More Non-Help for Africa, Courtesy of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee

by: Jill Richardson

Tue Mar 24, 2009 at 11:16:30 AM PDT

The Senate Foreign Relations committee held an absolutely heinous hearing on global hunger today. It was very specifically focused on hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Here are the true things they said (most of the rest after this is B.S.):

There are 800mil to 1bil hungry people in the world and 2/3 of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa and S. Asia.
The world's population is growing
Many of the hungry are farmers in Africa, many of whom are women, uneducated, and powerless.
Farmers in Africa lack water for irrigation, petroleum-based fertilizer, GMO or hybrid seeds, pesticides, electricity, and any machinery whatsoever. 70% also live more than 30 minutes walking distance from the nearest road, effectively cutting them off from any markets.
Global hunger is not just a moral issue, it's also a national security risk.
White House leadership will be critical in any effort fighting global hunger.

After that, we started to get into chemical-ag-public-relationsland. More below the flip.

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Hunger News & Legislation Update

Child nutrition is in the news - both because of the bad economy and because of the upcoming child nutrition reauthorization. I wrote about the hunger lobby's priorities for the upcoming reauthorization bill yesterday. Today I'd like to focus on the D.C. angle of the story.

First up - A bipartisan group of 40 Senators led by Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Dick Lugar (R-IN) sent a letter to Obama about child nutrition (the full text is at the link). They asked for:

"Efforts to increase participation by needy children in child nutrition programs." In other words, make sure the programs we already have reach ALL the hungry kids who need them.
Make sure we get food to kids in all settings where they need it - vacations from school, preschools, after school, etc.
Combatting childhood obesity. Extra funding targeted to healthier diets for kids.
Modernization and overall increased efficiency of federal programs. That means allowing people to apply for things online (not just on paper), and "cross program certification" (i.e. if you qualify for one program, you are automatically qualified for other programs - that way you don't need to apply individually for each).

More below, about the Senators' letter and upcoming legislation:

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