Mark Muller

Mark Muller

Mark Muller is the director of IATP's Food and Justice program and coordinates the IATP Food and Community Fellows.

Child Nutrition

Sometime in the next several weeks, Congress is expected to debate the Child Nutrition Act. How can this legislation better achieve its stated goal of “safeguarding the health and well-being of the Nation’s children?” To help answer this question, we asked several fellows and other experts to explore various aspects of getting healthier foods to kids

Like kissing babies and eating apple pie, there’s not a
politician around that would deny that every child in the country deserves
access to an abundant supply of healthy foods. The growing evidence of the
benefits, from students performing better in school and improved health to
a more productive work force and reduced health care costs, provide a strong
rationale for making child nutrition a top national priority.

Calories from healthy foods tend to cost significantly more
than less nutritious options. As one
in four children now receive SNAP assistance (formerly called food stamps),
lower cost foods understandably take precedence for many Americans. And
unfortunately the trend is in the wrong direction, as we have added 10 million
additional SNAP/Food Stamps recipients in the past two years. USDA reports that
14.6 percent of
households were food insecure for at least part of 2008, the highest level
since USDA started tracking the data in 1995.

The jump in food prices a couple of years ago, combined with
the national recession and spike in unemployment, demonstrates how fragile food
security really is for so many people. The federal government spends nearly $50
billion on SNAP/Food Stamps,  nearly
$7 billion annually on the WIC program, and $9.3 billion on the National
School Lunch Program, and as incredibly important as these programs are, they
are still insufficient to meet the need.

President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget
demonstrates that the Administration recognizes the food challenges facing so
many families. The President proposes to increase the funding for Child Nutrition Act programs
by $1 billion a year and a $7.6 billion increase in SNAP/Food Stamps. This
is an admirable commitment, but rather than making a significant dent in the
number of food insecure people in this country, the extra funding will probably
simply lessen the overall pain of the persistent recession.

Food insecurity in the U.S. is just one of the many examples
where federal policy options appear inadequate or work against other policy
initiatives. The nutrition programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture are
primarily funded by two pieces of legislation. The Child Nutrition Act, which
needs to be reauthorized sometime in the next several months, provides the
legislative authority for school meals and WIC. The Farm Bill, which is
expected to be reauthorized in 2013, funds SNAP/Food Stamps.

So advocates for child nutrition can keep very busy just
maintaining support for these programs. But this is just part of the story of
how federal legislation and child nutrition interact. Also within the Farm Bill
are a myriad of commodity programs, many of which require farmers to grow
certain crops to participate.  There is
little thought to how child nutrition is impacted when policies create
incentives for farmers to grow crops like corn and soybeans, which are often
directed to feeding animals or industrial uses, rather than crops that directly
feed people. Or how child nutrition is affected when incentives are created to
transport and export crops internationally rather than building local markets.

Things get much more complicated when we realize that food
systems are significantly impacted by agencies well beyond the USDA. The
complexity of the legislative picture of the food system is well documented in
a new IATP
report “Beyond the USDA”. The Department of Energy’s ethanol subsidies and
the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuels Standard have had a
tremendous influence on the cropping decisions of farmers and the end use of
corn and soybeans. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees many
food safety, food labeling and dietary guidelines. The Department of Commerce
manages crucial agricultural water supplies in western states and the
Department of Labor oversees how farmworkers are treated.

This complicated array of departments and programs
discourages efforts to improve the food system as a whole, and instead
encourages special interests to support individual programs. The result is that
most food and agriculture-related programs focus on one primary goal and have
limited success in creating multiple benefits. The National School Lunch
Program, for example, is a tremendous benefit to the health and wellbeing of
schoolchildren, but it could also provide a significant boost to local farm
economies by making local procurement a higher priority in purchasing
contracts. But since the school lunch needs are so great and budgets are so
tight, the emphasis is on low-cost foods, and the potential health and economic
benefits of fresh local foods are lost.

Similar arguments could be made against commodity support
programs that encourage environmentally harmful monocultural production
practices, conservation programs that reduce the real estate tax base of local
communities, renewable energy programs that incentivize the farmers’ use of
fossil fuel-intensive chemicals, and the many policy drivers that have made it
more profitable for corner stores and fast food restaurants to advertise and
sell highly processed, calorie dense foods rather than more healthful
alternatives.

Given the scenarios that we are currently facing – severe
federal budget constraints, growing food security challenges, an agricultural
economy in economic disarray from wild price swings – one could argue that the
best course is to continue the traditional approach, where public interest
groups focus on their particular areas of expertise. Anti-hunger groups should
simply concentrate on getting as much funding as possible into WIC, school
meals and SNAP/Food Stamps, conservation groups should focus on land reserve
programs, and rural development organizations should center on economic
development opportunities.

But sometimes economic crises present new ways of thinking.
For example, the
estimated 2009 farm income is $57 billion, a number that is somewhat notable
because it is considerably less than the estimated $77 billion that all levels
of U.S. government spend on food assistance, including outlays to the SNAP/Food
Stamps and WIC food assistance programs. In fact, government purchases of food
come to about eight
percent of the value of food purchased by families and individuals in the
United States.

In addition to the $77 billion in food assistance, other
food system support includes the roughly $10
billion in annual farm commodity payments, five billion in crop insurance
subsidies and five billion in farm conservation payments. Add all of that up
and just the USDA is spending about $100 billion annually on the food
system. 

We could get more benefits from that investment if it was
utilized with a broader food systems perspective. Food assistance programs
targeted at consumers should also provide an economic pull for environmentally
sound agriculture that revitalizes rural economies. Farm-oriented programs such
as commodity payments, crop insurance subsidies, and conservation payments should
also support food production that provides consumers with an abundant equitably
distributed supply of healthy foods.

One method of placing a holistic lens on policy is with
impact statements, such as environmental impact statements (EIS). Federal
agencies are required to perform an EIS on actions that significantly impact
the quality of the environment, which serves as a decision tool that helps to
quantify the positive and negative impacts of various actions and explore
alternative actions. An EIS avoids the formation of policies that inadvertently
conflict with the federal government’s environmental goals. Policies abound
that conflict with the societal goals for a nutritious, safe, abundant, and
reasonably priced food supply, and a mandated food systems impact statement may
be a method of reducing that conflict.

As the growing coalition of organizations attempting to
reform farm bill policies experienced in 2008, developing the political
strength to get funds moved from one farm bill program to another is quite
difficult. Perhaps a more successful approach would be to simply place
appropriate criteria on the existing food systems related programs. Many policy
tools have been used in other arenas, from compliance provisions to impact
statements to listings that protect historic buildings or endangered species.
The fiscal crisis that the federal government is facing should force all of us
working for a better food system to think more creatively about policy.