors telling me about senior citizens coming there
with all kinds of ailments because they are taking their
medication without adequate food. These seniors are
dehumanized. They are demoralized when they have to choose
between food and medication or rent or utilities. Yet, once
again, this budget just like last year proposes to eliminate
the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which is a modest $107
million.
And while I am touching on the subject of seniors and food
stamps, we both know why so many eligible senior citizens do
not take advantage of the Food Stamp Program. They only qualify
for a $10.00 minimum monthly benefit, and the $3,000 asset
limit has remained the same for many years and unlike most
programs for elderly, there is not index for inflation.
I think these are changes that need to be addressed in the
Farm Bill, but I do not see any such proposals in your budget.
And if these necessary changes were made, which I think they
should be made, they will have a budget impact.
So I would like to get your comments on that. But before I
do, I want to get my second question in with regard to
children.
Nearly 80 percent of food stamp recipients are households
with children, so changes in eligibility can have a devastating
effect on whether working families are able to put food on the
table for their kids.
Data provided by many faith-based organizations, food
pantries, and food banks clearly shows that many families
exhaust their monthly food stamp benefits about two-thirds of
the way through the month. Yet, the changes in eligibility
proposed in this budget actually reduces the number of families
eligible for food stamps rather than increasing the amount of
the benefit or expanding the number of families eligible for
the benefit.
So in that respect, I think we are going in the wrong
direction. For the 280,000 families slated to lose their food
stamp eligibility under this budget, approximately 400,000 of
their children will also lose their access to free school
lunches.
So in addition, I think this budget once again fails to
provide the necessary funding for universal school breakfast
programs, after school feeding programs, the summer feeding
programs, leaving more and more kids hungry, under- nourished,
food insecure. Again, all of these programs remain
significantly, in my opinion, under-funded with very limited
reach.
Now, I guess, my question, Mr. Secretary, is that at a
minimum, why can we not get a budget that adequately addresses
hunger in America, I mean, or at least addresses the needs of
our children and our senior citizens?
This budget, I think, tolerates hunger. And that is not to
take away from the positive in this budget to try to deal with
hunger, but it does not anywhere go near where we need to go to
eliminate the problem in this country. It makes no effort to
move America forward in cutting hunger in half or even reducing
it by a third.
And so I would like your reaction to that, but also make a
suggestion that maybe you or someone in this Administration
should head up an inter-department or interagency task force
designed specifically to deal with the hunger issue. Maybe
cutting hunger in half by the year 2015, you know, or even
doing better than that. But I do not see in this budget how we
get to that goal.
And, again, if you could deal with this hunger issue, you
know, we can control healthcare costs, we can get a more
productive workforce, kids are going to learn better in school.
I mean, all the benefits are very obvious to me. But, yet, we
are not there with this budget. And I would appreciate your
response.
Secretary Johanns. I will ask Chuck Conner to offer a few
thoughts. He works this issue a lot and so he probably has some
special insights that I do not.
But a couple of thoughts that I might offer. I do not think
any Administration in the history of this country has more
aggressively and fully funded nutrition programs than this one.
They are growing. We fully fund them. We establish a
contingency program so if there is additional growth that we
did not anticipate, we could handle that.
I think the senior program you are talking about, the
Commodity Supplemental Food Program, let me just be very clear,
in that proposal, we have outreach dollars to reach out to
seniors. We feel very, very strongly that if they qualify for a
nutrition program that we should get them on that program.
This Commodity Supplemental Food Program is only in a few
states, if I remember correctly, a few states, and I think a
couple of reservations, if I am not mistaken. It is a very,
very limited program. And in my judgment, there is just no
doubt that the greatest impact you are going to have is through
the Food Stamp Nutrition Program.
And then the other one you mentioned, I think you are
probably referencing the eligibility issue.
Mr. McGovern. Yes.
Secretary Johanns. And, again, if those citizens qualify
for the Food Stamp Program, we want them on the Food Stamp
Program, but this is a situation. And, again, the Deputy works
this more than I do, but this is a situation where maybe they
have qualified for job training or something and so they are
automatically put there. And we are saying, wait. What it
should be about is qualifying them for the Food Stamp Program.
If they qualify, let me just assure you, we are going to get
the benefit of that program.
Chuck.
Mr. Conner. Well, Congressman McGovern, I think the
Secretary has touched upon, you know, the key highlights of
this. Again, I think the data would show pretty clearly that
our outreach efforts in this Administration to reach those
people that are eligible for food stamps but for whatever
reason in the past have failed to sign up for the program has
been, you know, a real benefit to this country.
And the data that was cited earlier by another one of your
colleagues, I think, is the right data to show that we have
reached a tremendous number of people with this program.
Mr. McGovern. Yeah. But one of the problems I mentioned is
that for a lot of senior citizens, they have a $10.00 minimum
which, you know, is nothing. And, you know, so, I mean, part of
the issue is not just, you know, outreach, it is also having a
benefit that is, you know, reasonable.
And we are not indexing this for inflation. We are not
recognizing the rising costs. And I mean, I know my time is up,
but I will again just point that out and say that I think we
need to work on that.
And, again, I would urge the Secretary, you know, maybe
this interagency task force or maybe a White House summit on
hunger, but I think we need to focus on this issue in a way
that--you know, with all due respect, I think we have a long
way to go.
Mr. Conner. Just a quick----
Chairman Spratt. Go ahead quick.
Mr. Conner. Just a quick closing comment on that point in
terms of the level of benefit. In our budget proposal, we do
provide six months worth of benefits to those transferring into
the Food Stamp Program away from the CSFP Program. I believe
that benefit is about $22 million worth in the bill so that
they do have a significant transition there.
Mr. McGovern. But that is much smaller than the elimination
of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program which the 22 million
does not make up for what has been taken away.
Mr. Conner. Well, depending upon their level of food stamp
benefit they get once they qualify. That is correct.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Etheridge.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Secretary, good to have you back.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you.
Since we are talking about the budget, let me ask you a
question. If you would enlighten me, I want to return to the
conservation piece for just a moment.
You talked about how important it was, and I happen to
agree with you. It is important to me and certainly to my State
of North Carolina and I think all states.
North Carolina is one of the top five states in total
livestock production in this country. It is a major crop
producer, and we also have a growing influx of people from all
over the country, a number of retirees moving there, and so we
are growing very rapidly.
So conservation funding helps strike a balance between farm
and these growing cities. Using programs like Farm Preservation
and CRP are very important in a State like ours, and I think in
most states.
So my question is this. We are being asked to set aside
billions of additional funding for conservation for the next
Farm Bill, which I happen to agree with. However, I am
perplexed, and I hope you can straighten me out, with the
President's own budget recommendation that we now have, for
this year alone cuts conservation funding by almost $400
million.
Secretary Johanns. Here is what I can offer. We are kind of
at an unusual intersection here, and I guess it happens during
every Farm Bill cycle.
Mr. Etheridge. Before you start, there is one other point I
want to make. At a time in a State like ours and a lot in the
southeast, we are seeing growth in poultry and pork, an area
where obviously you can appreciate conservation is really
needed.
We have got morbidity on animals that through EQUIP you
have got to deal with. You got land conservation. These things
really are a grave concern, and I am not sure these two things
are meeting, you know. We are sort of like this.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. This gets so complicated, I almost
need the budget guy to explain it. But as I understand it, it
is a cut to the baseline. It is not a cut in terms of
absolutes.
But here is another thing I would offer. We are kind of at
this unusual intersection here where we have a budget process
going on, but we also have a Farm Bill process going on. And
this September, the current Farm Bill basically expires. It
expires with the 2007 crop year, and hopefully we will have a
new Farm Bill ready and up and going.
And in the new Farm Bill, as you point out, we
substantially increase funding for conservation programs, about
$7 billion. In some of the programs that work very, very well
in a State like yours and in the cattle industry, like our
proposal for EQUIP is like an additional $4.2 billion.
Mr. Etheridge. But is that not a gap, Mr. Secretary? You
are asking here and we are cutting here, and we do not have a
bridge.
Secretary Johanns. No. Scott, if you can walk us through
this. I do not think that is the case.
Mr. Steele. Yes. Mr. Congressman, yeah. We have
authorizations that are funded in the 2000 Farm Bill that take
some of these programs to higher levels than we are actually
proposing in the budget. For example, EQUIP would go
potentially in the 2002 Farm Bill, the one point two or three
billion dollars.
This program has been traditionally funded at about a
billion dollars by Congress. Last year, they funded at a
billion dollars. We are proposing to again fund it at the
billion dollars.
In waiting for the transition of the Farm Bill, we are
going to have some new rules and regulations, new ways of
operating these programs. So rather than making a change in the
2008 budget, we would rather make those changes in the Farm
Bill context and then raise the money based on the new
proposals that come forward in the Farm Bill.
So there is no absolute cut, for example, in EQUIP. We are
still maintaining the same level. We just are not increasing it
to the full authorization in the 2002 Farm Bill in 2008.
But the out-years, as the Secretary said, we are going to
be ramping up EQUIP. We are going to be ramping up CSP, and
these other conservation programs will see an increase of
something like $7 billion.
Mr. Etheridge. In the authorization?
Mr. Steele. Well, in our proposal----
Mr. Etheridge. What about the appropriation side where the
budget is?
Mr. Steele. Well, that is a year-to-year thing. Now, you
know, they can combine, put limitations on as they have in the
past and do that, but, you know, that is up to----
Secretary Johanns. Mr. Etheridge, the seven billion,
though, is mandatory funding that would not be subject to
appropriation.
Mr. Etheridge. Okay. I see my time is running down. Let me
just make a point that I am sorry my friend from Texas is not
here. When he was talking about farmers and the checks they get
recognizing that one good year does not necessarily mean a
long-term successful operation when a piece of equipment today
costs a quarter of a million dollars that just a few years ago
may have cost the farmer or operation 100,000.
So it has a significant impact. It has been my experience
that most farmers are not sending those checks back. I assume
you do not have an agency taking those checks when they are
sent out. And the last time I checked, we do not have a whole
lot of farmers who are retiring to the Bahamas.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
And I yield back.
Chairman Spratt. Ms. Hooley.
Ms. Hooley. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Secretary, I have a couple of issues. There are a lot
of issues I would like to talk to you about, but I want to try
to stick to two.
The ``National Forest Land Adjustment For Rural Communities
Act'' would authorize you to provide a source funding for a
four-year extension of the `` Secure Rural Schools'' to help
fund this initiative. The Administration recommends that we
sell a number of National Forest Systems' land around the
nation.
My question is, approximately how much revenue do you
anticipate generating from your proposal? How do you anticipate
counties would make up the difference? What happens four years
from now and is that not a little bit like selling your seed
corn?
Given the fact that this was tried last year, you know, why
are we doing this again? And then what additional steps have
you taken to further the reauthorization of this `` Secure
Rural Schools Act,'' which affects 42 states and 4,400 school
districts across the country?
And the reason I talk about this is I am from Oregon, and I
am from a State where this is just devastating to our rural
communities, our rural counties. This is money that we said
because you have all of these federal lands in your county that
we are going to pay you in lieu of taxes. That is where it
started. Then it was timber receipts and then it was the ``
Secure Rural Schools.''
And we have literally pink slips going out today and
tomorrow and the next day where you are cutting down the
Sheriff's Department so they cannot operate, DA Departments so
they cannot operate. In one instance, laying off a number of
jail guards, actually is against the State law where they would
have to go on that one.
So this is a very serious problem for those of us that have
a lot of federal lands. So that is why I want to talk about ``
Secure Rural Schools.'' First question.
Second question, again being from the Wallamette Valley
that grows 1,200 different crops, most of those are vegetable,
tree nuts nursery crops represent--the specialty crops
represent about 50 percent of the farm gate receipts with $50
billion and, yet, as you heard my colleague say, only receive a
fraction of USDA funding.
And I think it is a little ironic because most of these
farmers--and I grew up on a farm in North Dakota, a wheat
farm--but most of the farmers in Wallamette Valley are small
farmers. They grow crops that are easily damaged. I mean, if
you are a strawberry grower and you have rain at the wrong
time, you do not have any sunshine at the wrong time, your
crops go under.
So these are small farmers growing the foods that we need
to supply to--you just heard one of my colleagues talking about
hunger. I mean, we need to supply more of these foods to our
schools. These are fresh vegetables, fresh fruits. Small
farmers, certainly a lot of uncertainty, so sort of what your
take is on that.
And I know in 2004, the President signed into law the ``
Specialty Crops Competitiveness Act,'' which authorized $44
million for specialty crop block grants for states, for
research, for marketing, education, pest control, so forth.
However, since that act has been signed into law, the
President has largely left this unfunded. So my question is,
does the President's budget include anything for this program
and, if not, does this budget include anything that benefits
this vital segment of U.S. agriculture?
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. Let me, if I might, visit with you
about specialty crops. Then I am going to ask Scott to maybe
walk us through the budget on the program that you talked about
at the start of your comments.
Ms. Hooley. ``Secure Rural Schools.''
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Ms. Hooley. Okay.
Secretary Johanns. ``Secure Rural Schools.'' I will tell
you, Congresswoman, without any hesitation that specialty crops
have never been a part of farm policy like we are proposing
they be a part of it in the proposal we released three weeks
ago.
The specialty crop legislation that you are talking about,
all discretionary funding, and it has been a challenge to have
much funding come out of that bill.
Here is what we are proposing, and this would be mandatory
funding. We are proposing about a $5 billion program for
specialty crops, 2.75 billion to purchase fruits and vegetables
for our food assistance programs, an additional 500 million to
increase the purchase of fruits and vegetables in our school
meals.
And the schools could use those fruits and vegetables in
whatever way they feel would be best. They might do a snack
program. They might do fruits and vegetables with their hot
lunch program or if they have a morning breakfast, they might
do it there.
We are providing a $250 million increase for the Market
Access Program, that is a program targeted at nonprogram
commodities again, to promote. Very popular program.
We are providing 20 million to address sanitary, phyto
sanitary issues, again directed at specialty crops. We are
increasing the technical assistance for specialty crops, and
our specialty crop farmers, the waste from those crops would be
eligible for all of our energy programs.
In your area, you will benefit from conservation proposals
and some other things we are proposing, but I would
specifically mention that in your area, you would benefit from
a proposal we have that includes $1.7 billion for regional
water programs. And, again, I am confident that that would be
very helpful to you.
We have had a very, very positive response to our proposal
from specialty crop producers because, quite honestly, they
just did not have much place in previous farm policy. But when
we did our Farm Bill forums, these farmers showed up and said,
you know, we want a place at the table, not subsidies. No one
asked me in that industry for cash subsidies, but for research,
purchasing fruits and vegetables, market promotion, sanitary,
phyto sanitary.
And we have hit on every issue here, and I think it is the
most bold initiative for the farmers that you are talking about
of any Farm Bill proposal ever made to date in farm policy.
Now, let me ask Scott to talk to you a little bit about the
budget numbers here.
Ms. Hooley. Okay, because I would like to have a sense of
if you talk about $5 billion for specialty crops, how does that
compare to the commodity crops. That is what, 50 percent
production.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. I know. I know. Commodity crops
are going to get a sizable amount of money.
Ms. Hooley. Give me a ballpark figure of the comparison of
the five billion compared to----
Secretary Johanns. Thirty-five billion.
Ms. Hooley. Okay. And even though these are the small
farmers, the farmers that have----
Secretary Johanns. Here is what I would say. That is the
direct subsidy number.
Ms. Hooley. Okay.
Secretary Johanns. I can promise you I did not hear a
single specialty crop farmer at any Farm Bill forum I did show
up and say, you know, I want to be subsidized. Treat me just
like soybeans or corn or whatever. In fact, they do not want to
be because they worry that it will distort the marketplace. But
they did want funding for the research, et cetera, and----
Ms. Hooley. And the market access?
Secretary Johanns. Yeah, and all the others I have
mentioned.
Ms. Hooley. Okay.
Secretary Johanns. So this is a much larger place in farm
policy for this group of very important farmers than has ever
happened, ever. I promise you that.
Go ahead, Scott.
Mr. Steele. Thank you very much.
On the ``Secure Rural Schools'' situation, and you probably
know as much as I do, but I do not work for the Forest Service.
I am a Departmental Budget officer, but I will try to explain
to you what we are trying to do on this.
Basically, as you know, there are two pieces of legislation
that apply to rural schools. There is something called, you
know, the `` 1908 Act''----
Ms. Hooley. Right.
Mr. Steele [continuing]. Where these counties that have a
large timber production in their counties got 25 percent of the
timber receipts.
Ms. Hooley. Right.
Mr. Steele. The problem is we have had a very vast
reduction in timber production and timber sales around the
country, something from over ten billion board feet down to
something like two billion board feet.
Ms. Hooley. Right. And that is probably not going to
change.
Mr. Steele. And that may not change. And that is something
beyond our control a little bit because of court cases and
things like that.
But in the year 2000, there was a bill passed by Congress
which allowed these school areas, these counties to get, you
know, the benefit of additional amounts of money that Congress
enacted. And that law was in effect from 2000 to 2006.
Ms. Hooley. Right. Because we said on the ``Forest Practice
Act'' that we were going to reduce the amount of forest cut.
Mr. Steele. Yeah.
Ms. Hooley. And so this was to make up the difference.
Mr. Steele. Make up the difference. And we understand that.
Now, unfortunately, that second piece of legislation, the ``
2000 Act,'' expired in 2006. It has not been extended by
Congress in 2007, although we did propose something in last
year's budget. We again are proposing something similar in the
2008 budget which would extend this type of program for four
years.
Now, I understand that there is some controversial aspects
of our proposal in terms of selling off some of this land.
Ms. Hooley. Yeah, because what do you do four years from
now?
Mr. Steele. Well, then we will have to readdress it. But,
you know, you have got to do something with the legislation
here in Congress. And the Under Secretary, Mark Rey, has told
us that, you know, he is willing to work with Congress and the
committees to help work out a solution to this problem.
However, there is a problem in 2007 because we are not
collecting any money. This is a lag, one year. You have to
collect the money, then pay it out the next year. So right now
there is a hiatus in terms of funding for 2007. We would
continue this in 2008, but I think the payments would not be
made until 2009.
Ms. Hooley. Right.
Mr. Steele. So there is a lag problem in the funding here,
and we realize that problem, but we are going to have to work
with the committees on the Hill here to try to figure out a way
to solve that problem.
Ms. Hooley. I just want you to know how serious the problem
is and literally----
Mr. Steele. But, still, I mean, it is not a total
substitute. They could still fall back to the `` 1908 Act'' and
get some payments based on the timber receipts from that
county. It is not a solution, but they are not totally without
some source of funding there.
Ms. Hooley. Okay. Thank you.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Boyd.
Mr. Boyd. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Secretary Johanns, gentlemen, welcome.
Let me start, Mr. Secretary, by saying I know of your deep
love for the land. You were reared on the land and have a great
respect for those who farm it. And I have a great respect for
you and the way you handled yourself.
I want to start by saying two things. One is thank you for
the Department's work on behalf of the citrus industry relative
to citrus canker. I know you were not there during the whole
fight that has been going on a lot of time, but obviously we
lost the fight in terms of eradication. But now you are helping
us develop a policy or a plan to live with it. And we
appreciate that.
By the way, our citrus farmers are doing pretty well,
better than they have been doing because of market prices and
reduced stocks.
I also want to say that many of those of us in the farm
community are not opposed to Farm Service Agency mergers and
consolidations. We know that needs to come, and we would along
with Mr. Cooper encourage you to continue that in a reasonable
and rational manner so that we can serve our farm community,
but do it at the lowest possible cost to the taxpayer.
I want to ask two questions, Mr. Secretary. One is a
general question. The other one, we are all parochial in a way,
and you may know what that is going to be.
First of all, let me associate myself with Marion Berry's
remarks, not all of them, but certainly the ones where he
talked about our national agricultural policy and the
importance of that to our economy, but not only to our economy,
but to our national security.
Those of us who grew up on a farm and have parents and
grandparents that owned a farm during the depression days
understand how important the national agricultural policy and
government's involvement is in this.
Commodity prices have traded in a very narrow range for 40
years. We have only been able to stay competitive, Mr.
Secretary, because we stayed ahead of the curve on research and
development. Research and development is of critical import,
and the ways that we deliver that research and development is
through our land grant universities, system research and
extension services, and our ARS.
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Mr. Boyd. There are real cuts, not the cuts--I am sorry Mr.
Hensarling is not here--but there are real cuts in your budget
proposal.
Would you address how you think we can stay competitive and
help me a little bit here, and do you have a plan soon for
upping those research numbers?
Secretary Johanns. I think what you are looking at is the
earmarks. And if you just look at number to number, without
earmarks, it looks like there has been a real cut. But if you
recognize that those are earmarks, that is what has happened
there. I think our funding for research is actually up some
excluding the earmarks. So that is the number you are looking
at.
I will also point out to you again we are kind of at this
unusual intersection between budget and Farm Bill. But part of
our proposals relative to Farm Bill are for really an
aggressive effort to expand our research capability. We are
proposing some internal reorganization so we will have it under
one umbrella. It makes a lot of sense.
But we are also proposing additional funding, and we think
that we can create a better working relationship between what
is referred to as our intramural research and the extramural
research that goes on.
The other thing I would mention I think would be very
interesting to you, we are proposing a billion dollars in
additional research in our Farm Bill proposals directed at
those nonprogram crops, those specialty crops. Again, this was
something that we were asked to fund.
So I think when you look at it, set off the earmarks, and
you and I do not have to have a debate about earmarks; that is
a big discussion point these days, our research dollars are
actually pretty strong.
But I would ask you also to look at our Farm Bill
proposals. I think we are doing some pretty exciting things
there in terms of our proposal.
Mr. Boyd. I will, Mr. Secretary. But earmarks are not when
you turn money over to the ALRS for the Land Grant University
to work specifically on problems in the agricultural area.
Those are real dollars when they are eliminated. So I
appreciate your answer on that.
My second question, Mr. Secretary, you may know about this.
Can you tell me from a parochial standpoint--again, those of us
in the southeast, peanut crops has always been a very important
program. You know, we changed it in a major way in the 2002
Farm Bill, and the storage and handling is a critical and
important part of that, we believe, to keep southeast farmers,
you know, growing that crop. Can you expound a little bit about
your thoughts on that----
Secretary Johanns. Yes.
Mr. Boyd [continuing]. And the fact that that portion of
the Farm Bill expired in 2007?
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. We have pretty well gotten out of
the storage business, if you will. There are only two crops
that get anything for storage, and one would be peanuts and one
would be cotton.
When the peanut program was changed, and I just educated
myself on this late yesterday afternoon after appearing before
the Ag Committee in the House, that storage was put in place
for four years. So that has now expired.
And, again, it would be in keeping with our approach, and
that is to move away from paying for storage. And so that is
what has happened here with the peanut industry. That is
probably why you are maybe getting calls from your peanut
producers. But that was only designed to be a four- year
program. It has now run out and expired.
Mr. Boyd. If you would indulge me for 15 seconds, Mr.
Chairman.
I think that they ran out of--I was not in the room when
they wrote that 2002 Farm Bill, but I assume they ran out of
money and that is one of the areas they cut. And,
unfortunately, that is not in the baseline and now it is a
problem for us.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah. You will run into that problem.
The MILC program is not in the baseline, for example.
Mr. Boyd. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you, Mr. Boyd.
Ms. Kaptur.
Ms. Kaptur. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Welcome, Mr. Secretary, and gentlemen. Glad to see you
again and thank for the great job you do.
My questions will center in two areas. One deals with
strengthening local food systems by small- and medium-sized
producers that are largely unsubsidized, and improving
nutrition.
What tends to happen in a Farm Bill or in the way USDA
approaches these is they are scattered all over the place and
it is not looked at coherently. And I just wanted to draw that
to your attention.
So, for example, in the WIC Farmer's Market Program,
excellent program for--I do not have to explain to you what
that is--for children, for mothers, many of those families do
not eat enough fresh fruits and vegetables. Helps our local
farmers who tend to be frozen out of the processing facilities
far away and cannot get their product to market. As we approach
a new Farm Bill and you look at your budget, I would really
have you look at that program.
Another program is the Senior Farmer's Market Nutrition
Program. I think you were informed I would be asking you about
that one because that has been a test program since 2000,
giving very small amounts of money to our seniors so they eat
better and get fresh fruits and vegetables. There has been a
cap on that at $15 million around the country, and over half
the states do not even have any prototype program.
We have one prototype program in Ohio which we have worked
on now in our region for, I think, going on four or five years.
And rather than USDA learning from these prototypes, what is
happening in a State like Ohio, we have heard, based on some
regulations that came out of USDA in December, now what they
want to do is take a program and begin breaking it apart,
putting it in other parts of the State where there is no
experience.
And I would just urge you, Mr. Secretary, to look at these
programs in a way that they operate over a period of time. You
strengthen the local food system. You strengthen the ability of
unsubsidized crop producers to provide good nutritious food. I
would not bound you by just those programs, but rather look at
the area Offices on Aging in regions all over this country. I
would urge you to go see the Director of that over at HHS.
The area Office on Aging in the largest community I
represent serves a million meals a year, a million meals a
year. The area Office on Aging hates the food. All we need to
do is to get our producers a little help in processing and we
can provide a really good meal to a million people a year. If
we can do that 12 months out of the year, we can then begin to
move that food into the local schools.
We have never been able to get USDA to do this. I think I
am going to propose a new piece of legislation as part of the
Farm Bill in order to do this. But you understand it because
you are an agriculturalist at heart.
So if you were to just take the Senior Farmer's Nutrition
Program as part of that, could you tell me, would you
consider--your budget does not say this--not capping the
program at 15 million and drawing on the experience of regions
that have painstakingly tried to make it work with seniors
across this country rather than in many ways dismantling what
you have been about creating since 2000? Would you consider
that?
Secretary Johanns. Yeah, although we took a little
different approach. And I would love to sit down with you more
and talk about this. But in the programs that you have talked
about, the additional funding that we are dedicating to our
nutrition programs to buy fruits and vegetables, those programs
could take advantage of what we are proposing.
And it is a substantial amount of money. It is not an
insignificant amount of money, and I think it would be, yeah,
3.25 billion available. At least that is what we are proposing.
And, again, mandatory funding is our proposal.
So it is something that if Congress acts on it, it would be
there and available.
Ms. Kaptur. But what links them to the farmer? What creates
the continuum from farm to table? What is the mechanism?
Secretary Johanns. Well, these crops especially, you are
buying straight from that farmer. Again, I think these will
help specialty crop farmers whether they farm an acre or are a
very large producer of specialty crops, because we are
literally going out there again with our proposal with a
substantial amount of money and buying those crops. And that
would come in an area like yours. It would be available for the
programs you have talked about.
Now, the Senior Farmer's Market Program, I will tell you I
like the program. I think it does do a lot of good things. I
would be happy to take a look at that and how well that is
working.
Ms. Kaptur. Thank you.
Secretary Johanns. But, again, I think if we can have a few
minutes of your time sometime, we would love to walk you
through our proposals here because I think they would make a
lot of sense and work for what you are describing.
Ms. Kaptur. Yes. We need a more coherent mindset at USDA to
draw them together. It sounds like you are already there. I
would love to meet with you on that.
I know my time is expired, Mr. Secretary. The amount we are
going to pay on interest this year on the debt is 20 times more
than your discretionary budget.
Secretary Johanns. Yeah.
Ms. Kaptur. So I thought I would just let you see this
chart because it is a concern of all of ours. Our trade deficit
is as bad as our budget deficit, and the major category of that
is petroleum, $250 billion a year, about an $80 billion
deficit, the most important category of trade deficit.
I just wanted to ask you, who at USDA or where in your
budget--we see a billion dollars set aside for proposed change
from the baseline for this coming fiscal year. Who is the czar
of energy? Collin Peterson here in the House has set up a new
Subcommittee, Conservation, Energy and Natural Resources. Who
at USDA is thinking about this in an integrated way?
Secretary Johanns. We established something that I think is
really doing very well and doing some exciting things. It is an
Energy Coordinating Council. Keith Collins is on that. But the
Chair of that is our rural development person, Tom Dorr. And
Tom has a lot of fire and enthusiasm. If you have not met Tom
Dorr, I would really recommend it. He is really good. And he
would love to sit down with you on energy issues.
Ms. Kaptur. Mr. Secretary, I would be very willing to work
with any of my colleagues on this Committee or Mr. Peterson and
just have a briefing for any members interested in agriculture
and energy----
Secretary Johanns. We would love to do it.
Ms. Kaptur [continuing]. Prior to the Farm Bill. I would
just offer that up.
And I know my time is expired, and I thank the Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you very much.
Now, let me say to our panel thank you very much for being
here today, for your forthright answers and your forbearance in
helping us to understand the Farm Program. We appreciate you
coming and we appreciate what you have added to our knowledge
of the program and your budget request.
Secretary Johanns. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. We probably will have some questions for
the record as we come to an understanding of what you are
requesting. We may need to send you a copy of those, and we
would appreciate a prompt response.
Secretary Johanns. Yes, of course.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you very much indeed.
We next have a panel that will take up the topic of
interest and concern to all of us, and that is hunger in the
United States.
USDA has estimated that 34 million individuals are food
insecure. And USDA, the Department of Agriculture has a number
of programs to address this problem of hunger in America, food
stamps, school lunch, WIC, Women, Infants, and Children, the
Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which the Administration
is proposing to terminate, and the Emergency Food Assistance
Program.
Our two witnesses who are about to come forward are Dr.
Deborah Frank, the founder and Director of the Grow Clinic at
Boston Medical Center, and Denise Holland, the Executive
Director of the Harvest Hope Food Bank in South Carolina.
This hearing is held at the request of Jim McGovern, and I
yield to Jim McGovern for an opening statement.
Mr. McGovern. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I appreciate you
accommodating me on this.
And I want to thank both Ms. Holland and Dr. Frank for
being here. I know Dr. Frank very well, and the work that she
is doing at Boston Medical Center is really quite incredible.
But both of these individuals are doing unbelievable work and
are battling hunger in their respective communities and
actually serving as models for the rest of the country to
follow.
One of the reasons why I had requested this additional
panel was essentially out of a sense of frustration that we do
not talk about hunger very much in this Congress and especially
on this Committee where a lot of the discussion tends to be
around numbers.
As I mentioned to Secretary Johanns, I think it is
important that we understand that there are people behind those
numbers. And a lot of people do not realize this, but the
United States of America actually signed a treaty to cut world
hunger in half by the year 2015. And the last time I checked,
the United States was still part of the world.
And I fail to see in this budget the mechanisms or the
funding or the strategy to even reach that modest goal of
cutting hunger in half by the year 2015.
And notwithstanding some of the good things that Secretary
Johanns is doing, the fact of the matter is that we have a lot
of kids who are eligible for the free school lunch program
during the school year who do not get summer feeding in the
summertime. We get people who are not taking advantage of the
Food Stamp Program in part because the benefit is too low, not
just because that they cannot go through all the paperwork to
register.
The other day when Secretary Leavitt was here, I asked him
some questions about the fact that a lot of senior citizens are
showing up in emergency rooms ill because they are taking
medication on an empty stomach and that we needed to do
something about that, especially wanted to control healthcare
costs. I mean, that seems to me to be one way to do it. And his
response to me was, well, I assure you I am against hunger.
Well, I have never met anybody who is for hunger. But what
we lack is the political will to actually reduce and eliminate
hunger. It is something we can do. And I just hope as we
formulate our budget here that this takes a high priority.
And, again, I thank the Chairman for allowing this panel to
come before us, and I hope that this panel will shame us into
doing what we need to do to end hunger in America. So thank you
very much.
Chairman Spratt. I might add that Dr. Deborah Frank is a
graduate of Harvard Medical School, a professor at Boston
University School of Medicine, a pediatrician, and an authority
on the growing problem with hunger in the United States and
especially its effects on children.
Ms. Denise Holland from my State, South Carolina, runs
something called the Harvest Hope Food Bank, serves 18 counties
throughout South Carolina, 12 in my district, providing for 350
member agencies, which are food pantries, soup kitchens,
emergency shelters, the kids cafe, feeding 149,000 people every
year. She is also a Treasurer of the South Carolina Food Bank
Association and plays a leadership role in a number of civic
organizations.
You have had to wait through all the afternoon, and we
appreciate your patience and look forward to your testimony.
Dr. Frank, if it is agreeable with both of you, we will
begin with you. Pull the microphone up to you because this room
does not have very good acoustics.
STATEMENTS OF DEBORAH FRANK, M.D., DIRECTOR, GROW CLINIC FOR
CHILDREN, BOSTON MEDICAL CENTER; DENISE HOLLAND, EXECUTIVE
DIRECTOR, HARVEST HOPE FOOD BANK, COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA
STATEMENT OF DEBORAH FRANK
Dr. Frank. Thank you. I would like to thank you for the
concern that you and Representative McGovern and the members of
the Committee have shown for the well-being of Americans at
greatest nutritional risk, which are our children followed
closely by our elderly.
I am a researcher as well as a clinician. I am involved in
the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program which
works in the states of many of the people on this Committee,
including Pennsylvania, Maryland, Minnesota, Arkansas, and
Massachusetts.
And I know you have had a lot of numbers and because I
teach in a med school, I cannot help show you more numbers and
more slides. But I really want to remind you what I know as a
clinician, that every number comes with a name and a face.
And let me tell you about a little boy that I will call
Sam. He was born in our hospital at a reasonable birth weight,
six pounds, and then when he was sent into my clinic, which
only takes kids who are scaring their neighbor health center
doctors, at 13 months of age, he only weighed 17 pounds, which
is the weight of a normal little boy of 17 weeks. He was all
head, eyes, and ribs and long eyelashes, but his skin was so
pale, I thought I could see right through him. And he had the
most abnormal blood count I had seen in ten years. I thought
maybe he had leukemia.
But then when I sat down to take his medical history, it
became clear that the reason his blood count was so abnormal
and he was so malnourished is that his family was trying to
keep him from experiencing hunger by filling him up with a
mixture of cornstarch mixed with water, and he was never
allowed to go to bed hungry.
People get very emotional about our children going to bed
hungry. Their parents try very hard to, quote, always have
something in their stomach. But he was very seriously
malnourished.
Once we were able to help his mother get onto the WIC
Program, which she did not realize she was still eligible for
now that he was a year, and also to get the family on food
stamps, he began to look much better. He no longer looked like
he had a fatal illness. But the last time we saw him, he was
still developmentally delayed and on a waiting list, as many of
my patients are, for Head Start.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Now, this child is not unique. As the first chart shows,
the best way for an American family to suffer food insecurity
is to have a young child under the age of six and even more
under the age of three. You can see that households with
children young enough to need a sippy cup are almost twice as
likely as those without children to be food insecure.
And this really is scary because, as you probably know, the
last couple of prenatal trimesters and the first three years of
life are unique periods of rapid growth of body and brain. And
if the nutrition for that development is not adequate of
quality and quantity, the whole trajectory of the child's life
is changed.
Any one of you could come visit this problem firsthand
either in one of our sites or in your State. I would be happy
to network you.
Now, the bland term of food insecurity does not sound very
alarming. But even at the mildest levels, we found that it
threatens health and development of young children.
The nutritional status of a woman when she enters pregnancy
and the amount of weight she gains during pregnancy are the
crucial determinants of her baby's weight and the baby's birth
weight is the crucial determinant of what we call infant
mortality, which means dead babies.
And as you know, there are huge gaps in this country in who
suffers from dead babies. We are getting better, particularly
in, you know, medical meccas at keeping these very low birth
weight babies alive. But the lower the birth weight, the more
likely that this child will survive with lasting impairments
and school failure.
This is one reason that WIC is so important. It has lowered
infant mortality rates dramatically. But the problem does not
end at birth. For everybody, including the elderly,
malnutrition injures the immune function, which is the body's
ability to fight infections.
With any illness, as anybody who has raised a child knows,
children lose weight. But in my house, your house, when the
baby gets over what we technically refer to as prevailing crud,
they can eat as much as they want. They replenish themselves
nutritionally and they very soon are growing normally, and,
again, normally what we call immunocompetent.
In poor families where, as Representative McGovern said,
people are running out of food quite routinely. If the child
gets sick, particularly at the end of the month, there is
nothing extra. There is not even enough. So the child is left
underweight, more susceptible to the next infection, and down
the cycle they go. The same actually also happens with elderly.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
This infection malnutrition cycle is shown in the next
chart, which shows that after giving everybody credit for all
their background characteristics, children from food insecure
families--they do not have to rate hungry, just food insecure--
are 90 percent more likely to be in poor health and 30 percent
more likely to have required a hospitalization in their short
lifetime. These are kids in my research project across the
country who are only kids under three. So that is a lot of
hospitalization.
We have also found that WIC protects kids from this kind of
underweight. Now, when we see a kid who is underweight and
infected and sick, if they have decent access to decent
healthcare--I was interested to hear about your rural
hospitals--we can get them back to growth and health if we can
get them adequate nutrition and adequate doctoring.
But even so, they are left with lasting deficits in their
cognitive development posing serious implications for their
future ability to participate in the global knowledge economy.
And I heard a lot of conversations about strengthening the
economy in the previous panel. But if we want to strengthen the
economy of the future, we have to strengthen the brains of the
babies of today.
And even iron deficiency, which WIC is very good at
decreasing without slowed growth, is associated with decreased
IQ into adult. So if you are iron deficient as a baby, you are
much more likely to have a low IQ as an adult.
And this is not just a baby problem. In older kids, there
are multiple studies, including one from Mr. Berry's region in
Arkansas and the Mississippi/Louisiana Delta that shows that
food insecurity is not just associated in older children with
poor physical health, but with decreased school achievement and
reading and math, more behavior and emotional problems, which,
of course, makes it harder for the other kids in the classroom
to learn, and actually increased risk of suicide in adolescent
girls.
So we have an endemic problem that is even now worse than
it was in 2000. So when you are a doctor and you see a health
problem that is all over the place, you want to know what are
the possibilities for prevention and treatment. And I can tell
you that there are several medicines, but you are the ones who
can prescribe them. I cannot.
The first is the Food Stamp program, which buffers even in
food insecure households, some of the deprivation of the
children. And we know that when a family loses food stamps,
their kids become sicker and more food insecure. WIC and school
meals are also good medicines, but I understand that they are
liable to be diluted.
There is good research just recently published that show a
huge sample, not ours, that show that children who were on food
stamps and WIC from birth and stayed in it cost Medicaid much
less in terms of failure to thrive, malnutrition, and anemia.
And there is another recent study, also government funded,
who followed 8,000 kids from kindergarten to third grade. Those
whose families started to receive food stamps in that period
had much greater improvement in their reading and math than
those whose families stopped receiving food stamps.
Now, what is going on with these good medicines? You have
heard a lot of discussion about how we have expanded access
and, in fact, that is true, but it is like the flu vaccine.
Well, certainly more kids are getting flu vaccine this year
than got it last year. But it does not reach anywhere near all
of the eligible people enough to control the epidemic.
One in five kids who is eligible for food stamps do not get
them, and particularly at risk are citizen children of the
immigrants, but it is all kinds of kids.
Secondly, even if you get the medicine, the dose is what we
call subtherapeutic. We know if your kid has strep throat, the
doctor says make sure you give four doses a day for ten days.
If you do not, the kid is going to get sick again.
Well, food stamps is that kind of low dose. It is not that
it is no good. Penicillin is a good medicine. But the average
benefits of dollar per meal per person, and that is based on a
thrifty food plan, which is a theoretical estimate of what it
would cost to purchase foods representing a minimally-adequate
diet. We did a study in Boston, and this has been replicated in
Seattle, and there are very similar findings in other parts of
the country.
Next slide, please.
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
This is just like a medical meeting where there is a lag.
A family of four in Boston cannot even purchase the thrifty
food plan assuming they get the maximum benefit of a $1.40 per
meal per person, which nobody does.
If you say, yeah, but, Mrs. Jones, that is not a good diet
for your family's health, you really need to use this low-cost
version of the Surgeon General's diet, they come up about
$1,800 a year short, which is completely impossible for them to
provide from their cash resources because they are trying to
get to work, keep the house warm, keep from becoming homeless.
So the Administration's recent budget proposal does not
address the problem of broadening access or the adequacy of
food stamps to purchase a healthy diet. And it threatens to
dilute the WIC medicine by hampering the educational component.
And one of the groups that is at risk are those who are so
poor that they are currently eligible for noncash welfare
benefits. Somewhere around 280,000, and I was told 329,000
working families with children making the transition from
welfare to work will lose food stamps and then their kids will
probably also lose school meals and WIC.
So besides the failures of this preventive care in the
proposal that I understand it, and it is not my expertise, as
far as I can tell, it does nothing to address the issue of
getting things to an adequate dose to enable families to
purchase a healthier diet.
To put things in context, one person eating the South Beach
diet for one day has to spend as much as the maximum amount,
that nobody gets, the government would allot for a family of
four on the same day under food stamps rules current and
proposed.
Now, I know I am talking to a Budget Committee and not a
medical meeting, even though you think maybe I forgot. But I
know that your obligation is to make sure that America's
resources are wisely spent.
However, I have described to you a miracle drug which cuts
babies' chances of dying, decreases ill health and
hospitalizations in children, and it sounds like in old people,
too, and behavioral and emotional problems, and increases kids'
school achievement. You can test them until they are blue in
their face. If they come to school hungry, they cannot learn.
With your budget expertise, you can readily understand the
implications of the fact that one average two- to three- day
pediatric hospitalization, not ICU, just plain old pneumonia or
something like these kids get, costs about $11,000, which would
fund a year's worth of food stamps and WIC for many children.
Now, I understand that you are not only balancing domestic
expenditure and needs but also grappling with international
ones. And I was told you are going to have to go off for a
debate on this, but lest you think that I am wildly
unrealistic, I would leave you with a statement made by Winston
Churchill, who I do not think anybody would refer to as a
starry-eyed liberal.
In the middle of World War II, when Great Britain was
dealing with homeland security problems, orders of magnitude
greater than ours, Churchill announced on the radio that there
is no better investment for any society than putting milk into
babies. And I am sure you will be equally statesmanlike.
Thank you.
Chairman Spratt. Very much indeed.
[The prepared statement of Deborah Frank follows:]
Prepared Statement of Dr. Deborah A. Frank, Director, Grow Clinic for
Children at Boston Medical Center, and Principal Investigator,
Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP)
Mr. Chairman and Distinguished Committee Members: I would like to
thank you for the concern for the well-being of American citizens at
greatest nutritional risk, our children. You have always shown this
concern and are again showing today by inviting a pediatrician to
speak. As a researcher from the Children's Sentinel Nutrition
Assessment Program (C-SNAP), a multi-site project in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Massachusetts, which provides the
most current and largest dataset in the nation about the food security,
health, and development of very young, low-income children, I will be
sharing lots of data with you. As a clinician, I cannot forget that
every number comes with a name and a face, like my patient, whom I will
call ``Sam.'' Although he was six pounds at his birth in our hospital,
when we met Sam at thirteen months of age, he weighed only 17 pounds,
which is the weight of a normal little boy of seven months. He seemed
to be all head, eyes and ribs with long eyelashes and a skin so pale it
seemed you could see right through it. His blood count was so abnormal
that I initially worried that he might have leukemia. However, when we
sat down to take his medical history, the reason for Sam's condition
became clear. This child, his mother, and his father were living in one
room on the father's minimal earnings as a part-time gardener, and Sam
was being fed a diet primarily composed of cornstarch mixed with water,
especially when the winter meant there was little work for his father.
Sam never ``went to bed hungry'' since his worried mother made very
sure he was really full of cornstarch, but he was clearly seriously
malnourished. Once we were able to assist his mother in enrolling this
youngster in WIC and food stamps, his weight rapidly improved. But when
we last saw him, he was delayed developmentally and like too many
children in my clinic, on a waiting list for Head Start. It is on
behalf of the many food insecure young children like Sam all over the
country, who are invisible to all but their parents and their doctors,
that I appear before you today.
Sam is by no means unique. As this chart shows that the surest way
for an American family to suffer food insecurity, defined by the USDA
as ``limited or uncertain access to nutritionally adequate food for an
active and healthy life for all family members,'' is to have a young
child. This chart, based on 2005 USDA national data, groups together
all children under 6 years and does not focus the microscope on the
most vulnerable children of all, those from birth to three. To
understand the health of those children, we must turn to the data from
the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP, www.c-
snap.org), which monitors the well-being of children during the
critical period of brain growth between birth and three years. In the
families of the most susceptible of all children, the rates of food
insecurity range from more than 1 in 10 to nearly 1 in 5. For your
interest, we have appended a chart for the members of the committee
showing the most recent rates of food insecurity in your states, with
specific data about the youngest children in the states where we are
conducting C-SNAP. We welcome visits from the members of the Committee
to C-SNAP sites and Grow Clinics in your states, so that you can see
the problem firsthand. In addition to C-SNAP sites, there are Grow
Clinics in Los Angeles, Houston, New York, and Florida to which I could
readily refer you.
Now, the bland term `food insecurity' does not sound very alarming.
But whatever we call it, food insecurity, even at the mildest levels,
is a well-documented threat to health and brain function at all stages
of life. The effects of food insecurity are particularly devastating in
prenatal life and early childhood when humans undergo unprecedented
growth of body and brain. Nutrition of inadequate quality or quantity
stunts this growth and development, jeopardizing the whole future
trajectory of the child's life.
The nutritional status of a woman as she enters pregnancy, and the
amount of weight that she gains during pregnancy, are critical
predictors of whether the child will be born low birth weight, the most
important cause of ``infant mortality,'' which is how doctors refer to
dead babies. Although we are getting better technically at keeping low
birth weight babies from dying, the lower the birth weight the more
likely that a child who survives will suffer from lasting impairments
and school failure. This simple relationship explains why the nutrition
counseling and healthy foods that the Special Supplemental Nutrition
Program for Women's, Infants, and Children (``WIC'') provides to
pregnant mothers have been so effective in enhancing the survival of
America's children. In a five-state study, WIC was directly responsible
for lowering infant mortality rates by 25% to 66% among Medicaid
beneficiaries (Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. 1993),
After birth, nutrition continues to exert major influences on
health and development. At all ages, malnutrition impairs immune
function leading to the infection/malnutrition cycle. With any acute
illness all children lose weight. However, in privileged homes once the
acute illness is resolved, children rapidly rebound, increasing their
dietary intake to restore normal growth. For many low-income families,
where food supplies are uncertain even for feeding well children, once
a nutritional deficit has occurred due to normal childhood illnesses,
scarce resources means there is no additional food to restore a child
to his/her former weight and health. The child is then left
malnourished and more susceptible to the next infection, which is
likely to be more prolonged and severe, and followed by even greater
weight loss. It is this infection/malnutrition cycle, which explains
this chart showing that infants and toddlers from food insecure
families, after considering numerous background characteristics, are
90% more likely to be in fair or poor health and 30% more likely to
have required a hospitalization in their short lifetimes. We have found
(Black et.al, 2004) that babies under one year old who are eligible for
WIC but do not receive it are 34% more likely to be seriously
underweight than similar babies who receive WIC, with obvious
implications for protecting babies from this deadly cycle.
With intensive nutritional and medical efforts, malnourished
children can recover growth and health, but all too often malnutrition
inflicts concurrent and lasting deficits on their cognitive
development, posing serious implications for the malnourished child's
future ability to participate in the global knowledge economy. Lack of
nutrients available to the brain during any part the critical period of
brain growth from the last two prenatal trimesters through the first
few years of life will lead to deficits in the part of the brain under
development. Even iron deficiency anemia in early life (which WIC
participation decreases) without slowed growth is correlated with
lowered IQ all the way to adulthood. Four to five year old children who
participated in WIC in early life have higher vocabulary and digit
memory than those who did not (National WIC evaluation, USDA, 1986).
As knowledge of the importance of nutrition for proper brain
functioning has evolved, awareness has also increased with regard to
brain function; although brain size and structure can be most affected
by malnutrition in early life, brain function can be seriously affected
at any age. In older children multiple research studies all over the
country including the Arkansas-Mississippi-Louisiana Delta, (Casey,
Szeto et. al. 2005) have shown that food insecurity is associated not
only with poorer physical health but with decreased school achievement
in reading and math and more behavior and emotional problems, including
risk of suicide in adolescent girls. (Jyoti, Frongillo, and Jones 2005;
Casey, Szeto, Robbins et.al; 2005; Alaimo, Olson, and Frongillo, 2002)
This alarming and widely prevalent condition is threatening all of
America's children, but particularly the poorest, including Hispanic
and African American children and citizen children of immigrant
parents, where rates of food insecurity far exceed those that I have
presented for the general population. So what are possibilities for
prevention and treatment? I can tell you that there are several ``good
medicines'' for this problem but they can only be prescribed by you.
The first is the Food Stamp Program, which our research has found,
buffers young children in food insecure households from themselves
suffering food insecurity; parents are better able to protect their
children. Moreover, we know that families and children who lose food
stamps suffer increased rates of food insecurity and that the children
are much more likely to be in poor health. Other good medicines include
WIC and school meals, which may also be diluted under the
Administration's proposals. Recent research shows that participation in
the Food Stamp Program and/or WIC starting at birth is associated with
decreased rates of Medicaid payments for children's anemia and
malnutrition (termed ``Failure to Thrive'' in medical settings) under
age 5. (Lee et al 2006) Moreover, participation in these programs
decreases the likelihood that these children will be the subject of
child abuse reports. In older children, particularly girls, food stamps
have also been shown to decrease the risk of obesity (Jones, Jahns,
Laraia, and Haughton, 2003) Another recent study demonstrated that
among 8000 children followed from kindergarten to third grade, those
whose families began to receive food stamps achieved significantly
greater improvement in reading and math then those whose families
stopped receiving food stamps. (Frongillo, Jyoti, and Jones, 2006)
So what is going on with these good medicines? Why haven't they
cured the problem? There are two issues. First, like the flu vaccine,
these medicines do not reach all of the eligible people. At least one
in five children who is eligible for food stamps does not receive them.
Particularly at risk for not getting the medicine are citizen children
of immigrant parents who comprise 12% of all American children. For
want of this ``medicine'' these children suffer from serious increases
in rates of food insecurity and ill health, a risk even greater than
those faced by other poor children. Secondly, even when America's
families get food stamps, the dose is often what we in pediatrics would
call ``sub-therapeutic,'' akin to not giving enough penicillin to
really cure a strep throat. The average food stamp benefit is a dollar
per meal per person per day. We have shown in the report entitled, `The
Real Cost of the Healthy Diet,' that even assuming a family of two
adults and two children receive the maximum possible Food Stamp benefit
($1.40 per meal per person per day), which few real life families
actually do, they would come up short about $800 a year if they tried
to purchase the government recommended Thrifty Food Plan market basket
shopping in Boston. (I would like to enter into the record a link to
this report: (http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/HealthyDiet--
Aug2005.pdf)) Similar findings have been reported across the country
from cities like Seattle. Moreover, as you probably know, the Thrifty
Food Plan is USDA's theoretical estimate of what it would cost to
purchase a market basket list of particular amounts and kinds of food
representing a minimally adequate diet. It is the government's lowest
cost meal plan and does not reflect current scientific thinking about
nutrition and health. As the chart shows, if our family of four tried
to purchase the most economically reasonable version of the Surgeon
General's most recent dietary recommendations, their costs would exceed
the maximum possible food stamp allotment by nearly $2,000 a year. This
is an impossible expense for families who are constantly trading off
how to have money to get to work, keep a roof over their head, or keep
the house warm while trying to provide healthy meals.
From what I understand, the administration's most recent budget
proposal fails to address either the problem of broadening access to
food stamps or of the adequacy of food stamps to purchase a healthy
diet, and threatens to ``dilute'' the WIC `medicine' as well. This
budget proposal does contain some sensible measures, such as excluding
from calculations of eligibility for food stamps retirement and college
savings, and combat pay Unfortunately, at the same time, it also
proposes that families who as so poor that they are currently eligible
for non-cash welfare benefits will nevertheless lose their food stamps
and their children may consequently lose access to free school meals.
Thus 280-329,000 American working families with children who are making
the transition from welfare to work will lose this crucial work
support. Currently, food stamp participants with pregnant women or
young children are automatically eligible for WIC--as a result of this
new policy, without food stamps, these families may also lose their WIC
benefits.
WIC, one of the mere 17% of Federal programs that the OMB has given
its highest rating of ``Effective,'' also suffers under the President's
budget, with a $145 million cut to Nutrition Services funding.
Nutrition Services funding enables WIC to provide the invaluable
nutrition education, counseling and referrals that are essential to
WIC's ability to achieve positive health outcomes. Under the
President's proposed cut, Nutrition Services funding would be frozen at
2006 levels with the result that there will be $1.42 less for every
mother and child served with which to deliver critical public health
nutrition and other social services. As a pediatrician who frequently
refers pregnant women and their children to WIC, I am concerned that
this cut will diminish the quantity and quality of WIC nutrition
services, including loss of professional nutritionists, and thus
decrease WIC's remarkable effectiveness.
For the nation as a whole, the reduction of $145 million represents
the loss of nutrition counseling and health referral services to some
800,000 clients. This is especially alarming, given that the USDA is on
the verge of changing the WIC food packages to align with the most
recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the current infant feeding
practice guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics--an exciting,
long-anticipated change that will greatly help WIC to keep providing
quality services that meet clients' nutritional needs, but will also
require a lot of hard work by the states to implement. The proposed cut
in Nutrition Services funding will jeopardize states' ability to
successfully roll out the newest and best ``nutrition medicines'' for
children. Finally, in contradiction to the President's own WIC
technology initiative embodied in the Child Nutrition and WIC
Reauthorization Act of 2004, the President's budget has provided no
money to meet WIC's Management Information Systems (MIS) needs, another
critical component to successful issuance of the new food packages, by
managing the program's integrity and containing food costs
Besides these failures of ``preventive care'' for children at risk
of food insecurity, nothing in the current proposals would addressed
the problem of increasing the ``dose'' of food stamps to a level that
would enable families to purchase healthier diets for their children.
To put things in context, one person eating the South Beach diet for
one day has to spend as much as the maximum the government would allot
for a family of four on that same day under the current and proposed
food stamp rules.
I know that I am addressing a budget committee and not a pediatric
conference, and, therefore, your obligation is to make sure that
America's resources are wisely spent. However, I have described to you
a miracle drug which cuts babies' chances of dying, decreases American
children's ill health, hospitalizations, and behavioral/emotional
problems, and increases children's level of school achievement. With
your budget expertise you can readily understand the implications of
the fact that one average 2-3 day pediatric hospitalization costs about
$11,000, which would fund years worth of food stamp and WIC benefits
for many children. Of course, I also realize that you are not only
struggling with the cost of domestic problems but with international
ones, however, I would like to leave you with a statement made by
Winston Churchill, whom no one would call a starry-eyed liberal. In the
middle of World War II, when Great Britain was dealing with homeland
security problems orders of magnitude greater than ours, Churchill
announced on the radio, ``there is no better investment for any society
than putting milk into babies.'' I know, as policy-makers, that you
will be equally wise leaders of a society under stress.
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Maternal Depression, Changing Public Assistance, Food Security, and
Child Health Status. Casey, Patrick, Goolsby, Susan, Berkowitz,
Carol, Frank, Deborah A., Cook, John, Cutts, Diana, Black,
Maureen, Zaldivar, Nieves, Skalicky, Anne, Levenson, Suzette,
Heeren, Tim, Meyers Alan and the C-SNAP Study Group.
Pediatrics. 2004; 113(2):298-304. http://
pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/113/2/298
Child Food Insecurity Increases Risks Posed by Household Food
Insecurity to Young Children's Health. Cook, John T. Deborah A.
Frank, Suzette M. Levenson, Nicole B. Neault, Tim C. Heeren,
Maureen M. Black, Carol Berkowitz, Patrick H. Casey, Alan F.
Meyers, Diana B. Cutts, Mariana Chilton. Journal of Nutrition.
2006 April; 136 (4):1073-6. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/
csnappublic/publications-abstracts.htm
Food Insecurity is Associated with Adverse Health Outcomes Among Human
Infants and Toddlers. Cook, John, Black, Maureen, Casey,
Patrick, Frank, Deborah A., Berkowitz, Carol, Cutts, Diana,
Meyers, Alan and Zaldivar, Nieves. Journal of Nutrition. 2004;
134:1432-1438. http://www.nutrition.org/cgi/content/full/134/6/
1432
Welfare Reform and the Health of Young Children: A Sentinel Survey in
Six US Cities. Cook, John, Frank, Deborah A., Berkowitz, Carol,
Casey, Patrick, Cutts, Diana, Meyers, Alan, Zaldivar, Nieves,
Skalicky, Anne, Levenson, Suzette Heeren., Tim. Archives of
Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. 2002; 156:678-684. http://
archpedi.amaassn.org/cgi/reprint/156/7/678.pdf
Heat or Eat: Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program and Nutritional
Risk Among Children Under 3. Frank, Deborah A., Neault, Nicole
Skalicky, Anne, Cook, John, Levenson, Suzette, Meyers, Alan,
Heeren, Timothy, Cutts, Diana, Casey, Patrick Black, Maureen,
Zaldivar, Nieves and Berkowitz, Carol. Pediatrics. 2006 Nov;
118(5): e1293-e1302
Lower Risk of OverWeight in School-Aged Food Insecure Girls Who
Participate in Food Assistance. Jones, S. J., Jahns, L., et
al., Results from the panel study of income dynamics child
development supplement. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent
Medicine 2003. August; 157(8): 780-4.
Food Insecurity Affects Children's Academic Performance, Weight Gain,
and Social Skills. Jyoti, D., Frongillo, E. et al. Journal of
Nutrition 2005; 135: 2831-2839.
Effects of WIC and Food Stamp Program Participation on Child Outcomes.
Lee, BJ, Mackey-Bilaver, L Chin, M. USDA Report No. 27, 2006
Subsidized Housing and Child Nutritional Status: Data from a Multisite
Surveillance Study. Meyers, Alan, Cutts, Diana, Frank, Deborah
A., Levenson, Suzette, Skalicky, Anne, Cook, John Berkowitz,
Carol, Black, Maureen, Casey Patrick and Zaldivar. Nieves
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. 2005; 159:551-
556. http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/159/6/
551?ct
Child Food Insecurity and Iron Deficiency Anemia in Low-Income Infants
and Toddlers in the United States. Skalicky, Anne, Meyers,
Alan, Adams, William, Yang, Zhaoyan, Cook, John, Frank, Deborah
A. Maternal and Child Health Journal, 2006 March; 10(2): 177-
184 http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/publications-
abstracts.htm
Hunger: Its Impact on Children's Health and Mental Health. Weinreb, L.,
C. Wehler, et al. 2002. Pediatrics 110(4).
children's sentinel nutrition assessment program reports
1. Food Stamps As Medicine: A New Perspective on Children's Health,
February 2007.
The Food Stamp Program is America's first line of defense against
hunger and the foundation of our national nutrition safety network.
Physicians and medical researchers also think it is one of America's
best medicines to prevent and treat childhood food security. The report
demonstrates the important protective effect of food stamps on child
food insecurity and for citizen children of immigrants. http://
dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/Food%20Stamps-Medicine%202-12-07.pdf
2. Safeguarding the Health, Nutrition, and Development of Young
Children of Color, September/October 2006.
An article summarizing C-SNAP's two reports on children of color
and the buffering impact of nutrition assistance on their health and
well-being as well as the way in which food insecurity puts young
children of color at increased developmental risk. Published in Focus
Magazine, a bi-monthly magazine of the Joint Center For Political and
Economic Studies. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/SeptOct2006-
Children%20of%20Color.pdf
3. Nourishing Development: A Report on Food Insecurity & the
Precursors to School Readiness among Very Young Children, July 2006.
A report of original C-SNAP findings demonstrating that the
foundations of school readiness are laid long before the start of
formal education begins. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/
Nourishing%20Development%20Report%207-06.pdf
4. `The Impact of Food Insecurity on the Development of Young Low-
Income Black and Latino Children;' & `Protecting the Health and
Nutrition of Young Children of Color: The Impact of Nutrition
Assistance and Income Support Programs'--Research Findings from the
Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program (C-SNAP), (Prepared
for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies Health Policy
Institute), May 2006.
A pair of reports demonstrating the increased vulnerability of
young black and Latino children from low-income households to
developmental risk linked to food insecurity and the buffering effect
that family support programs can have on young black and Latino
children's health and growth. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/
Children%20of%20Color%20Reports%20May%202006.pdf
5. The Real Co$t of a Healthy Diet: Healthful Foods are Out of
Reach for Low-Income Families in Boston, Massachusetts, August 2005
A report from a research team from the Boston Medical Center
Department of Pediatrics revealing that, on average, the monthly cost
of the Thrifty Food Plan (upon which Food Stamp Program benefits are
based) is $27 more than the maximum monthly food stamp benefit
allowance. A low-cost healthier diet based on the most recent nutrition
guidelines exceeded the maximum monthly food stamp benefit by $148--an
annual differential of $1776. This is an unrealistic budgetary stretch
for most families who qualify for nutrition assistance. http://
dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/HealthyDiet--Aug2005.pdf
6. The Safety Net in Action: Protecting the Health and Nutrition of
Young American Children, July 2004.
A comprehensive summary of C-SNAP findings showing the positive
impact of five public assistance programs on young children's food
security, growth, and health. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/csnappublic/
CSNAP2004.pdf
7. The Impact of Welfare Sanctions on the Health of Infants and
Toddlers: A Report from the Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment
Program, July 2002.
A report based on C-SNAP findings published in the July 2002
Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. Welfare sanctions and
benefit decreases have serious negative implications for infants and
toddlers' health and food security. http://dcc2.bumc.bu.edu/
csnappublic/C-SNAP%20Report.pdf
HOUSE BUDGET COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Average Percent of Food
Insecure Households 2003- C-SNAP Rates of Food
Member 2005 by Member's State Insecurity**
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MAJORITY:
1. John M. Spratt, Jr., SC, Chair....................... 11.0%
2. Rose DeLauro, CT..................................... 11.0%
3. Chet Edwards, TX..................................... 15.2%
4. Jim Cooper, TN....................................... 11.8%
5. Thomas H. Allen, ME.................................. 9.8%
6. Allyson Y. Schwartz, PA.............................. 8.3% 13%
7. Marcy Kaptur, OH..................................... 9.7%
8. Xavier Becerra, CA................................... 13.3%
9. Lloyd Doggett, TX.................................... 15.2%
10. Earl Blumenauer, OR................................. 14.2%
11. Marion Berry, AR.................................... 13.7% 11%
12. Allen Boyd, FL...................................... 13.2%
13. James P. McGovern, MA............................... 7.5% 19%
14. Betty Sutton, OH.................................... 9.7%
15. Robert E. Andrews, NJ............................... 8.9%
16. Robert C. ``Bobby'' Scott, VA....................... 10.2%
17. Bob Etheridge, NC................................... 9.8%
18. Darlene Hooley, OR.................................. 14.2%
19. Brian Baird, WA..................................... 13.2%
20. Dennis Moore, KS.................................... 11.5%
21. Tim Bishop, NY...................................... 11.9%
22. Vacancy*............................................
MINORITY:
1. Paul Ryan, WI Ranking Member......................... 8.5%
2. J. Gresham Barrett, SC Vice Ranking Member........... 11.0%
3. Jo Bonner, AL........................................ 12.5%
4. Scott Garrett, NJ.................................... 8.9%
5. Thaddeus G. McCotter, MI............................. 9.6%
6. Mario Diaz-Balart, FL................................ 13.2%
7. Jeb Hensarling, TX................................... 15.2%
8. Daniel E. Lungren, CA................................ 13.3%
9. Michael K. Simpson, ID............................... 11.3%
10. Patrick T. McHenry, NC.............................. 9.8%
11. Connie Mack, FL..................................... 13.2%
12. K. Michael Conaway, TX.............................. 15.2%
13. John Campbell, CA................................... 13.3%
14. Patrick J. Tiberi, OH............................... 9.7%
15. Jon C. Porter, NV................................... 10.4%
16. Rodney Alexander, LA................................ 14.4%
17. Adrian Smith, NE.................................... 8.7%
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Rep. Lois Capps, (D-CA) resigned from the Budget Committee on January 19, 2007 to accept assignment to another
Committee.
**The Children's Sentinel Nutrition Assessment Program has sites in the following states: Arkansas, Maryland,
Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania. Sites in California and Washington, D.C. are dormant. Food
insecurity rates reflect the problem among our study population, who are low-income, urban families.
Chairman Spratt. And now Denise Holland who comes at the
problem from a different direction, and that is practical
solutions, and her contribution to that is truly phenomenal.
We are glad to have you here to share your experience and
wisdom with us.
STATEMENT OF DENISE HOLLAND
Ms. Holland. Chairman Spratt and honorable members of the
Committee, I want to thank you for this wonderful opportunity
to be here and testify before you today.
I will summarize my testimony, but with your permission,
submit my full testimony for the record.
My name is Denise Holland. I am the Executive Director of
Harvest Hope Food Bank in Columbia, South Carolina, which
serves 18 counties. We serve the Capitol City of Columbia, but
most of our counties are rural in nature, particularly those in
the PD.
I also am representing America's Second Harvest, the
nation's food bank network, which is the nation's largest
hunger relief organization.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I have been a
food bank director for nine years. Since coming to Harvest Hope
Food Bank, I have a seen a dramatic increase in hunger and
poverty in Columbia and particularly in the rural communities
outside of Columbia and also around the country.
Last year, we served more than 149,000 needy people in a
region of over 1.2 million. This represented nearly 75 percent
of the 200,000 people estimated by the Census to live in
poverty in our community.
On any given week in central South Carolina, including the
Fifth Congressional District, some 19,100 different people
receive food assistance from Harvest Hope Food Bank through
local volunteer-led and community-based organizations.
Long ago are the days when the chronically unemployed and
homeless men represented the majority of the people we serve.
Today our member agencies, food pantries, soup kitchens,
congregational meal sites, we are seeing the working poor.
These are working poor who are families with children, and
particularly the elderly. Most are not receiving welfare and
all are faced with the challenges of finding affordable housing
and adequate healthcare.
Today we see way too many children in soup kitchen lines,
too many working parents at food pantries, and too many elderly
people who choose between can I pay for my utility or can I
eat.
The USDA's most recent economic research study of the
prevalence of hunger insecurity found that more than one in ten
American households, including 35 million people in all, are
food insecure or, as we say in South Carolina, they are hungry.
Of this total, 12 million are children. This data shows
that South Carolina has the fourth worst rate of food
insecurity in the nation and the highest rate of households,
15.5 percent, with very low food insecurity. For me in South
Carolina, that would be very hungry. But statistics can often
be too abstract, so I would like to share a very personal story
with you.
About six months ago, I was behind a family in a local
grocery store. While I waited in line, I watched a mother with
three children choosing which foods to put back because her
food stamp benefit was not enough to pay for all of it.
One of her daughters, I am assuming to be about nine or ten
years old, appeared very sad. The mother said I know, honey,
these are some of your favorite foods, but I just do not have
enough left at the end of the month to pay for these so we have
to put them back. I am very sorry. The little girl looked down
and I thought she was going to cry in addition to myself.
I quietly told the mother that I completely understood her
situation. I would be glad to take care of those few items for
her and handed my business card. I wanted her to personally
come see me. She broke down in tears as I did and hugged me,
very thankful that I could do that for her because with nine
days left in the month, she was not going to make it until her
next food stamp allotment came in.
Food stamps are a lifeline for working families, and any
reduction in this program would affect tens of thousands of
families and significantly impact our donated food system.
The current food stamp benefit is extremely beneficial. It
is helpful. But with America's Second Harvest and through our
own hunger study which we participated with them, we found that
the food stamp benefit only lasts 2.3 weeks of the month.
At Harvest Hope Food Bank, we have our own on-site
emergency food pantry and the other 350 member agencies who
report back to me each month report the last two weeks of the
month are much worse than the first two weeks of the month, and
that is because that food stamp benefit does not last that
long.
I worry about how this President's budget proposal will
affect those working poor families.
In South Carolina, in my 18 counties, we run about 13 kids
cafe sites. Last year, I stopped at an elementary school where
some children were eating through one of those sites. That
night, we were serving chicken and collard greens, rice and
peaches, all wonderful South Carolina food.
One little boy there who I sat down beside was greatly
enjoying his meal. And I asked him, well, what did you do for
dinner before you were able to come to this kids cafe site. He
reached down in his pants pocket and he pulled out a quarter,
and he said I used to just go buy a package of crackers with
the peanut butter between them because my mommy works two jobs
and she is not there at night to give me something hot to eat.
These are real-life examples, but they fuel my passion
every day to work hard to make use for every available resource
so that no child just has crackers to eat at night.
I am particularly concerned with the President's fiscal
year 2008 budget proposal. It funds or in too many instances
cuts a number of programs that are utilized by many of the low-
income people we serve in South Carolina. These are not people
who want a handout. They are people who want a hand up.
In South Carolina, there are presently 227,000 households
participating in the Food Stamp Program. In talking to the
South Carolina Department of Social Services who works very
closely with us, the President's proposed budget would
negatively affect an estimated 68,000 South Carolina
households. These are not merely numbers. They are real people.
They are real people who we see.
If we are serious about ending hunger in this nation, we
should be increasing access to the Food Stamp Program, not
making it more difficult for eligible households to qualify. We
should be increasing support for low-income families and
seniors who need supplemental food assistance to help them make
it through the month.
Mr. Chairman, the nation's food banks are like the
proverbial canary in a mine shaft. We see the effects of poor
economies, layoffs, rising energy, health, and housing costs
often way before they show up in government statistics.
Nationally 35 percent of emergency food recipients have to
choose between buying food or paying rent or mortgage. Another
42 percent choose between buying food and paying their utility
bills. The problem is real. The problem is serious. Our
families should not have to go hungry in order to avoid being
homeless or without heat.
I spoke recently to several groups in Columbia who are
funding some privately-funded organizations, and I talked about
the community of homelessness in Columbia might be this big.
But if we do not reach out to families who are struggling in
this way, that I see as this gap, that community of homeless
people will turn in to this group.
The President's budget has again targeted for elimination
of the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. Last year, the
Congress rejected this proposal, and we hope you will again do
so.
Last year, my food bank provided more than half a million
pounds of CSFP commodities to 1,250 low-income seniors each
month, making a total of 15,000 distributions.
At our on-site emergency food pantry, 400 of them come to
me the second Thursday. They come in wheelchairs. They are in
walkers. They greatly appreciate that food.
The elderly population in South Carolina is one of our
fastest-growing populations. And in 32 states, this program is
very needed, is very appreciated. In South Carolina, while we
have it in six counties, I desperately wish we had it in all
46.
I do not know where we will find the resources to help
those who would lose the benefits of this program under the
Administration's budget. Please do not accept this proposal or
the Administration's suggestions for losing program benefits
who will be able to participate in the Food Stamp or other
programs. This is simply not true. Many are ineligible or
unable to access food stamps and those who are eligible will
not be able to obtain the same quantity and value of food they
receive in their CSFP food packages at retail prices.
The elderly we serve love to get their box. It is important
to them that that is how they receive that assistance.
Unfortunately, the Administration's budget and Farm Bill
proposals fall short for reducing hunger in South Carolina and
it falls short for the rest of our country.
Although most of the food we provide to needy families is
sourced from the private sector, we rely heavily on federal
commodity programs, especially the Emergency Food Assistance
Program, TEFAP, to stabilize some leverage to those private
donations.
Meanwhile, since the enactment of the last Farm Bill, bonus
and surplus government donations to our programs has fallen by
some 60 percent nationwide. At the same time, requests for food
assistance has increased by eight percent or more nationally.
At Harvest Hope Food Bank, we have had a 39 percent increase in
the need for food due to hunger and food insecurity.
The fiscal year 2008 budget resolution and the next Farm
Bill offer an opportunity to strengthen the system of farm to
table for our nation's poor and hungry. As this Committee
deliberates on the fiscal year 2008 budget resolution and how
much will be provided for the new Farm Bill, I respectfully ask
this Committee to reject the Administration Food Stamp and CSFP
budget proposals and provide adequate funding for the nutrition
title of the next Farm Bill so that our needy families and
children and elderly will find a place in the budget and at our
Farm Bill table.
In conclusion, Chairman Spratt and members of the
Committee, I appreciate you allowing me to tell our story. In
South Carolina, those passions of feeding the people run deep
as they do across the entire nation.
Our hope is the budget resolution will provide adequate
discretionary funding for Nutrition Assistance Program for
fiscal year 2008 and will also provide some new funding for the
nutrition title of the next Farm Bill.
Your Committee's continued support and leadership can pave
the way toward ending hunger in America.
You know, several years ago, we had a wonderful opportunity
in our food bank. There was a lady who came in. She was
suffering from cancer, and she spent a little bit of extra time
with our counselor, but she had three little boys who came with
her.
Those three little boys were a little precocious, so we
took them back to the packing area, one of our volunteers did,
and allowed those little boys to pack their own bag of food to
take home with them that day. They did not realize exactly that
that is what they were packing.
But in the end, as they were rolling their cart out to the
church van that had brought them and their mother there, the
middle little boy looked up at his older brother and said we
have never had this much food before. It kind of looks like
Christmas. And the older little boy put his hand on his little
brother's shoulder and he said, you know what, that is what
good people do to help people like us.
The hungry people in this nation are good people, and you
are good people, and we need to work together to help them.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Denise Holland follows:]
Prepared Statement of Denise Holland,
Executive Director, Harvest Hope Food Bank
Chairman Spratt, and members of the Committee, I want to thank you
for the opportunity to be here and testify before you today. My name is
Denise Holland, and I'm the Executive Director of the Harvest Hope Food
Bank in Columbia, South Carolina. I'm here representing the Harvest
Hope Food Bank, which serves 18 counties in central South Carolina, as
well as America's Second Harvest--The Nation's Food Bank Network.
America's Second Harvest--The Nation's Food Bank Network is the
largest hunger relief organization in the United States. Second Harvest
member food banks serve all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and
Puerto Rico. Nearly every community in the United States is served by
an America's Second Harvest food bank and its local network of food
pantries, congregant feeding programs, after school programs, and
programs that serve the elderly. This work is accomplished through
programs operated by congregations of every religious persuasion, civic
organizations, and social welfare agencies. More than 50,000 local
programs are included in this system of private sector support for the
poor and needy in our communities.
Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, I have been a food bank
director for nine years working to feed and serve hungry and needy
people in my state. Since coming to Harvest Hope Food Bank, I have seen
a dramatic increase in the problem of hunger and the complexities of
hunger and poverty in Columbia, in the rural communities outside of
Columbia, and around the country. And as the problem has grown worse,
the profiles of the people affected by the threat of hunger have
changed. Long gone are the days when the chronically unemployed and
homeless men represented the majority of the people we serve. Today
many of the people receiving food assistance from our partner programs
are working; they are most likely not receiving welfare, and are often
faced with the challenges of finding affordable housing and adequate
health care. Today, we see too many kids in soup kitchen lines, too
many working parents at congregational food pantries, and too many
elderly people having to choose between paying utility bills and
eating.
Three months ago, the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) released its annual prevalence estimates of food insecurity. The
USDA estimates are an objective and authoritative measure of the state
of food insecurity in our nation. In releasing these new food
insecurity estimates, the Department chose to abandon using the term
``hunger'' and replaced it instead with ``very low food insecurity.''
Changing words to describe hunger does not change the prevalence of
hunger in America and in my state of South Carolina. Despite the word
change, these prevalence estimates are generated by a highly reputable
agency of the Federal government--USDA's Economic Research Service--and
these statistics are viewed as the final and authoritative word on the
problem of hunger in America.
The most recent USDA prevalence estimates find that more than one-
in-ten American households--including 35 million people in all--live in
food insecure households. Of the 35 million people deemed food
insecure--in South Carolina, like the rest of the country, we just call
them hungry--more than 12 million are children. In South Carolina we
are 48th of 50 states and the District. We have the fourth worst rate
of food insecurity in the nation--and the highest rate of households
with ``very low food insecurity,'' or hunger, with 15.5%.
In addition to the USDA estimates of food insecurity, America's
Second Harvest also conducts independent research on the prevalence of
the hunger problem and measures how well food banks are doing as they
work to address this problem. According to independent research by
Mathematica Policy, Inc. for America's Second Harvest, an estimated 25
million unduplicated people nationwide--including nine million children
and nearly three million seniors--received emergency food assistance
from our network food banks in 2005. That represents an 8% increase
over 2001 and an 18% increase from a decade ago.
On any given week--this week, for example--four and a half million
people are lined up for emergency food boxes at pantries or for hot
meals at community kitchens across the nation. More than a third of the
people served by our food programs--36%--are employed, and of our
emergency food recipients, 70% reside in households were deemed food
insecure using the USDA standards.
But national statistics can often be too abstract. So let me
discuss the problem of hunger in South Carolina--and my community in
and around Columbia, my home. The Harvest Hope Food Bank serves 18
counties in central South Carolina. It not only serves the capitol city
of Columbia and its suburbs, but it also serves small towns, and rural
areas. Last year, the Harvest Hope Food Bank served more than 149,000
different needy people in a region of over 1.2 million people. Of the
200,000 people estimated by the Census to live in poverty in our
community--nearly three-fourths had, at some time, turned to our
partner agencies for food and services. This is incredible and shameful
in a nation so blessed by a strong economy and agricultural abundance.
On any given week in central South Carolina--including the 5th
Congressional District--some 19,100 different people receive food
assistance from the Harvest Hope Food Bank through local, volunteer
led, and community-based agencies. These numbers matter because they
allow you to see the challenge we face in South Carolina and in food
banks and hunger relief organizations all across the country. Food
banks and their agencies are the last defense against hunger for many
low-income and working families. It is a good thing that this network
of food banks and community based agencies exists, because more and
more we are seeing people who must give up buying food at the grocery
store so they can pay the rent, the utility bill, address a health
emergency, or just put shoes on their children's feet. These are people
who are falling through the cracks in our nation's safety net.
Approximately six months ago, I was behind a family in the grocery
store. While I waited in line I watched a mother with three children
face the dilemma of choosing to put back some groceries because her
food stamp benefit was not enough to obtain what she had in her buggy.
She had chosen very nutritious foods but was short $17 dollars and was
returning good food items such as peanut butter, jelly, bread, cheese,
cereal and frozen chicken. One of her daughters, I'm guessing that she
was about 9 or 10 years old, appeared very sad. I heard the mother say,
``I know, honey, these are some of your favorites but I just don't have
enough left at the end of the month to pay for these so we have to put
things back-I am so sorry.'' The little girl looked down and I thought
she was going to cry. I quietly told the mother that I completely
understood her situation and could I pay for these items for her and
handed her my business card. She broke down in tears and hugged me
around the neck very thankful that I could do this for her because,
with approximately 9 more days left in the month, she was not going to
make it until her next food stamp allotment came in. I share this with
you because this is definitely the reality for working families. The
food stamp benefit is extremely helpful but, according to the America's
Second Harvest Hunger study, it only lasts 2.3 weeks a month. This is a
devastating reality for a family to face. It is especially devastating
for children to have to worry about what they are going to eat. Food
stamps are a lifeline for working families and any reductions in this
program will affect tens of thousands of families and significantly
impact our donated food system. At Harvest Hope Food bank, our
pantries, and especially our own onsite pantry, experience a dramatic
increase in the need for food toward the end of every month because the
current allocation, while extremely helpful, needs to be increased. It
certainly does not need to be decreased. I worry about how the
President's budget proposal will affect working poor families.
At one of our Kids Cafe sites last year, I stopped to visit a table
where elementary school children were eating. That night they were
having chicken, collard greens, rice and peaches. All great southern
food! I looked at one little boy who seemed to be greatly enjoying his
meal and I asked him, before he came to our Kids Cafe site, what he did
for dinner. He reached in his pants pocket and pulled out a quarter and
said, ``Before coming here, I would stop by a gas station and buy me a
pack of crackers with peanut butter in them, because my momma works two
jobs so she is not at home at night to fix something hot.'' This has
fueled my passion to make sure that I must work hard with every
available resource at my disposal to make sure that no child only has
crackers to eat at night. How can we possibly expect our children to
succeed in school when they are hungry?
To meet these needs in our communities, the food bank system was
created to secure private donations of food and surplus government
commodities, warehouse those donations and then distribute them to
local partner agencies. This system allows us to receive donated food
and produce from all around the country and provide it to needy people
in my community. Food banks are the lynchpin in a massive network of
private, charitable hunger relief that operates in nearly every
community throughout the nation.
The local agency system in South Carolina and around the country is
largely comprised of faith-based entities, with three-fourths of the
pantries in our system being part of the community support provided by
churches, synagogues, temples and mosques. These local hunger relief
agencies reflect the very best of America, the broad array of America's
social fabric and religious life; they also highlight the public and
private sector successfully working together to address a major public
health and social issue. I would like to commend the South Carolina
Department of Social Services for their support in our hunger relief
efforts. They are a highly valued partner in the fight to eliminate
hunger and actively participate with us.
Our agencies rely heavily on volunteers to provide hunger relief,
with two-thirds of our partner programs relying entirely on volunteer
support. The volunteers in our system are crucial to our work. An
estimated one million different people comprise the volunteer work-
force around the country. These volunteers provide an average of 53
hours of labor annually, or put another way, they donate a full-time
work week plus overtime each year to help their needy neighbors. Using
the current minimum wage, the value of volunteer labor in our network
in a typical week is estimated at $8.2 million, or nearly a half a
billion dollars per year.
The volunteers that keep our system moving don't just ladle soup or
pack food boxes. They provide additional support to needy families that
come to the pantries for assistance. Often the lack of food is just the
presenting problem and the beginning of a relationship toward self
sufficiency. Partner agencies provide after school tutoring in Kids
Cafe programs, community support to seniors, counseling and training
for jobs, housing support, mental health services, and an array of
other support services that transform lives. Using a commodity that we
have an abundance of--food--we are able to engage, educate, and empower
people toward self sufficiency. This is the transformation that food
programs provide everyday.
Our charitable food system has evolved and become more
sophisticated as the face of hunger has changed. The need for much
better food stamp referrals is based on the reality that little more
than one-third (38%) of the people we serve are enrolled in the Food
Stamp Program, even though nearly two-thirds (64%) reside in households
with incomes below the Federal poverty level. We provide utility
assistance and referrals to other public programs because the research
shows that 53% of those we serve had to choose between buying food or
paying their utility bills, 35% had to choose between buying food and
paying their rent or mortgage, and 41% had to choose between buying
food and paying for medicine or medical care.
Mr. Chairman, these facts are unacceptable in a nation as wealthy
as ours. In America today we allow nine million children a year to rely
on private charity to ensure that they don't go to bed hungry. We must
do better. This Committee has an opportunity in the budget process to
help reduce hunger and support the very effective efforts of the
emergency food providers to meet the hunger needs in their communities.
I am particularly concerned with President's Fiscal Year 2008
Budget proposal. The President's budget request funds--or in too many
instances cuts--a number of programs that are utilized by many of the
low-income people we serve in South Carolina. These are families that
do not want a hand out, but a hand up. They want to work toward self
sufficiency, but the system that should support that goal is too often
is stacked against them.
Let me provide one example of what I mean. The President's budget
request proposes eliminating categorical eligibility in Food Stamps for
families that are on TANF but receiving non-cash assistance. The non-
cash assistance takes several forms, such as government supported
child-care or day care, transportation, and other work supports. The
categorical eligibility is meant to allow these families--typically,
single working moms with children--to continue to receive TANF and food
stamp benefits while they transition from welfare assistance to work
and eventually self-sufficiency. Yet, the President's proposal would
deny them food stamp benefits if their meager income or assets rise
above the typical food stamp income threshold--which for a typical low-
income household of three, a single working mother with two children is
approximately $1,799.00 gross income per month.
In South Carolina there are 227,000 households participating in the
Food Stamp Program. The President's budget proposal will negatively
affect an estimated 68,000 South Carolina households. It will not only
increase the number of families who will have to go without food but it
will also increase the number of people who will have to rely on
donated supplies. At Harvest Hope Food Bank we never turn down any
resource and we actively work to recruit more food resources. It is
important to keep in mind that these numbers represent real people. And
the challenges I face, on a day to day basis, to provide food for those
in need are constantly growing. Removing any resource for being able to
provide food would be devastating.
Mr. Chairman, increasing access to the Food Stamp Program should be
a goal of this Administration and of the Congress. With the
participation rate of eligible individuals in the Food Stamp Program is
at only about 60% nationwide--and only a little better in South
Carolina, where the rate is about 65%. More can, and should be done to
ensure that low-income families who need supplemental food assistance
to feed their children get the help they need. Needy seniors, legal
immigrants and the working poor are all underrepresented in the Food
Stamp Program and the President's proposal does little to address this
problem.
Food stamps are the cornerstone in the nation's efforts to reduce
hunger and help low-income families achieve self-sufficiency. Harvest
Hope Food Bank and all of the nation's food banks are committed to
continue working to improve and strengthen the Food Stamp Program. For
instance, food banks across the United States participate in food stamp
outreach activities with private funding and with the support of USDA.
And it is in these public private partnerships that we leverage our
resources, build strong networks, and best serve those in need.
Mr. Chairman, the nation's food banks are like the proverbial
``canary in the mine shaft.'' We see the effects of poor economies,
lay-offs, and rising energy, health, and housing costs, often before
they show up in government statistics. Of course, we must always
remember that these statistics represent more than mere numbers: they
represent real people in our own neighborhoods and communities who are
struggling to make ends meet. We see the family that struggles to pay
the rent and therefore cuts into the family food budget. Nationally, 35
% of emergency food recipients have to choose between buying food and
paying the rent or mortgage. Another 42% have to choose between buying
food and paying their utility bills.
These families have to make difficult decisions and face heart
wrenching trade-offs. When the President proposes cutting Low-Income
Heating and Energy Assistance (LIHEAP) as he has in this budget
request, it exacerbates the problems for those families that are
already struggling to figure out how they will pay their utility bills.
Or if the President proposes cutting Section 8 housing vouchers, as he
suggested in this budget, it again only forces many of these families
to choose between paying rent and putting food on the table. In
Columbia South Carolina, the problem is very real and the estimated
4,500 people who live in public housing or receive Section 8 housing
vouchers would rather pay rent and go hungry than be homeless. Just
this past weekend our food bank was broken into and all we could find
missing was several packages of meat. Food is a grave concern.
The President's budget request makes a number of reductions in
funding for programs that, if allowed, will increase the number of
people that turn to food banks for food assistance--while
simultaneously cutting support for the very private sector charitable
agencies that are meant to serve these families. One program targeted
for elimination in the President's budget is the Commodity Supplemental
Food Program (CSFP).
CSFP provides specialized monthly supplemental food packages of
USDA commodities for low-income seniors and low-income, nutritionally
at risk pregnant women, post-partum women, infants and children up to
age six. The CSFP food packages are not meant to provide a full diet,
but rather provide critical supplements to at-risk populations,
especially seniors. In my food bank, we provided more than half a
million pounds of CSFP commodities to 1,250, low-income seniors last
year each month for a total of 15,000 distributions. And yet the
President's budget proposes to eliminate the CSFP on the hope that the
almost 442,000 seniors--91% of the program's caseload--who are now
participating in CSFP will instead enroll in the Food Stamp Program.
Yet, the Department knows that the CSFP senior population--and indeed
seniors all across America--participate in the Food Stamp Program at
very low rates. They have difficulty in negotiating through the
application process and even greater difficulty in utilizing the
benefits when they get them. But through CSFP, we are able to provide
not just the food package, but also community-based support, which
allows us to be able to check in on these senior citizens; see how
they're doing and learn what other services beyond food assistance they
may need. CSFP is a truly remarkable program that could help many more
needy senior citizens, but the President's budget has targeted this
program, once again, for elimination.
The elderly population in South Carolina is one of the fastest
growing populations in the state. Three food banks in South Carolina
participate in the CSFP program. These food banks utilize 47 sites in 6
counties; they provide a total of 3,705 seniors with a monthly
nutritious box of food. Because the need is so great, especially in
rural areas where there is a high concentration of elderly, we have had
to establish a waiting list. When these seniors come to our food pantry
they are often in wheelchairs, or rely on walkers. They are always
thrilled to have the food.
Which brings, Mr. Chairman, to what I believe is a missed
opportunity in the President's budget. Today, you have heard from the
Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns about the upcoming Farm Bill
reauthorization. The Farm Bill provides an opportunity to address the
problem of hunger and under-nutrition in our communities in a profound
way. Unfortunately, the President's budget and the administration's
Farm Bill proposal fall far short of reducing hunger in South Carolina
or the rest of our country. The President's budget proposal makes no
new investments in The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), a
program that provides USDA commodities to food banks and other local
charities for distribution to needy people through church food
pantries, soup kitchens and shelters.
During the past four years, we have had a 39% increase in the need
for food due to hunger and insecurity. We have also seen, during that
time, a trend where public-sector food donations have not adequately
kept up with the requests for food assistance that we face in our
communities. Although most of the food we provide to needy families is
sourced from the private sector, we rely heavily on Federal commodity
programs, especially TEFAP, to stabilize and leverage those private
donations.
Since the enactment of the last Farm Bill, there has been a
troubling decrease in commodity donations through TEFAP. Since 2003,
steadily rising farm commodity prices have reduced the need for USDA to
purchase surplus commodities for market support purposes under the
Department's Section 32 authority. Although the TEFAP mandatory
purchases set by Congress have remained stable, the surplus or bonus
commodities--constituting more than half of all TEFAP donations to food
banks--have fallen off. Since 2001 bonus commodities have fallen by
more than 60%. At the same time requests for food assistance have
increased by 8% or more. Moreover, inventories held to support CSFP and
support its costs have virtually disappeared, leaving this program
under funded when appropriations are not sufficient to offset this
shortfall.
I understand that in the upcoming debate on the Budget and on the
Farm Bill, the choices may be few and the competing interests many, but
with respect to TEFAP and the other commodity donation programs we
clearly find mutual and compound interest. Many of the commodities
donated to TEFAP, CSFP and other commodity donation programs are
acquired to support farm prices and provide a farm safety net. These
programs also serve as a nutrition safety net for millions of hungry
people. Moreover, TEFAP commodities offer some of the healthiest and
most nutritious food distributed to our agencies. TEFAP commodities
stabilize our distribution when private donations are lagging or can
help extend private donations enabling the food mix to be more
complete.
TEFAP is critical to the estimated 25 million low-income people
that access these commodities through food banks and the agencies we
serve. The Fiscal Year 2008 Budget Resolution and the next Farm Bill
offer the opportunity to strengthen this system of farm-to-table for
our nation's poor and hungry. As this Committee deliberates on the
Fiscal Year 2008 Budget Resolution and how much will be provided for
the Farm Bill, it is crucial that Congress: increase mandatory food
purchases for TEFAP; stabilize the surplus commodities provided to the
program through Section 32; and find a way to maintain CSFP caseloads
when commodity inventories disappear, and seek a long term solution to
the lack of programs in many areas with unserved needy seniors. With
demographic trends moving as they are, the nation needs a strong senior
nutrition safety net.
The compelling need to strengthen and enhance the Food Stamp
Program so that it can reach more eligible Americans, and the
substantial decline in government commodity stocks donated to the TEFAP
and CSFP in the face of increased demand upon the charitable food
system argue strongly against the President's dangerous plan to
eliminate CSFP and weaken the Food Stamp Program. I respectfully ask
this Committee to reject these administration proposals, and provide
adequate funding for the nutrition title of the next Farm Bill so that
all of our nation's hungry will have a place at the table.
Efforts to increase access to food stamps for so many of those who
are eligible but not participating is one of the fastest ways to
succeed in our nation's battle against hunger. With the next Farm Bill,
we can also find creative ways to capitalize on the many potential
sources of support for TEFAP and CSFP--government commodities, industry
food donations, private charitable donations, infrastructure and
administrative grants, increased volunteers, etc.--so that these
programs can operate with dependable and sufficient resources to meet
their ever growing need. We must find a way to ensure that our needy
families and children, and the elderly find a place in the Budget and
at our Farm Bill table.
Several years ago, three boys were visiting our food pantry with
their mother who had cancer. The boys were taken to our packing area to
give their mother a little private time with our volunteer counselor.
While they were there, they did not realize they were helping our
volunteers pack the bags of food that they were going to take home. The
food was a combination of our donated supplies and TEFAP commodities.
When they finished and were wheeling their cart to the Church van that
brought them to us, one little boy looked at his older brother and
said, ``This is for us * * * Wow! We have never had this much food at
our house, it is kinda like Christmas.'' The older brother, with a
great deal of compassion and maturity, put his hand on his little
brothers shoulder and said, ``Well, we have a lot to be thankful for,
because this is what good people do to help people like us.''
In conclusion, Chairman Spratt and members of the Committee, I
appreciate your allowing me to tell my story, and the story of many who
are daily engaged in trying to end hunger in our country, one community
at a time. Our hope is that the Budget Resolution will provide adequate
discretionary funding for nutrition assistance programs in Fiscal Year
2008 and will also provide some new funding for the nutrition title of
the next Farm Bill. Your committee's continued support and leadership
can help pave the way to ending hunger in America.
Mr. Chairman, there are lots of good people in this country just
like ourselves who need our help with these programs. My prayer is that
help will continue. Thank you.
I look forward to answering any questions you may have.
Chairman Spratt. Jim McGovern.
Mr. McGovern. First of all, let me thank you both for your
testimony. And I wish the Administration witnesses were here to
hear this because I think you make the point that needs to be
made, and that is that, you know, we all talk about balancing
budgets and numbers and stuff, but that there are people behind
these numbers and that when you make these adjustments or these
reductions or you do not keep the programs adjusted for
inflation and people do not get to take advantage of some of
these programs, that means people go without food.
And if you are not moved by the moral argument of making
sure people in this country have enough to eat, then I think
you both made a case that you should be moved by just the
numbers, because if the child goes without food, then he or she
is going to grow up to be an unhealthy adult, and the
healthcare costs, you know, as a child, you know, and as an
adolescent and then as an adult, you know, are quite high. And
I think sometimes we do not make those connections.
You know, when I look at programs that address child hunger
in America, you know, you look at programs like WIC, food
stamps, school lunches, school breakfasts, summer feeding
programs, the Commodity Food Supplemental Program, Head Start,
Early Start, and so on, none of them are adequately funded. And
so we get into this little debate here, well, you know, we have
a little increase over last year's level, but last year's level
was not fully funded to meet the need and a little increase
does not meet the current need.
But if food stamps and child nutrition programs were
adequately funded, would that be sufficient to improve the
health and development of our children and, if not, what are
the survival issues your work has identified as necessary to a
child's health and learning, and how can we in Congress bring a
more effective approach to addressing child hunger and poverty
in America?
Dr. Frank. In medical terms, these child nutrition programs
are what we call necessary, but not sufficient. For example,
like heat or eat is an unbelievable issue in the whole northern
tier. But even keeping the lights on in the southern tier is a
huge issue, and keeping refrigeration so the food does not
spoil.
And we have found that currently with the current funding,
and I understand it is going to be cut a whole bunch, 17
percent of eligible families get LIHEAP. If you are eligible
and do not get it and you are a baby, there is a 30 percent
greater chance that you show up in an emergency room, you are
going to be sick enough to be hospitalized. And that is a
pretty drastic tradeoff.
This is just published in Pediatrics, okay, that if you
take a whole bunch of kids and they are all eligible for
LIHEAP, income eligible, but only 17 percent of them get it
because that is the level of the funding of the program, and
then you think about all the background differences, if you are
a baby who is eligible for LIHEAP, a kid under three and whose
family is not getting it and you show up in an emergency room,
you are 30 percent more likely to be sick enough to have to be
admitted to the hospital.
And, again, I can tell you that every admission, even short
ones, are very expensive, would fund a lot of LIHEAP. And we
found quite similar effects with housing.
If you take people on waiting lists for what we call
Section 8 and compared them to people who are getting it, so
where they are absolutely similar in terms of eligibility, the
entire wait for age curve or the baby, which is what affects a
lot of things, brain growth, susceptibility to infection, for
the kids who are eligible and do not receive it is shifted
over, so you about double the kids who are in the dangerous
underweight range. And that has also been published in a
reviewed medical journal.
So we have been taught to do evidence-based medicine. I am
glad to have people here who are really interested in evidence-
based social policy.
Mr. McGovern. Ms. Holland.
Ms. Holland. We see a great correlation between children
who are sick and children who are hungry. You know, when school
is out and, therefore, free and reduced breakfasts and lunch is
not available to those children, parents worry because it is
not just one meal they are then replacing, it is three. And
during those times, you see great differences in the families
that are coming in and the health, just, you know, in looking
at them, at the general health of them. So nutrition is
incredibly important to them. Eating is incredibly important to
them. REGINA
For all the food banks within America's Second Harvest, we
focus on making sure that they have, you know, fruits and
vegetables. And particularly in South Carolina, we have
programs to where we glean the fields, encourage the farmers to
bring the extra crops in, and let us give those out throughout
all of our member agencies. I think that is very, very
important to it and, you know, helping them to make those good
choices about nutrition.
When the food stamp benefit is not enough, I think
certainly they do make choices because they do need to fill
hungry stomachs. That is what Dr. Frank spoke of earlier. You
know, it is much cheaper to buy the Ramen noodles, ten cents a
package, but there is no health there.
So I do think it is incumbent upon all of us to increase
the health of all those populations that we do by providing
them not only adequate supplies of food but good nutrition as
well.
Mr. McGovern. Thank you.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Etheridge.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me thank both of you. I wish every member of Congress
and the Administration could have heard your testimony.
I do not know if questions are adequate. Your testimony
speaks for itself. But I want to share a couple of points and
ask you one question.
Prior to coming to Washington, I served as the State
Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina for eight years. I
know what you are talking about.
My wife had just retired as a child nutrition director for
our county schools. And she consistently shared with me you
could always tell the child that was hungry because they ate
well on Friday and were first in the cafeteria on Monday
mornings.
We ought to have a breakfast program for every child in
America and no matter what their background is because I think
that would do a lot for academics. It would also help some
other issues.
One point I will share with you before I ask a question. We
have a program that we just kicked off jointly in the last two
years. We have a State Farmer's Market in Raleigh. And the
agencies came together and we got some State money and a little
bit of federal and most of it is private, and built a receiving
center from the farmer's market all the excess produce that we
could pull together because a lot would go bad and we could not
use it. And they would get it immediately. They can freeze it,
reprocess it, and then they provide meals for families.
Something just to think about. I wish we had more money to
do that.
Let me ask you one question, both of you. In addition to
being on this Committee, I serve on the Ag Committee, and
realizing the dollars we need. But is there anything that we
need to do statutorily to change some things that you are
working with that we can help make your job easier from a
standpoint of things we do in agriculture for the programs that
flow to the local level?
If you do not know today, check it out, let me know. We
would sure like to make the job easier and distribute the
resources more readily because you are out there, as my wife
always reminds me when I come home, where the rubber meets the
road. And you see the problems. And if I can get that
information, we would certainly be happy to try to deal with
it.
Dr. Frank. The one thing I can address from clinical
experience is in our hospital, we have volunteer lawyers and
law students, and a good chunk of their time is spent helping
people apply for food stamps and trying to deal with being
irrationally turned down or stuff being lost.
I mean, the fact that it should take a lawyer to get a low-
income family under food stamps, and, of course, that is a
boutique program, you know, I mean, it is not a really good use
of money or people's time. I think it speaks for itself.
But it is the only program where people do not just have to
account for their income but have to account for their outlay.
And the documentation is so complex that it sometimes takes a
lawyer. I mean, I cannot do it.
Ms. Holland. Thank you.
I would like to get with my colleagues with America's
Second Harvest to respond to you on your question. But one
thing that does come to mind, every food bank with America's
Second Harvest, we do not leave any stone unturned when it
comes to gathering food. It is a partnership between private
donations of food and dollars and the Public Assistance Program
through Department of Agriculture. We greatly depend on both of
those to supplement each other to put an end to hunger.
I know in the State of South Carolina, we work very closely
with local farmers and growers to bring fresh produce in. You
know, our clients of our food pantries across the State really
love that.
I think being able to adequately recognize their donations
and what all those donations do for us give them the correct
monetary tax benefit is very important to them and it is very
important to us because we depend on that food so readily.
But thank you. I would like to get back with you on that.
Mr. Etheridge. Mr. Chairman, with your indulgence, one
little point.
Chairman Spratt. Certainly.
Mr. Etheridge. We in North Carolina, we have a lot of sweet
potatoes, and I am sure each State has their own commodities.
And every fall, a lot of that gets ditched in the ground
because they do not have processing when people could use it.
And I would be interested if you would share in your
thinking on that because I think I am going to talk to some of
my colleagues to find a way that we maybe can get some
companies to ramp up and process----
Chairman Spratt. We had a member here by the name of Tony
Hall of Ohio. And Tony had developed this program in Ohio where
they did go out and glean the harvest. And it was a very well-
organized program and lots of volunteers participated in it. It
certainly should be something that would work in North Carolina
beautifully.
Mr. Etheridge. They ought to be able to do it.
Ms. Holland. From a food bank perspective, we love that.
And, in fact, the Society of St. Andrew regularly drops
potatoes for us and we bring in college students that bag them.
You know, there was a Martin Luther King Day activity. It was a
wonderful activity.
Mr. Etheridge. Great food bank. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Blumenauer.
Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate what
you and Mr. McGovern have done.
And I agree with you, Jim, it would have been nice to flip
the panels and have the Secretary spend an extra----
Chairman Spratt. We should have done that. The custom is we
always take the Secretary first, but it would have been very
instructive for the Secretary of Agriculture and his
lieutenants to have heard your testimony, some of the most
compelling authoritative testimony I have heard in 24 years.
Mr. Blumenauer. I am sure he is watching C-SPAN.
And I appreciate the protocol and what needs to be done.
But it might be that we arrange for a video in all seriousness
of what we have done, if we could, because I think the
Secretary is a person of generous spirit, and I truly think it
would be useful for him.
I come here today hard on the heels of a farm forum I had
at home in Portland this weekend with one of my colleagues, Sam
Farr, from California who journeyed. And we listened to people
on a statewide basis come in and talk about what should happen
with the Farm Bill. And we had people from the Wheat League and
we had people from nutrition programs, from schools, people who
were involved with organic--I mean, the whole range of people.
But it was interesting, the subtext is talking about how to put
the pieces together in a way that made more sense.
And I deeply appreciate this testimony, Mr. Chairman. I
appreciate the language and would just posit if you have more
suggestions.
I mean, Doctor, you were saying infant mortality, we are
talking about dead babies.
Ms. Holland, you were talking about food insecurity, but it
is really hungry kids. I mean, the extent to which you have
ideas that you have road tested for us of helping us reframe
the debate, what is the hunger equivalent of the, quote, death
tax that we might be able to drop into the political lexicon
and help drive the discussion? If you have some thoughts, I
would be very interested in that.
You may or may not have been here when I posed a question
to the Secretary about our practice of shipping commodities
overseas when at times, this food drives local farmers out of
business, and that now the Administration is looking at taking
a few of these dollars, not all of them, not most of them, but
a fraction of them, 25 cents on the dollar perhaps, and buying
local food to help people be self-sufficient and doing it
faster.
If we could use your thought about local produce, local
commodities, that there might be some provision in the bill
that helps us buy food from local producers who would like to
do that. And in some cases, if they had some revenue stream for
local produce, local products, they might be able to give
slightly better prices.
I know that in my community, they are involved with
gleaning and whatnot, but we might be able to help stabilize
local agriculture, have steady through-put to help you round
out the diet rather than relying on occasional shipments of
surplus commodities which may not really be what is necessary
to provide the nutrition that is required. And your thoughts in
that regard would be helpful.
I am on another Committee where the Chairman, Chairman
Rangel, is driving an agenda in a very thoughtful fashion about
the high cost for society of poor people. And one of my
particular areas of interest is that the poor actually pay
more. They pay more for substandard healthcare. They pay more
for food. They pay more for milk. They pay more for their
mortgages. I mean, these are working people.
And I would like to maybe try and get you in touch with the
Ways and Means Committee staff because I think, Mr. Chairman,
there may be something in what Charlie is doing with poverty
that may be able to--there may be some tax elements that might
make a difference, not just in the Budget Committee.
The streamlining the process that was offered up, I mean,
Oregon was ranked as one of the two most food insecure states.
It was brutal. It was shameful. We found that the single-most
effective thing we did to move us to the middle of the pack is
to try and negotiate this goofy process.
Somebody told me it was almost as complicated to apply for
food stamps as for an OPEC loan, the private overseas
investment loan of millions of dollars. They streamlined that.
We have really made it hard on these folks. So your notion of
the streamlining.
And last but not least, I would urge that you redouble your
efforts with your national network. I mean, you have got
amazing compatriots around the country who are starting to make
progress with the local food banks, with people in the
agricultural community, academics.
And if there is a way that we can work with you in
broadening the national advocacy, I thought this was amazingly
compelling, and I hope that there are ways that we can think
about ways to link out so this happens locally around the
country. As our fellow members are having their own hearings
and workshops about the Farm Bill, that we make sure that what
you represent is there in force.
Thank you very much.
Dr. Frank. Thank you.
I mean, it is true. I mean, poor people pay more for worse
food. In our State, you know, the WIC Farmer's Market vouchers
are ten bucks for the whole summer, and we did have a State
Farmer's Market Program that it went under. I mean, it was
really simple stuff like, well, suppose we double the farmer's
market vouchers and also for the elderly. That would certainly
mean that there would be more people buying produce from local
farmers. I mean, I am no economist. I am just a doctor, but it
seems kind of does that work?
Mr. Blumenauer. We have some folks in Oregon who think it
might.
Ms. Holland. In South Carolina, as many states across the
nation, they have what is called a SNAP Program, a Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program. In North Carolina, I know there
is a very good one. And we in South Carolina are trying to
model and request a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
with our State legislature.
The proposal there would follow the North Carolina work
which says the State allocates some money to help food banks
purchase locally-grown foods to help supplement the supplies
that we have. We would very much like to see that in South
Carolina. I know many states have been very successful with it.
And I guess the critical piece of that is all the supplies
of food, and it does for us with Food Banks, we work hard to
have a good mixture from every available resource that we have,
but, you know, every one of those was critically important to
us and would not want to see any of those diminished at all.
Chairman Spratt. Mr. Blumenauer?
Mr. Blumenauer. No.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you so much for your testimony. We
will take it to heart. But we very much appreciate your
testimony and coming here today, your patience and forbearance
and waiting for the opportunity to testify. But you have made a
lasting impression on us, and we will be taking the advice you
left us with.
I have got one question. You spoke to the Food Supplemental
Program, Supplemental Food Program. The President's budget also
has a proposal that would terminate food stamps for some
families that receive food stamps because they receive noncash
welfare services.
How would that affect food stamp beneficiaries with whom
you deal?
Dr. Frank. Well, I see a huge number of families who are
struggling to work and take good care of their children. They
want to be good workers and good parents, and they already
unbelievably stretch. And it is very difficult for working
families because they have to recertify much more often, and
this would be a disaster.
It really seems, you know, for all the piety about people
playing by the rules, why would you take food away from
families who are playing by the rules, trying to get off
welfare, trying to get retooled to enter the job market? I do
not get it.
I mean, I can tell you if you take away food stamps from
people who had it, you can guarantee their kids will be more
food insecure and be in poorer health. I mean, you know, that
is a repetitive pattern.
It also looks like from the big kid data, which is not my
data, they will do worse in school. So you already have the
information, I think, you could extrapolate.
Ms. Holland. Chairman Spratt, eliminating food stamp
categorical eligibility would hurt tens of thousands of
families in South Carolina that are currently receiving food
stamps. It would remove----
Chairman Spratt. CBO tells us the impact nationally would
be about 200,000 families. I do not know what that translates
to in South Carolina. I have got a number here that looks a
little large. But what you are saying is the impact is
substantial? It is not minimal?
Dr. Frank. And if there is 280,000 families, that is
500,000 plus children. It is half a million children at least
depending.
Ms. Holland. The hurt would be deep and would be felt in
South Carolina.
Chairman Spratt. Thank you very much.
Jim, do you have any further questions?
Mr. McGovern. I just want to thank you both. I mean, I
think it has been an incredible hearing. And, you know, as
somebody who cares about these issues along with Chairman
Spratt, I think you have given us a lot to work with here.
And, again, I mean, I think the challenge for us is to try
to get people to feel the urgency that we have to deal with
this issue, and that it is not just a moral issue. I mean, if
you want to be fiscally responsible, it is an issue that you
have to deal with. And it is not sufficient to say that, well,
we have increased this program by a half a percentage point or
a percentage point. The question is, are we meeting the need?
And the other thing is, you know, if you take away, you
know, the food stamps for, you know, working families, they may
not be working families very much longer. They may have to go
on to some other sort of assistance because, you know, they
just cannot afford it anymore.
But this has been very, very helpful, and I appreciate you
coming here. And, believe me, your testimony will be widely
circulated. Thank you.
Dr. Frank. Thank you for having us.
Chairman Spratt. My next stop is to see Charlie Rangel.
That is why I have had time in and out of the room. And I will
convey to him that we just had two witnesses that need to come
before his Committee also.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for your testimony
Dr. Frank. Thank you.
[Whereupon, at 5:37 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.]