Congress has a chance to make a difference for these families by strengthening the Food Stamp Program when it passes a new farm bill. Improving food stamps may seem like common sense, but it will cost money, and money is tight in Washington, D.C., these days. That's why we need to understand why this issue is so important.
Nearly 52,000 families in Utah, containing 65,507 children, access the Food Stamp Program. Benefits are modest, averaging only about a dollar per meal for each recipient. But for many families, food stamp benefits help make ends meet.
That's because a typical family with children on the Food Stamp Program has income of only around half of the poverty line, or $8,800 for a family of three. In roughly half of these families, at least one parent is employed, but the job doesn't pay enough for the family to live on.
Food stamps help families stretch precious dollars. They're the only way many Americans can afford to put a decent meal on the table every day.
Each year food stamps lift a million children out of poverty. They lift another million children out of what the government calls "extreme poverty," where the family's income is below half of the poverty line.
In fact, food stamps are so effective in fighting hunger and poverty that they were recently cited as a "case study" of successful government.
But despite the program's many accomplishments, millions of children live in families that have difficulty affording an adequate diet. The government has a name for this too - "food insecurity" - and it affects one out of every six American children.
Food insecurity hurts children in many ways. It is particularly harmful in early childhood, when inadequate nutrition can stunt growth and development. Infants and toddlers from food-insecure families are almost twice as likely to be in fair or poor health as other children. In older children, food insecurity can lead to poorer health, lower school achievement and emotional problems.
We can do something about this problem by strengthening food stamp benefits. Because of cuts Congress made in the Food Stamp Program in 1996, food stamps no longer keep pace with the rising cost of living. Often, families' benefits run out before the end of the month.
In July the House of Representatives passed its 2007 Farm Bill, including improvements to nutrition programs. As the Senate prepares to address the Farm Bill they should follow the leadership of the House and include these same improvements in the Senate bill.
Improvements include increasing the minimum benefit from $10 a month to $16, adjusted annually for inflation. It increases the resource limits families must meet in order to qualify for the Food Stamp Program. These resource limits, which have been frozen since 1986 at $2,000 for most households, would begin to be adjusted annually.
The House bill also includes additional funding for the Emergency Food Assistance Program, which provides support to food pantries.
The Senate should adopt these and other important improvements passed in the House version of the Farm Bill. This will help ensure that American consumers will have access to enough food, which is one of the main goals of the Farm Bill. A Farm Bill that continues farm subsidies while steadily undermining poor families' ability to buy food is not something we should support.
There's no excuse for a wealthy nation like ours to allow food stamps for needy families to continue shrinking.
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* GINA CORNIA is director of Utahns Against Hunger.
