Page 72 - Farm Bill Series_The 7 Things You Should Know

Supporters of food stamps, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP), are worried that the House and Senate Budget Committees will propose a new round of
cuts in farm bill spending, including nutrition. And House Speaker Paul Ryan, a longtime
advocate for reducing the federal deficit by block-granting SNAP, has proposed a sweeping
overhaul of all federal welfare programs.

At the same time, conservative groups led by the Heritage Foundation and its advocacy arm,
Heritage Action, are pushing Congress to strip the nutrition title from the farm bill on the theory
that it will finally be easier to slash both farm programs and SNAP.

“If they split the nutrition title from the farm bill, I’m willing to bet my house that there
will be no farm bill,” said Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the
House Agriculture’s subcommittee on nutrition.
House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas, has been warning agribusiness groups
that he expects SNAP to get caught up in a new welfare reform effort Ryan plans for next year,
even as lawmakers try to write a new farm bill. The 2014 farm bill expires in the fall of 2018.
What that means for the farm bill is not clear. Conaway says he isn’t sure whether that welfare
reform plan will be relatively narrow in focus, unlike what eventually passed in 1996.

Meanwhile, in a new attempt by the farm-food coalition to flex its muscles, more than 500
national, state and local farm, conservation and nutrition organizations signed a Feb. 21
letter urging the House and Senate budget committees not to propose cuts in any farm bill
programs, including SNAP.

“With the agriculture and rural economy struggling, and households across the country
struggling to meet their basic needs for nutrition, and farm income down 46 percent from
only three years ago, it would be perilous to hinder development and passage of the 2018
farm bill with further cuts,” the letter says.

Unlikely partners and a common goal: Put ‘an end to hunger’
SNAP has its roots in the Depression. Under Franklin Roosevelt’s first agriculture secretary,
Henry Wallace, USDA allowed needy people to buy two types of stamps for about four years.
Orange stamps, like today’s SNAP benefits, could be used to buy any type of food. For every $1
worth of orange stamps that were purchased, people also received 50 cents worth of blue stamps,
which would be used to purchase food that the department deemed to be in surplus. At its peak
the program served 4 million people at a time.

In the 1960s, with Democrats back in the White House, President John F. Kennedy created a
pilot food stamp program that would expand to 40 counties and the cities of Detroit, St. Louis
and Pittsburgh. After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson asked Congress to
write the program into law in 1964. By the early 1970s, it had become a national program but not
every county offered the benefits. And in many places, food assistance was supplied through
commodities, rather than food stamps, which allowed recipients to buy any food they wanted.

By that point, hunger had become a national political issue, thanks in part to a stunning CBS
documentary in 1968, Hunger in America, which opened with a baby boy who was dying of
starvation. “He was an American,” intoned host Charles Kuralt. “Now, he’s dead.” A year

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