Press Releases

Wednesday July 10, 2013

U.S. Representative James P. McGovern
Statement on rural hunger
 

July 10, 2013

M. Speaker,

Nearly every week that this House has been in session this year, I’ve come to the floor to talk about the need to End Hunger Now. Fourteen speeches later, I still hear from people who doubt that hunger is a problem in the 21^st century in the richest, most prosperous nation in the world.

Well, M. Speaker, I hope anyone who doubts that we have a hunger problem in America has a chance to read the article by Eli Saslow in Sunday’s Washington Post titled “In rural Tennessee, a new way to help hungry children: A bus turned bread truck.”

It’s a heart wrenching story of hunger – where children of all ages have trouble getting enough food in the summer months in rural Tennessee. It breaks your heart.

The article may focus on a small area in rural Tennessee, but it really tells the story about the 50 million hungry Americans in this country and, more specifically, the 17 million kids who are hungry in this country.

And the blame shouldn’t be cast on these poor Americans who are doing their best to make ends meet. Consider the Laghren family, portrayed in this article. Jennifer, a mother of five, works full time as a cook at a nursing home. Yet her kids don’t have enough to eat because Jennifer only makes $8 an hour. SNAP helps during the school year when the kids get to eat two meals a day at school – combined these five kids, ranging from 14 years old to 9 months old, ate a total of 40 free meals and snacks at school a week – but there’s very little help during the summer months when school is out of session. While the $593 food stamp allotment lasted throughout the month during the school year, Jennifer only had $73 in food stamps left with 17 days to go in the month she was interviewed for the article. And if that weren’t enough to convince people about this ugly side of hunger, consider this heartbreaking paragraph from the article:

“Desperation had become their permanent state, defining each of their lives in different ways. For Courtney, it meant she had stayed rail thin, with hand-me-down jeans that fell low on her hips. For Taylor, 14,  it meant stockpiling calories whenever food was available, ingesting enough processed sugar and salt to bring on a doctor’s lecture about obesity and early-onset diabetes, the most common risks of a food-stamp diet. For Anthony, 9, it meant moving out of the trailer and usually living at his grandparents’ farm. For Hannah, 7, it meant her report card had been sent home with a handwritten note of the teacher’s concerns, one of which read: ‘Easily distracted by other people eating,’ For Sarah, the 9-month old baby, it meant sometimes being fed Mountain Dew out of the can after she finished her formula, a dose of caffeine that kept her up at night.”

This is all taking place in rural Tennessee. That’s right, M. Speaker, hunger doesn’t just exist in urban areas. According to USDA statistics, rural areas are poorer than urban areas. And according to the latest USDA data, households in rural areas were more likely to be food insecure. While 14.9% of all households were food insecure in 2011, 15.4 % of households in rural areas were food insecure.

And let’s look at the SNAP statistics. While 16 percent of all Americans live in nonmetropolitan areas, 21 percent of SNAP beneficiaries live there. 10 percent of the rural population relies on SNAP, compared to 7 percent of the urban population. Children under 18 make up 25 percent of the rural population, but they are 40 percent of the rural population using SNAP.

These statistics show empirically that hunger is a problem in rural America. Sunday’s article paints a terrible and disturbing picture about hunger in rural America. Together, they show why we must commit ourselves to End Hunger Now.

That’s why it is so disturbing to me that so many of my Republican friends seem hell-bent on cutting huge amounts from the SNAP program – literally throwing millions of Americans off the program. It shows a stunning ignorance of current reality and it shows a callousness that, quite frankly, is beneath this institution. I urge all my colleagues – Democrats and Republicans – to reject any assault on SNAP.

M. Speaker, we have an opportunity to End Hunger Now but we must take it. We need leadership – White House leadership – to get this done. We need the White House to host a Conference on Food and Nutrition. We need the President to bring the best and brightest minds from every corner of this nation together, lock everyone in a room and direct them to come up with a plan. It’s not hard, but we need to find the political will to End Hunger Now. This issue needs to be more of a priority.

I yield back the balance of my time.