U.S. lacks food policy

For one reason or another, 800 million hungry people across the world couldn’t make it to the United Nations emergency food summit last week in Rome.

But they were present.

What wasn’t there, or anyplace else, was a coordinated U.S. policy – which would produce a coordinated world policy – to deal with food costs that have spiraled from southern Africa to U.S. supermarkets. Nobody would imagine running for president – or trying to be president – without an energy policy, but the past year has reminded the world that one thing is even more fundamental than oil.

Yet in American politics, it’s an afterthought. It took nearly two years for Congress to pass a farm bill that contained desperately needed food stamp and other nutrition benefits. The looseness of our leaders’ grip on the international food crisis was shown by the international food-aid section somehow slipping out of the farm bill, which last week needed to be passed again with the section included (and now to be repassed over another White House veto) at the same time the U.S. delegation was telling the world in Rome about our commitment to the issue.

While Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schaefer was defending U.S. biofuel policy and telling representatives of 179 other nations that hunger was a major U.S. priority, Stephen Driesler of the U.S. Agency for International Development was telling reporters in Washington, “If by this time next week we don’t have a bill, then we are going to start to see real problems.”

None of this makes for a happy meal.

In Rome, the issues and goals were obvious. Increased costs for fuel and fertilizer are making Third World agriculture tougher at a time when it needs to be producing more food. Developed countries exporting, or even donating, food to poorer countries undercut local farmers. The world is falling behind on the kind of agricultural research – such as developing drought-resistant seed – that could drive another Green Revolution.

At the same time, commodity demand is rising, as wealthier Asians start to eat better and other countries such as the United States send more crops into biofuels. Now, rice prices are soaring, and there’s a worldwide wheat shortage.

Mike Moran, food resources manager of the Oregon Food Bank, is paying twice as much as last year for 100-pound bags of rice and worries that the increased nutrition spending in the new farm bill will be gobbled up by higher food costs.

“These aren’t the usual historic fluctuations,” Moran says. “If produce prices are settling at a high level, we’re going to continue to see consumer prices rise.”

According to Pedro A. Sanchez, director of the Millennium Villages Project at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, there are some clear directions. More food aid could be given in cash rather than U.S. grain – a change that President Bush tried to get in the new farm bill. Small farmers could get more research, feed and fertilizer support and a guarantee of a market, including access to developed countries.

“This policy,” Sanchez says, “would eliminate hunger, make more people trading partners. They will get richer, and they will buy more from the United States. This is what happened in Asia, and why we now talk about Asian Tigers. Africa and Asia looked the same 30 years ago.”

It would also change the worldwide image of the United States at a time when it needs it badly.

But one problem is that we don’t have a single place to talk about food, sending the issue out to multiple agencies in small servings.

“There are so many different groups, so many different perspectives, that it would probably do us all a service to get it coordinated so they’re not overlapping,” says Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Mo., a longtime hunger activist in Congress. “We’ve got the development people fighting with the food people.”

At the U.N. summit in Rome, the United States was represented by the secretary of agriculture. But as Emerson notes, international food policy also goes through the Agency for International Development, the U.S. Information Agency, the Commerce Department and the World Bank, with nobody at the center.

You could come up with an equally long list on domestic food policy. By the time everything got initialed, you could get very hungry.

Thursday morning, in a congressional briefing on the world hunger and agriculture situation, Emerson felt another wave of massive numbers and intersecting efforts sweep over her and concluded this was not the way policy was supposed to work.

“I leaned over to Earl Pomero, D-N.D., and said, ‘We’ve got to get this organized.’ “

Food for thought.

Or even what we really need: thought for food.