Amateur hoar.
Amidei, Nancy
Task Force on Food Assistance AMATEUR HOUR THE REPORT WARMS UP LEFTOVERS I F THE ISSUE weren't so serious, itwould be tempting to treat the President's Task Force on Food Assistance as a bad...
...A state could choose to operate food programs only in schools or in senior centers or in neither of those...
...But the inexperienced, non-expert members of the task force chose to ignore the numerous witnesses and studies presented to them in order to conclude: "We have not been able to substantiate allegations of rampant hunger...
...Once before, food programs were optional, and many local governments refused to provide any food assistance at all or, in some places, refused food during seasons when there was fruit to be picked, or to people who worked in voter registration drives...
...Conference of Mayors and the National Association of Counties also oppose the recommendation...
...under the circumstances, they saw no reason fo~ remedial action...
...The military side of the proposed bargain is clear enough...
...The general impression left by the report is of rare occurrences, of the sort of occasional lapses in coverage that are naturally found in any large system...
...The answers turn on what our government, in the name of those values, will actually do...
...They seem to have been reading from a script that was written at the White House...
...NANCY AMIDEI (Nancy Am~dei is director of the Eood Research and Action Center in Washington, D.C., and formerly served as deputy assistant secretary for welfare legislation at HEW...
...Hospital-based studies providing clinical evidence of malnutrition in children was presented to the task force, revealing that three times the expected number of children were failing to grow and develop normally by standard measures...
...Consider a few facts...
...In Massachusetts, the State Department of Public Health carried out a year-long survey of over 1,400 pre'school children and found that ten percent were chronically malnourished, three percent acutely malnourished...
...half the task force showed up for less than half of the meetings (Sandra Smolley, representing county government, attended none of the public hearings...
...incredibly, neither did the staff assembled to help them...
...The report speaks of "a possible exception" (to the general rule that undemutfition is not a problem), of "some people" who "have difficulties with access to food," and of "children who are sometimes sent to bed without food...
...They and the hungry deserved better than this $350,000 presidential amateur hour 'on hunger...
...It has suggested a new...
...IDEOLOGY VS...
...It has cut the U.S...
...Across the country, members of the press have done their share in documenting hunger in reports carried on the front pages of newspapers nationwide...
...Our real policy -- what our government actually did -was quite different from our declared policy...
...Midge Decter o f New York and J.P...
...In the days before there were national standards for food stamps, malnutrition was widespread among the poor and reports of civil-fights violations in the provision of food aid were common...
...Mayor Berkley of Kansas City and former Governor King of Massachusetts came to only two meetings...
...This task force composed of people who were new to the issue, or hostile to food assistance programs, or simply uninterested, has acknowledged that they did not have time to investigate the problems adequately...
...Significantly, theawo elected officials on the panel voted "no" to that proposal and there was a strong letter from the National Governors' Association before the task force urging them to reject any recommendations that food assistance programs be given to them in a block grant...
...In addition there have been the medical studies, the state and local studies, the reports by national church and voluntary organizations, and the testimony of elected officials at federal, state, and local levels...
...The task force report's major recommendation is that all food assistance programs should be combined in a "block grant" and made a responsibility of the states...
...THE IAF AN OMEN FOR FUTURE AID A DOZEN YEARS ago, the Nixon administration used to respond to critics of its foreign policy by asking them to "watch what we do, not what we say...
...One wonders what more they require...
...Henry Kissinger, at the center of the policy process in those days, was tough but correct in his public pronouncements toward Allende's government in Chile...
...Yet the task force concluded: " . . . there is no evidence that widespread undernutrition is a major health problem in the United States...
...It was inserted at the insistence of a task force member who had served in the Reagan administration and who had helped develop similar proposals (which have already been considered and rejected by the Congress...
...The U.S...
...President Reagan's task force apparently wishes to see a return to those days...
...The Kissinger Commission on Central America has presented its recommendation as a "bipartisan consensus...
...The government's own official statistics show that poverty has risen dramatically since 1978, and the poverty line is, by definition, an estimate of people with less income than what is thought to be needed for "an emergency short-term diet when funds are very low...
...J " i i i t~JJ " 10 February 1984:71 Whether the unemployed and their families could get help would depend on their political standing with the state legislature...
...Under the circumstances, one might expect the testimony of expert witnesses who actually knew something about the subject to weigh heavily with the task force and its staff...
...It is difficult not to be cynical...
...Representatives of the American Public Health Association noted that the government's own health statistics show, by conservative estimates, that half a million pre-school children Suffer from malnutrition...
...Meanwhile, their principal finding amounted to an exercise in trivializing a serious national problem...
...The Reagan administration may well accept these Commonweal: 72...
...The recommendations made to the president by the task force similarly had little rela!onshi p to the testimony of the various witnesses...
...And there was a certain logic to the process" having ignored the evidence, they found no serious problem...
...embassy in Latin America after Mexico), the hundreds of millions in training and mat&iel to E1 Salvador, the covert aid to the congas, and the studied refusal to foreswear an invasion of Nicaragua...
...And the picture in 1982 was clear: between 34 and 46 million Americans had incomes so low as to put them at risk of hunger...
...it was good advice then, as it is now...
...Its approach to development may be less obvious...
...Isn't it worth legitimating a U.S.commitment to such values, even if the price is continuing military aid...
...There is no indicator, they declare, that will "tell us where and by how much hunger has gone up in recent years...
...Most of the task force did not see the recommendation until just a few hours before they voted to accept it...
...Altogether it was a shabby performance...
...That is why there are national standards and federal programs today: because of compelling evidence that food programs operating under state and local controls left many people hungry and malnourished...
...Participation in existing federal food programs (like the school lunch program, food stamps, or the WIC program for high-risk pregnant women, nursing mothers, and young children) would become optional with the states under the task force's proposal...
...But what of the other side of the compromise, the unprecedented program of aid, the concern for "democracy" and "human development...
...Numerous witnesses have testified to us in the most forceful terms about the existence of widespread, and growing, hunger in this country," according to the task force report...
...Compounding the lack of interest was the lack of any understanding of the issue: Task Force Chair J. Clayburn La Force and most of the task force members acknowledged that they knew almost nothing of hunger, food assistance, or nutrition before being named to the task force...
...The President's Task Force may have no "indicators" that hunger is a problem, but millions of Americans have the evidence of their own experience to tell them otherwise...
...But behind the scenes, as we learned later, he was willing to do virtually anything to sabotage the Chilean experiment...
...Only three of the thirteen task force members who signed the final report had even bothered to attend all the public hearings where evidence of hunger was presented...
...Bolduc attended only one...
...With Kissinger back in our Latin American policy again, it is worth bringing out the old Nixonian advice -- particularly since Reagan's administration, unlike Nixon's, considers the hemisphere a matter of "vital national interest...
...III II I IIIli I illli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Latin America & the U.S...
...Our policy, it says, must address the needs both of security and development...
...Task Force on Food Assistance AMATEUR HOUR THE REPORT WARMS UP LEFTOVERS I F THE ISSUE weren't so serious, itwould be tempting to treat the President's Task Force on Food Assistance as a bad joke...
...Now the Kissinger Commission has recommended a five-year, $8 billion regional development program...
...The past three years give a fair basis for forecasts about a (second) Reagan administration...
...It essentially endorses what the administration is already doing (as it reflects Kissinger's own Hobbesian world view...
...Its military approach is as clear as the Teddy Roosevelt-like naval task forces off both Central America's coasts, the 3,000 U.S...
...Central American Development Organization, headed by a United States official holding veto power...
...Nonetheless, they felt competent to recommend sweeping changes in the existing food assistance programs, along with a few token improvements that were likely to be passed by Congress in any event...
...contribution for World Bank loans to the poorest nations (IDA), but it has also put through a Caribbean Basin Initiative worth $350 million (some $75 million of which is targeted to El Salvador...
...The administration makes no mystery about its use of military instruments (and indeed takes palpable pleasure over its exhibitions of pumping iron...
...In the absence of other more sophisticated studies, it is a very good surrogate for a "hunger count...
...None of the witnesses appearing before the task force urged or even suggested such a course of action, and the proposal was not included in the first draft of the report...
...troops already in Honduras (with the biggest U.S...
...Task force members carded on a discussion at their final meeting that made clear their ignorance of the programs, their history, and even of the recommendations on which they cast their votes...
...At a minimum it tells us whether there are more or fewer people at risk of hunger, and the general magnitude of the problem...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3