[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 148 (Friday, October 16, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Page S12670]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           HUNGER IN AMERICA

  Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I rise today to discuss the important issue 
of hunger in America. We often hear about hunger as a global problem 
affecting many people every day. Many in our own country warn us of a 
growing hunger problem in America.
  One of my Minnesota constituents, Dr. Joseph Ioffe, is a former 
Russian professor of economics and challenges this thinking from his 
first hand knowledge of hunger in Russia. He has written an editorial 
that suggests our real problem is one that involves the quality of diet 
for low-income families rather than starvation.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Dr. Ioffe's article be 
printed in the Record.

                   Is There Really Hunger in America

                           (By Joseph Ioffe)

       Another day, another letter in my mailbox from public 
     organizations fighting hunger in America. And every letter is 
     overloaded with general statements and emotional appeals but 
     lacks facts and specifics.
       Here is one from Larry Jones, president of Feed The 
     Children, an Oklahoma City-based organization: ``I am writing 
     on behalf of a very special group that faces death every hour 
     of every day of the year. It is the 15 million hungry 
     children in the United States. Every 53 minutes a hungry 
     child dies.'' A horrible picture--it looks like Rwanda or 
     North Korea. Hard to believe that the U.S. government is 
     providing food aid to many other countries while letting 
     millions of its own people starve to death.
       So I wrote a letter to Jones, asking him for specifics and, 
     in particular, to furnish the names and addresses, at random, 
     of children who died from starvation, say, last year. As it 
     appeared from Jones' response, he personally had never 
     witnessed such cases, never kept any records of the victims 
     of hunger, but relied on statistics from other organizations.
       After all, he said, his mission was not in studying facts 
     about hunger but raising money for children who, he believed, 
     were starving in the U.S.--which he has been doing for years 
     by hitting mailboxes all around the country.
       So I decided to go to the source Jones referred to. In a 
     publication by the Children's Defense Fund, a Washington, DC-
     based public organization, I found the numbers but defined 
     differently: 15 million children living in poverty . . . 
     every 53 minutes a child dies from poverty. . . . It appeared 
     that Jones did not just borrow the statistics from CDF but 
     adjusted it to the purpose of his own understanding.
       Poverty does not necessarily mean hunger. In the U.S. the 
     poverty lines is set up fairly high. Suffice it to say that a 
     family living at the poverty level in America has a higher 
     in-come than the median income of the same size family in 150 
     other countries throughout the world including Eastern Europe 
     and the former Soviet Union.
       But let us put aside the difference between hunger and 
     poverty. The point is that the CDF ``death from poverty'' 
     statistics were unfounded as well. The official mortality 
     statistics are based on the records of hospitals, and do no 
     operate with such cause of death as ``poverty.''
       So any responsible statement about children dying from 
     poverty is supposed to be supported and substantiated by 
     special studies establishing the link between medical and 
     social causes. Nothing like that could be found in the CDF 
     publications. Small wonder that my requests for information 
     of this kind was just ignored by CDF.
       And here is another letter, this one from Christine 
     Vladimiroff, president of Second Harvest, a food bank network 
     based in Chicago; ``Tonight millions of Americans won't get 
     enough to eat . . .'' Again, no specifics about numbers, not 
     the slightest attempt to prove that is real. Instead, 
     attached to the letter was a picture of the Statute of 
     Liberty holding the ``Will work for food'' poster, it was 
     ridiculous.
       Those men and women with such posters on the busy city 
     streets, idlers and drifters, don't care about work and food 
     at all. They are just playing a trick on compassionate 
     motorists. At the red light, the motorists reach out for 
     their pocket-books and hand out a dollar or two to the 
     ``hungry'' guys. None of them has ever accepted any offer to 
     work. But their day's ``work'' with the poster usually brings 
     in $100 or more and the money is being spent, right away, for 
     drugs and alcohol.
       As for food, they get it at the soup kitchens. In the 30's 
     soup kitchens served real hungry people, victims of the bad 
     economic situation. Nowadays in America they are mostly a 
     feeding place for people of anti-social behavior like idlers, 
     drifters, drug abusers and alcoholics. Now the old saying, 
     ``he who does not work, does not eat.'' is out of date.
       So is there hunger in America. It is common knowledge that 
     the U.S. is the world leader in food production, that the 
     food prices, in relation to the wages, are the lowest, that 
     the food stamps program combined with free distribution of 
     basic nutritional products from the state reserves for the 
     low-income families provides a safeguard against any threat 
     of hunger in America. Nobody is starving in this country, 
     and, moreover, nobody is dying from starvation.
       The real problem is not feeding the hungry but improving 
     the quality of the daily diet of the low-income families, 
     extending their diet beyond a certain number of plain 
     products and bringing it, gradually, to the modern 
     nutritional standards. That is where the efforts of the 
     charitable organizations should be directed.
       Those ambitious activities who are trying to impress the 
     public with sensations and high drama, talking about millions 
     of starving Americans facing death, don't do any good to the 
     country.

                          ____________________