IN ITS ZEAL to cut welfare spending last year, Congress slashed some $30 billion from nutrition programs.
When President Clinton signed the "Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act," he promised that restoring these cuts was one of his priorities.
This year, that promise seems little more than an empty bowl.
Consider the food stamp program, which took the hardest hit with a cut last year of $27.7 billion. In implementing that reduction, the program had to make cuts across the board, reducing benefits for families with children, as well as the working poor, the elderly and the disabled.
Dr. Larry Brown, a Tufts University researcher who studies the effects of hunger and poverty, described the cuts as "a line of Army convoy trucks filled with food, stretching to the moon and back. This is food taken from the poor by the wealthiest nation in the world."
Small increase
This year, Congress is giving the food stamps program an "increase" of $1.5 billion, a mere fraction of the amount it cut last year.
Most of that increase will be used to provide jobs for able-bodied, unemployed, childless adults.
That, along with modest increases in a program that supplements nutrition for infants and pregnant and nursing mothers, is the only real victory anti-hunger activists can claim in this year's budget battle.
The bottom line is that under the guise of welfare reform, Congress has undercut federal nutrition programs that have been alleviating hunger in this country since the 1930s.
The effects will not be immediately evident to most Americans. After all, most Americans are blissfully unaware that many of their fellow citizens go to bed hungry.
But according to the Childhood Hunger Identification Project and the Food Research and Action Center, about 4 million children under age 12 are going hungry in this country, while another 9.6 million live with the risk of hunger.
As changes in the welfare law take effect, hunger is likely to spread.
For instance, welfare reform has excluded legal immigrants from benefits, including food stamps. This was another aspect of the FTC new welfare law the president promised to try to correct. No such luck.
Supporters of these punitive provisions have successfully argued that the law should be given a chance to work before Congress begins making changes.
So, in California alone, some 280,000 legal immigrants, including 77,000 children, will lose food stamp benefits Sept. 1, resulting in less healthy diets and even outright hunger.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the food stamp program increases the nutritional quality of poor children's diets by 20 percent to 40 percent.
The old welfare system system had many faults. But nutrition programs, while perhaps not perfect, were certainly not among the worst of those problems.
They became a target anyway, and as the full effects of the cuts filter through to poor Americans, those programs will be missed in big ways and small.
Charities' shortfall
Charitable groups cannot fill this gap. Fred Kammer, president of Catholic Charities, USA, says that private charities would have to more than double their efforts to make up the federal cuts.
Even if they could meet that challenge, the efforts of all private anti-hunger agencies in the country amount to only about one-tenth of the federal food program budget.
To cite one effect of these cuts, look at the millions of dollars being poured into school reform in an effort to ensure that every child gets an adequate education.
And remember this: No curriculum innovation, no matter how dazzling, can quiet an empty, growling stomach.
Sara Engram is deputy editorial-page editor of The Sun.
Pub Date: 7/27/97
