A road map for eradicating world hunger, By Beth Gardiner, June 24, 2015, New York Times: “A lot has changed in Ethiopia since hundreds of thousands of people died in the famine of the mid-1980s. Rates of undernourishment have plummeted in the past 25 years, child mortality is down by two-thirds and 90 percent of children go to primary school. Now, the country whose name was once a byword for hunger is part of a global effort to end it entirely. Around the world, nations as varied as Brazil, Cambodia, Iran and the Philippines have reported progress toward the goals of the Zero Hunger Challenge, a campaign that the United Nations began in 2012. The campaign’s ambitious target of eradicating hunger, experts say, helps lend structure and clarity to efforts to ensure that even the very poorest have enough to eat and to make food systems more resilient in the face of climate change, droughts, floods and other pressures…”
Tag: Agriculture
The Farm Bill and SNAP
- House approves farm bill, without food stamp program, By Jonathan Weisman and Ron Nixon, July 11, 2013, New York Times: “Republicans muscled a pared-back agriculture bill through the House on Thursday, stripping out the food stamp program to satisfy recalcitrant conservatives but losing what little Democratic support the bill had when it failed last month. It was the first time food stamps had not been a part of the farm bill since 1973. The 216-to-208 vote saved House Republican leaders from an embarrassing reprisal of the unexpected defeat of a broader version of the bill in June, but the future of agriculture policy remains uncertain. The food stamp program, formally called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, was 80 percent of the original bill’s cost, and it remains the centerpiece of the Senate’s bipartisan farm bill…”
- As numbers increase, a battle over food stamps, By Sharyn Jackson, July 11, 2013, Des Moines Register: “After long days as a Wal-Mart employee, a nursing student at DMACC and single mother of five, Susanna Harrison spends her nights juggling numbers. After using most of her minimum-wage salary to cover rent and medicine for her kids, she’s left stretching food stamps to feed her children. She looks for sales and chooses items that she knows will last longest. ‘It’s a lot of late nights,’ said Harrison, 31. ‘Between the kids and schoolwork and work and trying to fit in setting down a budget, this is what I have to play with at the grocery store.’ Harrison is one of the more than 400,000 Iowans on food stamps, today known as food assistance, delivered via a debit-card-like system. The federal program distributes close to $75 billion to more than 46 million Americans, half of whom are children…”
The Farm Bill and SNAP
House defeats a farm bill with big food stamp cuts, By Ron Nixon, June 20, 2013, New York Times: “Opposition by Democrats to huge cuts in the food stamp program helped lead to the defeat of the House farm bill on Thursday, raising questions about financing for the nation’s farm and nutrition programs this year. The vote, which was 234 to 195 to defeat it, came a year after House leaders refused to bring the five-year, $940 billion measure to the floor because conservative lawmakers who wanted deeper cuts in the food stamp program would not support it…”