Bill helps families cope with rising food prices

As the country faces rising food costs, families struggle just to keep up and food banks can hardly handle the demand. Today, more than 35 million Americans live in households where not everyone has had enough to eat.

With this year’s farm bill, we are finally taking the right steps to provide people with a fighting chance.

We have come a long way since 2002. Change is not easy in Washington, but this bill represents the beginning — a commitment to increase tangible benefits for more than 10 million people, including families with seniors, and people with disabilities.

We are taking the right steps to finally end years of erosion in food stamp benefits and provide people with a fighting chance: increasing the standard amount families can deduct from $134 to $144 when determining their benefits, then indexing it to inflation; and increasing the minimum monthly benefit to $14 from $10, where it has been frozen for the past 30 years, then indexing it to inflation as well.

We also removed the cap on childcare expenses that can be considered when determining a family’s benefits.

Now, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a mother of three who works 35 hours a week at $9 an hour and pays $350 a month for childcare for a preschool-aged child would receive an additional $79 in food stamps each month or almost $1,000 more over the course of a year. We have a responsibility to help families already squeezed by rising food, healthcare, education, housing and fuel costs.

It is also about recognizing the undeniable early negative impact on children who lack access to nutritionally adequate foods. During last year’s Congressional Summit on America’s Children, we heard from Dr. Deborah Frank, director of the Grow Clinic for Children and an expert on nutrition and food security, who discussed our current policies’ impact on communities large and small across America. Infants and toddlers in homes without regular access to nutritional food are 30 percent more likely to have a history of hospitalizations and 90 percent more likely to be in fair or poor health. In the three states where infant mortality actually increased from 2004 to 2005, food insecurity went up as well.

These statistics are daunting. Yet, of all the many factors that jeopardize children’s development, food insecurity is also one of the most easily remedied. Increased benefits and broadened eligibility for programs such as food stamps can clearly decrease developmental risk for young children from low-income families, enabling them to enter school and succeed in adulthood just like their more financially secure classmates — on time and on track for a brighter future.

Nowhere is this more clear than in rural America — where problems like poverty and access to healthcare are particularly acute — where quality infrastructure and quality education are often harder to find — and where all of these challenges reinforce one another, threatening the next generation and making genuine change harder to achieve.

We have an obligation to step up to improve the health, well-being and nutrition of all communities — and to use our agricultural policy as a valuable tool to put working and middle-class families center-stage.

That is also why we have made a historic commitment to specialty crops — the fruits and vegetables we grow in my part of the country and which are so crucial to families’ healthy diets. That includes funding for the Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Snack program, which Congress created in 2002 to allow schools to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers and provide them as healthy snacks for kids during the school day.

At a time when teenage obesity rates have tripled in the last 20 years, it is so important to get kids started down the right path when it comes to nutrition. The Fresh Fruit & Vegetable Snack program helps students make better choices so that they grow up to be healthy adults. It gives our schools the tools and resources they need to teach kids how to make those choices. And it helps provide a more secure economic future for our farmers.

These are the same principles that guided my work last year as chairwoman of the Appropriations Agriculture subcommittee. And they will drive our work in the months ahead as well, crafting a back-to-basics budget that recognizes our responsibility to fight hunger and meet the nutritional needs of all Americans.

For too long, we have failed to meet our obligations as a Congress and a nation — failed to act while too many Americans have gone without adequate, healthy food. Today, we can begin to do something about it.

DeLauro is a member of the House Appropriations Committee.