June 5th, 2003 - I would like to thank you Mr. President, and especially Majority Whip McConnell and Minority Whip Reid for their very kind words. And I want to thank you, and other members of the leadership, for their unwavering support of this freshman class. I also want to recognize Senator Frist’s call for the traditional courtesies of a maiden speech to be extended to the new Senators, and express my appreciation for his commitment to the rich history of this great institution.
Tradition has held that by waiting a respectful length of time, the senior colleagues would appreciate the humility shown by a new member of the Senate, who would use the occasion to address an issue of concern.
I come in that sense today, Mr. President, to share my thoughts on a matter that weighs heavily on my mind. Hunger is the silent enemy lurking within too many American homes. It is a tragedy I have seen firsthand and far too many times throughout my life in public service.
This is not a new issue. In 1969, while I was serving as deputy assistant to the President for consumer affairs, I was privileged to assist in planning the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health. In opening the conference, President Nixon said, “Malnourishment is a national concern because we are a nation that cares about its people, how they feel, how they live. We care whether they are well and whether they are happy.” This still rings true today.
And on National Hunger Awareness Day, I want to highlight what has become a serious problem for too many families, particularly in North Carolina.
My home state is going through a painful economic transition. Once thriving textile mills have been shuttered . . . family farms are going out of business . . . tens of thousands of workers have been laid off from their jobs. Entire areas of textile and furniture manufacturing are slowly phasing out as high-tech manufacturing and service companies become the dominant industries of the state. Many of these traditional manufacturing jobs have been in rural areas, where there are fewer jobs and residents are already struggling to make ends meet.
In 1999, North Carolina had the 12th lowest unemployment rate in the United States. By December 2001, the state had fallen to 46th. That same year, according to The Rural Center, North Carolina companies announced 63,222 layoffs. Our state lost more manufacturing jobs between 1997 and the year 2000 than any state except New York.
Entire communities have been uprooted by this crisis. In the town of Spruce Pine in Mitchell County, 30 percent of the town’s residents lost their jobs in 2001. Ninety percent of those layoffs were in textile and furniture manufacturing.
These are real numbers and real lives from a state that is hurting. Our families are struggling . . . to find jobs . . . to pay their bills . . . and as we hear more and more often – to even put food on the table.
In fact, the unemployment trend that started in 1999 resulted in 11.1 percent of North Carolina families not always having enough food to meet their basic needs. That’s according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And North Carolina’s rate is higher than the national average.
Mr. President, this means that among North Carolina’s 8.2 million residents, nearly 900,000 are dealing with hunger . . . some are hungry . . . others are on the verge.
My office was blessed recently to meet a young veteran, Michael Williams, and his family. Michael served his country for 8 years in the United States Army, before leaving to work in private industry and use the computer skills he gained in the military. He was earning a good living, but after the September 11th terrorist attacks, he and his wife Gloria felt it was time to move their two children closer to family, back home to North Carolina.
But Michael found a shortage of jobs since his return. He worked with a temp agency . . . but that job ended. It has been so hard to make ends meet that the family goes to a food bank near their Clayton, North Carolina home twice a month . . . because with rent, utilities and other bills, there is little left to buy food.
Their story is not unlike so many others. Hard-working families are worrying each day about how to feed their children.
And if this weren’t enough, our food banks are having a hard time finding food to feed these families. In some instances, financial donations have dropped off or corporations have scaled back on food donations. In other cases, there are just too many people and not enough food.
At the Food Bank of the Albemarle in Northeast North Carolina, executive director Gus Smith says more people are visiting his food bank even as donations are off by 25 percent. Gus says, “We just can’t help everybody at this point and time.” To try to cope, they recently moved to a four-day work week, meaning the entire staff had to take a 20 percent pay cut just to keep the doors open.
America’s Second Harvest, a network of 216 food banks across the country, reports it saw the number of people seeking emergency hunger relief rise by 9 percent in 2001 to 23.3 million people. In any given week, it is estimated that 7 million people are served at emergency feeding sites around the country. .
These numbers are troubling indeed. No family in North Carolina or anywhere in America should have to worry about where they will find food to eat! No parent should have to tell their child, there is no money left for groceries! This is simply unacceptable! I spent most of the Congressional Easter recess going to different sites in North Carolina . . . homeless and hunger shelters . . . food distribution sites . . . soup kitchens. . . farms . . . even an office where I went through the process of applying for government assistance through the WIC program – Women Infants and Children. I was also able to meet on several occasions with a group known as the Society of St. Andrew.
This organization –like some others across the country – is doing impressive work in the area of gleaning. That’s when excess crops that would otherwise be thrown out are taken from farms, packing houses, and warehouses and distributed to the needy. Gleaning immediately brings to my mind The Book of Ruth, in the Old Testament. She gleaned in the fields so that her family could eat. You see Mr. President, in Biblical times, farmers were encouraged to leave crops in their fields for the poor and for travelers. Even as far back as in Leviticus Chapter 19, in the Old Testament, we read these words, “And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger.” So gleaning was long a custom in Biblical days . . . a command by God to help those in need.
It’s a practice we should utilize much more extensively today. It’s astounding that the most recent figures available indicate that approximately 96 billion pounds of good, nutritious food – including that at the farm and retail level – is left over or thrown away. It is estimated that only 6 percent of crops are actually gleaned in North Carolina. A tomato farmer in western North Carolina sends 20,000 pounds of tomatoes to landfills each day during harvest season.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to present an example of produce on the Senate floor. The produce can’t be sold; sometimes it’s underweight or not a perfect shape – like this sweet potato.
Other times it’s simply surplus food – more than the grocery stores can handle . . . but it’s still perfectly good to eat. Imagine the expense to that farmer in dumping 20,000 pounds of tomatoes each day during his harvest season!
And this can’t be good for the environment. In fact, food is the single largest component of our solid waste stream . . . more than yard trimmings or even newspapers! Some of it does decompose . . . but it often takes several years. Other food just sits in landfills, literally mummified. Putting this food to good use through gleaning will reduce the amount of waste going to our already overburdened landfills. And I am so appreciative of my friends at Environmental Defense for working closely with us on this issue.
Gleaning also helps the farmer because he doesn’t have to haul off or plow under crops that don’t meet exact specifications of grocery chains. And certainly it helps the hungry by giving them not just any food, but food that is both nutritious and fresh.
The Society of St. Andrew is the only comprehensive program in North Carolina that gleans available produce, then sorts, packages, processes, transports and delivers excess food to feed the hungry. In 2001, the organization gleaned 9.7 million pounds – or 29.1 million servings of food. It only costs a penny a serving to glean and deliver this food to those in need. Even more amazing, the Society of St. Andrew does all of this with a tiny staff and an amazing 9,200 volunteers.
These are the types of innovative ideas we should be exploring. I was told by the Society of St. Andrew that $100,000 would provide at least 10 million servings of food for hungry North Carolinians. I set out to raise that money for the Society in the last few weeks, and thanks to the compassion of a number of caring individuals, companies, and organizations, we were able to surpass our goal and raise more than $180,000 – enough for at least 18 million servings of food! More than ever, I believe this is a worthy effort that can be used as a model nationwide. I’m passionate about leading an effort to increase gleaning in North Carolina and across America.
The gleaning system works because of the cooperative efforts of so many groups . . . from the Society of St. Andrew and its volunteers that gather and deliver the food to the dozens of churches and humanitarian organizations that help distribute this food to the hungry.
Indeed, gleaning is, at its best, a public-private partnership. Private organizations are doing a great job with limited resources, but we must make some changes on the public side, to help them leverage their scarce dollars to feed the hungry. I have heard repeatedly that the single biggest concern for gleaners is transportation. The food is there. The issue is how to transport it in larger volume. I want to change the tax code to give transportation companies that volunteer trucks for gleaned food a tax incentive!
And there are other needed tax changes. Currently, only large publicly traded corporations can take tax credits for giving food to these gleaning programs. But it’s not just large corporations that provide this food . . . it’s the family farmers and the small businesses. Why should a farmer who gives up his perfectly good produce or the small restaurant owner who gives food to the hungry not receive the same tax benefits? The Senate has already passed legislation as part of the CARE Act that would fix this inequity. Now the House of Representatives needs to complete work on this bill!
But the answer to the hunger problem doesn’t stop with gleaning. That is just part of the overall effort. There are other ways we can help, too. This year we’ll be renewing the National School Lunch and other important child nutrition programs, and there are a number of interesting components to these programs that I am interested in reviewing.
Under School Lunch, children from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of poverty are eligible for free meals. Children from families with incomes between 130 percent and 185 percent of poverty can be charged no more than 40 cents. This may seem like a nominal amount, but for a struggling family with several children, the costs add up. School administrators in North Carolina tell me that they hear from parents in tears, because they don’t know how to pay for their child’s school meals.
The federal government now considers incomes up to 185 percent of poverty when deciding if a family is eligible for benefits under the WIC program. Shouldn’t we use the same standard for school lunch? Standardizing the guidelines would even allow us to immediately certify children from WIC families for the School Lunch program. It’s time to clarify this bureaucratic situation and harmonize our federal income assistance guidelines.
The School Lunch Program is a vital component of our commitment to child nutrition, and we must do everything to maintain and strengthen its integrity so that it works for those who need it . . . and isn’t viewed as a government giveaway!
There are a lot of interesting ideas being discussed, such as adjusting area eligibility guidelines in the Summer Food and other child nutrition programs, but these need to be looked at carefully, and we need to ask important questions, like how many people would be affected and what the costs would be? I’ve discussed many of these ideas with groups like America’s Second Harvest, Bread for the World, the Food Research and Action Center and the American School Food Service Association. I look forward to the opportunity of exploring them further during reauthorization of these important programs in the Agriculture Committee, on which I am honored to serve.
But our work cannot stop within our own borders. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says hunger affects millions worldwide. During my 8 years as president of the American Red Cross, I visited Somalia during the heart-wrenching famine.
In Baidoa, I came upon a little boy lying under a sack. I thought he was dead . . . but as his brother sat him up, I could see that he was severely malnourished. I asked for camel’s milk to feed him, and as I raised the cup to his mouth, I put my arm around his back. The feeling of the little bones almost piercing through his flesh is something I will never forget. That is when the horror of starvation becomes real – when you can touch it.
There are many things which will haunt me the rest of my life. When 1 million Rwandans fled the bloodshed in their country, they stopped at the worst possible place – on volcanic rock in Goma, Congo. They could not dig for latrines – cholera and dysentery were rampant. They couldn’t dig for graves. As I tried to help refugees, I was literally stepping over dead bodies, which were collected by the roadside and carried off, twice a day, to mass graves.
Former Senators Bob Dole and George McGovern are the architects of the Global Food Program, which has a goal of ensuring that 300 million school children overseas get at least one nutritious meal a day. The Department of Agriculture estimates that 120 million school-age children around the world are not enrolled in school, in part because of hunger or malnutrition. The majority of these children are girls. The Global Food for Education Program is now operating in 38 countries and feeding 9 million school children. I want to see this program expanded, and I plan to work on appropriations to advance that goal. Just helping a child get a good meal can make such a difference in developing countries. Feeding children entices them to come to school which allows them to learn . . . to have some hope, a future. And improved literacy helps with productivity, thereby boosting the economy.
This problem deserves national discussion. Hunger affects so many aspects of our society. In the spirit of that landmark conference held by the White House in 1969, I’m asking President Bush to convene a second White House conference so that the best and brightest minds can review these problems together.
I am honored to work with leaders in the battle to eradicate hunger . . . Former Congressman Tony Hall, now the United States Ambassador to the U.N. food and agricultural programs . . . and Former Congresswoman Eva Clayton, from my own state of North Carolina, now an assistant director-general for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. Both were champions on hunger while in Congress . . . And there are many others. . . Former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman . . .a leader on gleaning . . Catherine Bertini, Under Secretary-General of the United Nations who is praised for her leadership to get food aid to those in need throughout the world . . . Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson . . . co-chair of the Congressional Hunger Center, who carries on the legacy of her late husband Bill, who was a dear friend and a leader on this issue. And here in this body, my Chairman on the Agriculture Committee, Thad Cochran, ranking member Tom Harkin, Dick Lugar, Patrick Leahy, Pat Roberts and Gordon Smith . . . are all leaders in addressing hunger issues.
Partisan politics has no role in this fight. Hunger doesn’t differentiate between Democrats and Republicans, and just as it stretches across so many ethnicities, so many areas . . . so must we.
As Washington Post columnist David Broder wrote yesterday, “America has some problems that defy solution. This one does not. It just needs caring people and a caring government, working together.”
I get inspiration from the Bible in John Chapter 21, when Jesus asks Peter, “Do you love me?” Peter, astounded that Jesus was asking him this question again, says, “Lord, you know everything. You know that I love you.” And Jesus replies, then, “Feed my sheep.” One of North Carolina’s heroes, the Reverend Billy Graham, has often said that “We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are vessels made for sharing.” I look forward to working with Billy Graham in this effort.
Indeed, every religion, not just Christianity, calls on us to feed the hungry. Jewish tradition promises that feeding the hungry will not go unrewarded. Fasting is one of the pillars of faith, of Islam, and is a way to share the conditions of the hungry poor while purifying the spirit and humbling the flesh. Compassion or Karuna is one of the key virtues of Buddhism. So, you see, this issue, cuts across religious lines too.
Mr. President, I speak today on behalf of the millions of families who are vulnerable, who have no voice. For this little Sudanese girl . . . in this picture, stumbling toward a feeding station . . . and so many like her . . . I saw this picture in a newspaper some years ago, and it has been emblazoned on my mind ever since.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
One of my heroes is William Wilberforce, a true man of God. An old friend, John Newton, persuaded him that his political life could be used for the service of God. He worked with a dedicated group . . . they were committed people of faith, and his life and career were centered on two goals: abolishing slavery in England and improving moral values. He knew that his commitment might cost him friends and influence, but he was determined to stand for what he believed to be right. It took 21 years, and William Wilberforce sacrificed his opportunity to serve as Prime Minister – but he was the moving force in abolishing slavery and changing the moral values of England.
Mr. President, in my lifetime, I have seen Americans split the atom, abolish Jim Crow, eliminate the scourge of polio, win the Cold War, plant our flag on the surface of the moon, map the human genetic code and belatedly recognize the talents of women, minorities, the disabled and others once relegated to the shadows.
Already, a large group of citizens have joined what I believe will become an army of volunteers and advocates. Today, I invite all of my colleagues to join me in this endeavor . . . let us recommit ourselves to the goal of eradicating hunger. Committed individuals can make a world of difference . . . even, I might say, a different world.
Mr. President, I ask consent that my letter to President Bush be included in the record at this point.
I yield the floor.
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