For the Poor: More Hunger

For middle-class families, food-price inflation means discomfort; for the American poor, it can mean outright hunger. Spending up to 60% of their income on food, the poor consume the most basic of diets and cannot "spend down" by substituting cheaper items when the cost of their regular diet goes up. Worse, the foodstuffs that they eat much of, such as rice, flour and dried beans, have risen even faster in price than meat and butter, which the middle class eats more of. The price of dried beans, for example, has leaped an astounding 256% since December 1970, while rice has jumped 124%. As a result, the nation's needy are hungrier now than they were four years ago, despite the billions of dollars poured into federal food programs.

That was the most sobering conclusion after three days of hearings held last week by the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The committee five months ago asked Harvard's Jean Mayer to assemble a group of leading nutritionists and other experts to study thoroughly domestic and global food problems. Mayer's group of roughly 100 reported last week at unusual hearings split into two panels: one group of Senators, headed by Committee Chairman George McGovern, heard the international report; another group, led by Democrat Walter Mondale of Minnesota, listened to the domestic report.

In the U.S., one panel asserted, the Government's food-stamp program to feed the needy has failed so badly that "no amount of revision can ever enable it to solve the problem." Inadequate assistance payments and poor administration are major troubles. Many poor people do not know that they can get the stamps; in fact, only 35.7% of the 37 million Americans eligible for the stamps now receive them. Many of the poor who do not get them have been reduced to buying pet food as a source of protein.

The Mayer group recommended that the U.S. establish a minimum-income floor for all families--an idea that McGovern failed to sell in the 1972 presidential campaign.

The foreign report was even worse. Population growth, compounded by serious droughts in Africa and Asia, has literally eaten up all the increased food output achieved by poor nations over the past decade, leaving their citizens as ill fed as ever, the experts found. To bridge the gap, McGovern recommended that the U.S. set up a $20 billion "Plowshares for Peace" program that would build stockpiles of food for needy nations to draw on. That is another idea that seems unlikely to be adopted: Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, who will present the Nixon Administration's proposals for solving world food problems to an international conference in Rome in November, has already turned thumbs down.

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