What You Need to Know About Biden's Hunger Conference
More than four in 10 American have high blood pressure, which is directly correlated to the leading causes of death for Americans: heart disease and stroke. That’s according to new research from National Center for Health Statistics.
To reduce such diet-related diseases and end hunger by 2030, President Biden on Tuesday announced a 44-page package, National Strategy on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, that will focus on five primary pillars:
1. Improve food access and affordability
2. Integrate nutrition and health
3. Empower all consumers to make and have access to healthy choices
4. Support physical activity for all
5. Enhance nutrition and food security research
Speaking on the plan at a hunger conference on Wednesday, Biden outlined the details of the strategy.
Nationwide Free Lunch
Biden wants to lower income thresholds to make nine million more children in high-poverty communities eligible for free school meals, a measure Biden called “a major first step toward free meals for each student.”
A pandemic-era program that provided free breakfast and lunch to all schoolchildren expired this school year. Republicans voted against Democratic efforts to include universal free school meals in this week’s stopgap government funding bill and have expressed skepticism about other programs to expand free school meals.
The President also urged making permanent the Summer EBT program, which gives low-income families money to buy groceries during the summer when children don’t have access to school meals.
Opportunities for More Food & Nutrition Funding Ahead
Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Ct.) pointed out two upcoming opportunities to improve food and nutrition policy — the farm bill reauthorization and the annual appropriations process.
Republicans will inevitably propose cuts to SNAP in the 2023 farm bill, as they did in the 2014 and 2018 bills, said Stabenow.
“I say, we’re not going to cut food stamps,” said Stabenow. “We need your help, because No. 1 is to not go backwards on public nutrition.”
But not losing ground isn’t enough, she said, “we have to build and build and build.”
“The farm bill is every five years. Friends, appropriations is every single year,” added DeLauro.
She urged Biden to put the Child Tax Credit expansion in the 2024 budget “so that we can deal with it and move on.”
Another $8 Billion
Officials announced they had secured $8 billion in commitments from public and private entities toward helping provide more food and better nutrition in coming years. The commitments underscore the Biden administration’s reliance on the private sector to meet its goals of ending hunger by 2030 and prompting healthier eating habits.
Efforts were launched to make healthy food more affordable and accessible, provide more options for physical activity, and bolster research on food and nutrition.
Worker Rights
Fair wages, collective bargaining rights. Biden reiterated his support for fair wages and collective bargaining rights for the workers who “grow, produce, and process our food.” As part of its anti-hunger strategy, the administration proposed raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the House Rules Committee chair who spearheaded the effort for the conference, praised the Biden administration for making hunger and nutrition a national priority. But he also acknowledged that the conference was only a beginning
“We need to leave here with an assignment for tomorrow. And for next week and the week after that," said McGovern. "This is an opportunity. We can’t blow it.”
He called for a bipartisan effort to “make history” and “transform this country where 35 million people don’t know where their next meal is going to come from into a country where hunger is illegal or doesn’t exist at all.”
Hunger Strategy Opposition
Some Republicans criticized the confab. Rep. GT Thompson (R-Pa.), Republican leader of the House Ag Committee, called it “nothing more than a political stunt.”
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), senior Republican on the House Education Committee, which oversees child nutrition, said the administration had prioritized liberal activist groups instead of a diverse range of stakeholders to “set up this conference to be forgotten before it even started.”
More information about the strategy will likely be announced in coming months.
Additional articles on the strategy:
How Biden’s 5 Pillars of Hunger Strategy Will Show Up on Your Operation
Want To End Hunger? Animal Protein May Be the Answer
