Joel on Leonard Lopate: Hunger in the Land of Plenty

Progressives Should Stop Carping and Start Fighting

Vote Now! Joel’s Daily Kos Poll on What Obama Should Do about Hunger

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http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/1/15/54757/0526/174/684285

Joel Berg on The Huffington Post, January 19, 2009

The Huffington Post
January 8, 2009
To Be Posted January 19, 2009 | 10:55 AM (EST)

Dr. King’s Other Dream: Ending Poverty

by Joel Berg

Dr. Martin Luther King had more than one dream.

Of course, King dreamt of racial reconciliation, and tomorrow’s inauguration of Barack Obama demonstrates the nation’s enormous, albeit inconsistent and incomplete, racial progress.

King also called for making service to others a centerpiece of American life, saying “Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.” The Obama inauguration is perfectly honoring that legacy by marking Dr. King’s birthday as a national day of community service.

But the King dream that was perhaps the most fiercely opposed during his time - and has been most overlooked since his death - was his call to slash poverty in the U.S. and ensure that all Americans had enough to eat. As King said, “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger?”

Ralph Abernathy, who led the Poor People’s Campaign in the wake of King’s assassination, lamented how white northerners, sympathetic when southern African-Americans were violently attacked for sitting at lunch counters, had notably less sympathy when they tried to dramatize the extent of poverty and hunger nationwide. Said Abernathy: “It was easy enough to blame a southerner for barring his restaurant door…but who was the northern white man to blame for nationwide hunger, except himself, and who would have had to pay for the cure?”

Ironically, had America ever chosen to do so, it could have wiped out domestic poverty and hunger far more rapidly than it could have achieved King’s goals of racial equality or world peace. As King also said, “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real question is whether we have the will.”

Although conservatives have convinced most Americans that the War on Poverty was a failure, that’s just not true. Between 1960 and 1973, as a result of both broad-based economic growth and government anti-poverty initiatives, the nation’s poverty rate was cut in half, and more than 16 million previously poor Americans entered the middle-class. While the Great Society surely had flaws and excesses, it succeeded spectacularly in achieving its main goal of reducing poverty.

But the nation lost the political will to continue fighting the War on Poverty, and its programs were subsequently under-funded, gutted, or abandoned entirely. Our country’s economic policies fostered the replacement of lifetime living-wage jobs with temporary employment at poverty wages. By 2007, fully 37.2 million Americans lived below the meager federal poverty line, 14 million more than in 1973. Childhood poverty now costs our nation’s economy $500 billion per year, equivalent to four percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product, according to a study by the Center for American Progress.

Is the answer to simply resurrect and re-fund all the Great Society Programs? No. Since the nature of poverty and the American economy have changed since the 1960’s, our anti-poverty strategies must also change.

A good place to start would be finally meeting a central demand of King’s Poor People Movement: enacting a federal nutrition safety net robust enough to end domestic hunger. The federal government currently sponsors more than a dozen food assistance programs, but each has its own application and eligibility determination system, and each serves too few people, with too little in benefits. President-elect Obama has already pledged to end domestic child hunger (which now affects more than 12 million American children) by 2015. To achieve that goal, the President and Congress should streamline the existing nutrition programs and use modern technologies to allow eligible families to access all of them with one application, which would save money through decreased bureaucracy. The money saved should be pumped directly into increased food benefits.

Beyond that, we need an entirely new framework for addressing domestic poverty. While our political leaders still tend to choose ideological sides — and flatly declare that either faltering economics or personal irresponsibility alone is responsible for poverty — that’s a false choice. Increased government support, economic growth, community involvement, and a focus on personal responsibility are all needed to solve the problem. The country should enact an “Aspiration Empowerment Agenda” that gives all families the opportunity to advance their dreams through hard work and responsible choices, enabling them to earn, learn, and save their way out of poverty.

True, this will take additional government spending. Since the most fundamental feature of poverty is a lack of money, trying to fight poverty without money is like trying to fight a drought without water. But no matter the price tag, it won’t come close to the dismal cost of doing nothing. If we truly want to honor Dr King’s full legacy, and if President Obama wants to start building his own in a practical and immensely meaningful way, the time for new action against poverty is now.

To see the original article on The Huffington Post, please click here.

To see the article reproduced on the Daily Kos, please click here.

Durham, NC article featuring an interview with Joel

Anti-hunger activist Joel Berg on feeding America’s poor
By Fiona Morgan, Independent Weekly (Durham, NC), December 17, 2008

One recent Friday, a woman named Cathy stood in line with approximately 200 people to eat lunch at the community kitchen of Urban Ministries of Durham. Cathy is disabled but works part time. About three weeks ago, she moved out of the organization’s overnight shelter into a boarding house where she paid $400 for this month’s rent, plus a $200 deposit. That ate up the entire $600 she gets in federal assistance each month. She also gets $28 a month in food stamps—barely enough to buy milk and bread each week. So if Cathy wants to eat, she comes here. The food is good, and the portions generous. UMD offers three meals a day, 365 days a year, in exchange for only a name and birthdate. Those are for tracking demand, which is rising as the economy worsens. In November, UMD served nearly 15,500 meals.

Cathy is one of 36.2 million Americans who struggle with hunger. Many are working people, and more than 12 million are children whose parents make tough choices week after week about whether to pay bills or buy groceries. While anti-hunger advocate Joel Berg says soup kitchens and food banks are essential, he says nonprofits will never be able to replace the federal safety net.

Berg is executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and served for eight years in the U.S. Department of Agriculture until his job was eliminated in what he describes as a political maneuver by the Bush administration. Politics have also gutted successful programs like food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), creating bureaucratic hurdles designed to render them inaccessible and ineffective—thereby perpetuating the myth that they don’t work. (To get that $28 in food stamps, Cathy has to jump through a lot of hoops.)

Berg’s book, All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, is a remarkably readable political history of hunger in 20th-century America and an impassioned, opinionated proposal for how to end it. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Berg says there is a way to eliminate hunger in the United States: Increase federal government aid.

Every year around the holidays, the media—including this newspaper—run stories about hunger. They’re usually about how grateful people are to get their holiday turkey or soup kitchen meal, and the message is, isn’t it great people are chipping in? You talk about how charity provides society with a “moral escape valve.”

It’s amazing how many times you see the faces and stories of volunteers and rarely the stories of why people are there, particularly the public policy reasons. They say, this person became homeless. They don’t then say, by the way, the federal government has slashed Section 8 housing.

If they seem to be people like you and me, then they’re sort of sympathetic. If they’re just run-of-the-mill poor people, it doesn’t really trouble us quite as much. People need to really take a good, hard look at how much as a society we’ve focused on making volunteers and donors feel good, versus whether this is really working.

Why do you say federal government programs are the most effective way to deal with hunger?

Government programs in the past were extraordinarily effective in reducing the worst impact of hunger. A great North Carolina native, Dr. Raymond Wheeler, went to Mississippi in the late 1960s and found Third World-style malnutrition. After the growth of the federal nutrition assistance safety net, you just didn’t have that mass-style starvation. The War on Poverty reduced the poverty rate by half between 1960 and 1974. We’ve been sold this bill of goods that none of this stuff ever worked, therefore we should never try big government solutions again.

We have this incredible myth in America that government’s always wasteful and nonprofits are always efficient. Nationwide, there are relatively few federal employees administering the federal food stamp program. The entire food and nutrition service at USDA has about 700 employees. I calculate there’s actually less overhead in the food stamp program than in your average charitable food distribution program.

We’ve sloughed off this major social program onto these underfunded nonprofit groups, and it’s just not working. Ending hunger with canned food drives is like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.

It should be powerful government without necessarily a big bureaucracy. In my time at USDA, I learned two things: Without government programs, people would be starving and they wouldn’t have running water. But I also learned there are too many employees filling out paperwork and not enough focus on directly aiding people.

Forget the philosophy, forget the ideology and let’s talk pure practical logistics: If you doubled charitable food distribution in America, you’d barely dent the problem. And yet, if you only increased the scope, size and reach of the federal nutrition safety net by 41 percent, you could entirely end the problem.

How much will that cost?

I calculated that we could entirely end hunger in America by spending an extra $24 billion a year. It’s about 2 percent of the Wall Street bailout, 6 percent of the president’s tax cuts, three months of war with Iraq, or approximately what we spend on agribusiness subsidies.

It costs the nation $90 billion a year to have this problem. Our economy loses three times as much as it would cost to fix the problem. But unlike some on the pure left, I don’t say it’s the government’s responsibility alone to fix it.

President-elect Barack Obama caught flak during the campaign for a plan to fund faith-based organizations.

Some of that was just a knee-jerk reaction to Bush. [Bush] totally bungled the faith-based initiative, he hijacked it for political purposes and it did very little other than try to get him re-elected in 2004.

That doesn’t mean the idea is wrong. There are over 40,000 soup kitchens and food pantries out there. The question isn’t whether these agencies are going to get involved in hunger or not; they’re already involved. The question isn’t whether they’re going to get government aid; they already get government aid. The question is whether they’re going to be effective or not and get the help they need.

They should be seen as additive, not a replacement for government efforts. They shouldn’t get government money to proselytize or discriminate; Obama’s clear on that. And they should focus on what nonprofits do best, which is innovation, generating volunteers. They shouldn’t be relied upon to provide the fundamental services like food and housing and health care.

We have an active farm-to-table movement here in N.C. What potential do you see for that movement connecting with the anti-hunger movement?

The leaders of a national group called the Community Food Security Coalition are very focused on poverty issues. But some of the more popular [farm-to-table] spokespeople can be extraordinarily out of it to when it comes to hunger. Alice Waters, whose restaurants charge more than $60 per meal, said of poor people who can’t afford the most nutritious food, they should just buy one less pair of Nikes. I agree with much of Michael Pollan’s critique of corporate agriculture and of how we’re subsidizing corn syrup, but he seems to have a blind eye when it comes to working-class people. He’s continually said that increases in food prices are a good thing because it’s going to force a change in the international food system. Whether it forces a change or not, the bottom line is people who can’t afford enough food are now having to pay more.

If we agree on the bigger picture of a just and sustainable world where people can eat more nutritious food, let’s really look at how we can promote this. For instance, increasing the use of food stamps at farmers’ markets and CSAs and increasing community gardens, but not creating the false impression that community gardens are going to solve a massive problem that affects 36.2 million Americans.

I’m in favor of anything that increases choices for low-income families. The only thing poor people have less of than money is choices. Once we’ve made food more physically available and affordable in low-income neighborhoods, then we can have a serious discussion about nutrition education.

Your plan, which not all anti-hunger advocates agree with, is to streamline all federal programs, including food stamps and WIC, into one plan with one set of requirements and paperwork.

I think progressives really have to challenge themselves to once again be for reform and not just for the status quo. There are folks that are very good personal friends of mine who are worried that if they open up the debate about these programs at all, it will get even worse, that people who are against the interests of poor people will hijack the debate and use it to shaft them.

If there’s one program, it can be cut in one fell swoop.

That is true. On the other hand, if you have over a dozen programs like you have today, they’re harder to increase.

This really resonates with people across the political spectrum. I’ve done interviews with some pretty conservative radio shows and this is one issue the left and the right can unite on. There are an awful lot of very conservative evangelical Christians who are very concerned about hunger and poverty.

Can’t we just go to the American people and say, this is what we’re doing and this is how it would work and this is why we hope you will support it? Americans are extraordinarily generous.

I’m asking people to not just think with their heart when they think of this issue, but to think with their head, really think logically about the scope of the problem and what can fix it.

Berg reads Wednesday, Dec. 17, at 7:30 p.m. at Raleigh’s Quail Ridge Books. The event is co-sponsored by the Interfaith Food Shuttle and the Food Bank of Eastern and Central North Carolina.

(Read the original here.)

Two articles from the Asheville (NC) newspaper on Joel’s recent visit

Activist and author speaks on hunger
by Leslie Boyd, Asheville Citizen-Times December 17, 2008

Joel Berg, a former Clinton administration official and head of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger, was at Downtown Books and News Tuesday evening to talk about his new book, “All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?”

Berg, who now runs the nonprofit New York City Coalition Against Hunger, believes the nation can end hunger the same way it eradicated cholera, yellow fever and malaria.

“Government did that and it needs to do this,” he said.

Berg’s book outlines ways the government can reduce hunger quickly and, ultimately, end it in the United States.

“People have been sold a bill of goods that under-coordinated, underfunded charities can solve this, that we can end hunger one can of food at a time,” Berg said “That’s like trying to fill the Grand Canyon with a teaspoon.”

In contrast, he says the real way to solve the problem — which affects 36.2 million Americans, including 12 million children — is for the government to take a serious role in fighting both hunger and the poverty that causes it.

Improving nutrition in America isn’t just a matter of dismantling factory farms, Berg said. Wages haven’t kept up with the cost of food, so cheaper, less nutritious food is all many people can afford.

People in many places can’t get fresh produce, they have no safe place to exercise and they have no time to cook from scratch.

“Poverty and obesity are opposite sides of the same coin,” he said. “White bread is cheaper than whole-grain, whole milk is cheaper than skim and fresh vegetables are expensive. We have to stop seeing government as the alien, invading force.”

Berg said that when people say the solution to poverty should lie within the community, he counters that in a democracy, government is the embodiment of community.

The talk was sponsored by MANNA FoodBank, which has added advocacy to its focus, said Kitty Schaller, director of MANNA. “It can’t just be what I do with my hands and what you do with your hands,” Schaller said.

“It has to be more than that.”

(Read the original article here.)

More in need, less food at MANNA
Economy, efficiency cut pantry supply
by Leslie Boyd, Asheville Citizen-Times December 18, 2008

With just a week left until Christmas, charities are finding more need and fewer resources. Particularly hard-hit are food pantries.

“It’s been dire for a year,” said Josh Stack, spokesman for MANNA FoodBank.

Improved computer systems at grocery chains and food manufacturers and distributors means fewer overruns being donated to food banks.

“Their increased efficiency has been really hard on us,” Stack said. “We’re not about to run out, but we have less and we’re having to work a lot harder for what we do have.”

At MANNA, warehouse shelves are filled with pickles and energy drinks, pretty much useless commodities for a food bank.

“You get someone who can give you 10 palettes of protein, but you have to take 20 palettes of pickles or energy drinks,” Stack said.

Walking through the warehouse Wednesday afternoon, Stack pointed out empty spaces that should be filled with cases of food and stacks and stacks of pickles and soft drinks.

“We run out of things we used to have a lot of,” said Glenda Gragg, distribution manager for the food bank. “People ask us when we’ll have something again and we don’t know.”

MANNA is joining hundreds of other food banks across the country to advocate for a stimulus package that would increase food stamps and send more government food to food banks for distribution.

“We’re trying to meet face-to-face with our legislators and advocate for help for people who are hurting in this economy,” Stack said. “The problem is on a scale in this country that nonprofits need government help to meet the need.”

Advocacy of this type is a tactic recommended by Joel Berg, the author and anti-hunger activist who was in town Tuesday to talk about ending hunger in America.

Berg called the current approach of expecting nonprofits to meet needs in the community “a return to the bucket brigades.”

“Entire communities turned out to fight a fire by handing buckets of water down the line,” Berg said. “It was satisfying work, it was hands-on, but it didn’t work. Buildings burned down because it was only getting about 60 gallons of water onto the fire.”

Modern fire-fighting equipment, purchased with public money, operated by people with expertise who are paid with tax dollars, can pour 1,000 gallons of water onto a fire, Berg said.

“Which would you rather have if it were your house?” he asked.

(Read the original article here.)

City Year/Be the Change, Inc. AYCE Book Launch in Boston 12/8/08

Joel’s beloved friends at City Year and Be the Change, Inc. hosted his Boston book launch to a sizeable crowd of locals and national service corps members.

Several notable local hunger heroes participated, including:

• Congressman Jim McGovern (D-MA), who is not only co-chair of the House Hunger Caucus, but showed an amazing fortitude for listening to Joel’s passionate, arm-waving monologues by participating in his second AYCE event; 
• Michael Brown, a national service legend, as well as CEO and co-Founder of City Year;
• Hubie Jones, Dean Emeritus of Boston University’s School of Social Work and demonstrated lover of Bob Dylan lyrics and hominy grits (the latter is according to one of numerous bios you can find online about this esteemed Boston luminary); and 
• Dr. Deborah Frank, expert on child hunger who was quoted frequently in Joel’s book and in a somewhat lesser claim to fame, is also Director of Boston Medical Center’s Grow Clinic for Children.
• Massachusetts’ Department of Transitional Assistance Commissioner Julie Kehoe also attended.

The good folks at Be the Change, Inc. (hip techno-genuises that they are) posted photos and a YouTube video of the entire event here.  You can also see photos from the event on this website, under “Photos” oddly enough.

– posted by Lori Azim

Staten Island Advance, Editorial, 12/3/2008

OUR HUNGRY HOMES

Barack Obama will be the first U.S. president to have benefited as a child from food stamps. This ought to help to focus concern on the growing crisis of hunger in America.

Nearly 12 million Americans went hungry at some point last year, including almost 700,000 children, which was an increase of more than 50 percent from the year before.

The Wall Street meltdown of 2008 is making things even worse for the poorest of the poor. With the economy plunging into recession, charitable organizations across the United States are feeling the chill, particularly food pantries.

On Staten Island, the picture is no less bleak.

“We’re in a situation where people need more food,” notes the Rev. Will Nichols of Project Hospitality about the growing impact of hard times and the rise in joblessness.

Food is a worry in more and more homes. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, 13 of 15 Island agencies responding to its survey reported an increase in clients in the past year; 11 cited a decline in government money and food.

“It is important to increase funding from government programs because the public can’t donate enough to make up for the loss,” said Rev. Nichols about what troubles non-profit groups.

Foundations that normally are the financial pillars of charities have seen their stock portfolios plummet. It’s a crisis the hungry can least afford.

“Last year, it was truly hard,” said Joel Berg, executive director of New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “We said 59 percent of the agencies in New York City didn’t have enough food to meet the growing demand. This year, it’s 69 percent.”

He said wider use of food stamps would help to reduce the strain on food banks. For the first time ever, the number of Americans on food stamps will top 30 million by the end of this year, surpassing by 2 million the high set in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina.

The reason for this is obvious. Over 12 percent of the U.S. population already lives below the official federal poverty line. The number of poor could rise to nearly 50 million before times get a lot better.

“Food bank after food bank tells me it’s new faces, people they haven’t seen before,” said Ross Fraser, spokesman for Feed America, a Chicago-based charity that coordinates corporate donations to more than 200 U.S. food banks. “They will tell you it’s the worst it’s ever been.”

He noted: “Starting about a year ago, we’ve seen a very significant spike in the demand,” adding, “It used to be the poorest of the poor who came to us for help.”

But higher food prices are affecting the working poor, he explained, “and the needle is moving up in terms of the income we’re starting to serve.”

The Capital Area Food Bank, Washington’s primary distribution center for food agencies, said calls from needy residents have jumped nearly 250 percent in the past six months. But cash donations are down about 10 percent from last fall, and contributions of food have declined 15 percent.

For his part, Mr. Obama, whose mother briefly made use of food stamps, has vowed to make them more readily available soon. So, as the year-end holidays near, remember the hungry among us. Please do what you can to ease their plight.

You can see this editorial here on the Staten Island Advance’s website.

The Buffalo News, Editorial, 11/28/2008

EASE CHILDHOOD HUNGER
Improvements in food stamp program and other efforts could boost nutrition

President-elect Barack Obama has a full agenda of economic and international policy concerns, but he must also focus attention on rising hunger in the United States. About 691,000 children went hungry sometime last year. That is a national disgrace.

The Agriculture Department presented an alarming report charting those hungry children, and highlighting the fact that close to one in eight Americans struggles for adequate food. To make matters worse, that was before the economic downturn.

As groceries and gas prices rose, so did the number of empty stomachs. Overall, 36.2 million adults and children struggled with hunger last year, which was a slight increase from 35.5 million in 2006. The problem boils down to a lack of money or assistance to get enough food, and especially to get enough nutritious food. Little, including learning, gets done on an empty stomach. Educational initiatives, vital to breaking the cycle of poverty, are harder to implement with a classroom of hungry children.

Obama pledged to expand food aid in an effort to alleviate childhood hunger by 2015, an ambitious goal. Any new initiative needs to be launched immediately, as suggested by the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger group.

The group recently called for a boost in food stamp benefits. The food stamp program is a strong one, but inadequate to provide a healthy diet for a month. As a person’s income increases, he or she receives fewer benefits. The average is $3 to $4 in food stamps a day per person. Even at the maximum, the benefit is just not enough. Particularly in big cities, it costs 25 percent to 30 percent more than food stamp benefits to purchase a minimally adequate diet.

Journalists and members of Congress who have taken the “food stamp challenge” and attempted to live on the benefit for a week have shared their experiences — the difficulties in planning, mood swings and general fatigue. Imagine a child going through the same thing, except it’s not a “challenge.” It’s a way of life.

In the context of the recession, economists from both the left and right agree that the single best stimulus is food stamps because people spend them so quickly. Extended unemployment benefits are also necessary, but food stamps tend to be more helpful than tax rebates. The Food Research and Action Center is pushing hard for a temporary boost, six to 18 months, to be put in the next stimulus package.

That’s step one. Next year, Congress is supposed to consider a periodic reauthorization of all major programs, including child nutrition programs — breakfast and lunch, summer after-school food and the WIC program for pregnant women, infants and toddlers. Included, as well, would be the program that pays for food at child care centers and family child care homes. These are several very important programs, not just to hunger alleviation but to childhood development.

Monies should be increased in these programs both to draw more children into the programs and to improve the use of healthful foods. School meals tend to be healthier than the food many children bring from home.

Moving forward, the goal is to make child nutrition programs better when Congress reconsiders them next year. The Department of Agriculture, Obama transition team and White House must start now if there is to be hope of ending childhood hunger by 2015 through further improvements in nutrition programs, a long-term increase in food stamps and jobs and income supports.

You can see this editorial here, on The Buffalo News’ website.

NYT City Room Blog: This Week, Joel Berg Taking Questions

Tags:Brooklyn, Coalition Against Hunger, Health and Hospitals, hunger, Manhattan, People & Neighborhoods, poverty, Queens, Taking Questions, Thanksgiving, The Bronx.

Thanksgiving week, Joel was asked by the New York Times City Room Blog to answer select readers’ questions about what New Yorkers can do to end hunger in the city.   Questions generally fell into the following four categories:  1) how can I volunteer or donate food?; 2) why do poor people eat so badly?; 3) come on now, is there really hunger?; and 4) readers wanting to know the extent and cost to society of hunger.  Joel found it telling that few readers asked him to write about the governmental policies that create and/or sustain hunger.

To read the Intro and comments, click here.

Read Part One of his Q & A  here.

Read Part Two of his Q&A  here.