Can We Afford NOT to End Child Hunger?

Comments on fellow blogger Charlotte Hill's post about the pending bill (pdf) to reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act flagged the cost issue. The Senate Agriculture Committee, which developed the bill, authorized spending for all the programs the act covers (pdf) at $4.5 billion over 10 years.

The Committee Chairman's framework for the bill indicates that $1.2 billion of the total would be for "a path to end child hunger." This, says hunger activist Joel Berg in a new report (pdf), translates into $8 per year per child who lives in a food insecure household, i.e. a household that, at least sometimes, can't afford to buy enough of the right kinds of foods for a healthful diet. Talk about chump change!

Committee member Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has reportedly called for $40 billion a year — four times what President Obama's Fiscal Year 2011 budget requests. Berg thinks Gillibrand's figure is the minimum child nutrition programs need.

Ah yes, say those concerned about the deficit, but we need to curb federal spending. This is where Berg's report gets really interesting. Because it turns out that child hunger costs our nation more than 20 times as much as what the Senate Agriculture Committee would commit to its "path" to end it.

In 2007, a team of academics developed an estimate (pdf) of the annual cost burden of hunger in the U.S., i.e., "what it costs the American public to tolerate hunger and food insecurity."

They calculated a range of direct and indirect costs, including the costs of treating physical and mental problems linked to hunger, charitable efforts to feed the hungry in our society and lost earnings and productivity resulting from the adverse effects of hunger on children's academic performance and ultimate education level.

The total cost burden they came up with was $90.4 billion a year. This, they said, was probably on the low side. But it still translated into an average $300 per year "hunger bill" paid by every individual living in the U.S. — a lifetime "tax" of $22,000.

One of the study's authors extrapolated a child hunger cost burden for Berg. Seems that we're now paying at least $26-34 billion a year for our failure to ensure that every child is properly nourished. But, adds Berg, the figure is probably much higher due to the recession-driven increase in poverty since 2007.

This is one of many cases where we unknowingly pay for economizing on programs that address the impacts of poverty. We see others in the high costs of homelessness relative to permanent supportive housing and in the cost shift from child care to welfare that Brittany Shoot blogged about here.

The immediate solution to the child hunger cost burden is, of course, a much larger investment in child nutrition programs. But, as Berg argues, we've also got to do something about the root cause of child hunger — poverty. Otherwise, we'll just have to keep plowing more money into child nutrition programs.

Eliminating child food insecurity would itself bring down the poverty rate because well-nourished children are at a much lower risk for the developmental, health, behavioral and academic problems that entrap them in lifelong poverty.

But we also need to directly address the causes of food insecurity in their families. Top priorities here would include more and better job-related education and training, higher minimum wage rates, expanded work support programs like subsidized child care and tax credits for low-wage earners, more housing vouchers and affordable housing development and cash benefits, like TANF and SSI, that actually give recipients enough to live on.

We also should, at the very least, extend the boost in food stamp benefits that was part of the economic recovery act, as President Obama's budget proposes.

Better yet would be a substantive reform in the way benefits are calculated. The U.S. Department of Agriculture itself has found (pdf) that the current method results in consistent shortfalls — and that's for a "market basket" priced at 20 percent less than what low and moderate-income families report they spend on food.

Beyond these immediately doable measures, the thresholds for food stamp eligibility should be revised to reflect the new poverty measure that the Census Bureau plans to develop. Today, the maximum income levels for food stamps, which are based on the Bureau's measure, disqualify many families who are struggling to keep food on the table.

We don't know how many. But a USDA study (pdf) tells us that, in 2006-2007, at least 37 percent of households with food insecure children had incomes above the cutoff for food stamps. This affected not only what the children were fed at home; it also made them ineligible for free school meals.

All these measures will cost. But not nearly so much as deciding to do nothing because we think we can't afford it. Berg estimates the current total hunger burden at more than $126 billion a year. You can buy a lot of hunger prevention for that.

Photo credit: timsamoff