A Vote for the Hungry
One of Washington’s nastiest legislative deadlocks came to an end last week when Congress voted convincingly to override a presidential veto and enact the five-year funding package known as the Farm Bill.
The bill provides some $300 billion in food stamps, nutrition programs, foreign aid and conservation programs, along with perennially controversial growers’ subsidies. The bill’s passage is a victory for compassion, for fairness and most of all for the hungry. It is a credit to the lawmakers who voted for it and the armies of farmer, consumer, environmental and religious groups, including Jewish organizations, that fought so long and hard for passage.
The June 30 vote, on the very eve of Congress’s July 4 recess, followed weeks of trench warfare between the White House and Capitol Hill. The bill was initially passed in May by veto-proof majorities, but President Bush vetoed it anyway. Republican delaying tactics and bureaucratic snafus then forced the measure into a second round of congressional approval, presidential veto and congressional override. Bush and his allies claimed, improbably, that crop subsidies amounted to a waste and a giveaway to the rich.
Leaving aside the implausibility of Bush and company objecting to gifts for the wealthy, the argument just doesn’t wash. Farm subsidies are a topic of legitimate debate, but the bill just enacted is a step toward greater fairness, not away from it. Barely 12% of the total goes for subsidies. Subsidies themselves will be subject to a lower cap on income, reducing the amount that goes to big agribusiness without throwing family farms into crisis. An equal amount will support conservation and energy programs.
The rest of the five-year budget, upwards of $200 billion, will pay for food for the hungry, in the form of expanded food stamps, nutrition programs and overseas food aid. These, we suspect, were the real targets of Bush’s opposition.
The world community is currently suffering through a severe food crisis, largely as a consequence of soaring petroleum prices that drive up the cost of fuel and fertilizer. Rising food production costs are compounded by the global financial crisis, which hurt producers and consumers alike, and severe weather that is ruining crops in places like Iowa. The result is hunger on a new and unfamiliar scale, in a wired, globalized world that is capable of better.
Withholding assistance to the poor and hungry, as this administration has sought to do repeatedly over the years, is heartless. Cutting food aid at the present moment, in the midst of a worldwide food crisis, is unconscionable. For a government that claims to be motivated by biblically based religious values, it should be unthinkable. Americans, whatever their faith or income level, owe Congress a debt of gratitude for standing firm.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
