Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Expats

In all the talk about $700 billion bail-outs, $25 billion Big Three rescues and a Dow Jones average that ended Wednesday below 8000 points for the first time in five years, other statistics have nearly vanished in the shuffle. Among them: the one-in-eight Americans who struggled to feed themselves adequately in 2007 even before the economic downturn. From 2000 to 2007, the proportion of those affected rose from 10.5% to 11.1%. That's 36.2 million people.

Other findings, as reported by the Associated Press:

• The families with the highest rates of food insecurity were headed by single mothers (30.2 percent), black households (22.2 percent), Hispanic households (20.1 percent), and households with incomes below the official poverty line (37.7 percent). • States with families reporting the highest prevalence of food insecurity during 2005-07 were Mississippi (17.4 percent), New Mexico (15 percent), Texas (14.8 percent) and Arkansas (14.4 percent). • The highest growth in food insecurity over the past nine years came in Alaska and Iowa, both of which saw a 3.7 percent increase in families who struggled to eat adequately or had substantial food disruptions.

Nationwide, children suffering from a severe disruption in how much food was available to them rose 50 percent, from 430,000 in 2006 to 691,000 in 2007, the worst year since 1998. Not Congolese fleeing the chaos of civil war. Not Dickensian orphans. Americans in the 21st Century.

These grim statistics were included Monday in an annual report on what is euphemistically called "food insecurity" by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Results for 2008 won't be available until this time next year. With the broadest measure of unemployment (called U6) up 40% since last year - we're now at 11.1% vs. last November's 7.9% - it takes no imagination to guess how much worse the situation will become.

In its State of the States: 2008: FRAC’s Profile of Food & Nutrition Programs Across the Nation released Wednesday, the advocacy group Food Research and Action Center noted the irony of so many millions unable to obtain an adequate, healthy diet:

In other words, the nation had years of economic growth concentrated on the affluent, at the end of which period several million more people lived in households struggling with hunger. For the worst-off households, the picture was even bleaker: the number of people living in households suffering from "very low food security" (until two years ago USDA called this "food insecurity with hunger") rose from 8.5 million in 2000 to 11.9 million in 2007 – a 40 percent increase in the number living in the hungriest households. The official 2008 hunger numbers from the Census Bureau and USDA won’t be released until late 2009, but every report from food stamp offices, WIC programs, school meals programs, social service agencies, religious congregations and emergency food providers portrays a rising tide of increasingly desperate need. If the recession is as long and deep as many experts predict, we are likely to see an epidemic of hunger, among children and adults alike, unlike any we have seen for decades.

Indeed, soup kitchens across the country have been reporting dwindling resources and increased need for more than two years.

It's not that there aren't programs to reduce hunger in the United States. And many of these, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (née Food Stamps), can be expanded to meet the swelling needs. But this will take a concerted effort by the federal and state governments. Believe it or not, there still are, in this day and age, quite a few politicians who will try to put up roadblocks to reducing "food insecurity."

Last month, the Obama-Biden team issued its Tackling Domestic Hunger program. One of the goals? Ending childhood hunger in the United States by 2015.

FRAC suggests:

The transition team, the new Administration and Congress need to address this goal seriously and purposefully. They need to determine the mixture of improved jobs and wages, improved income supports like refundable tax credits and more reasonably available unemployment insurance, and improved nutrition programs that will actually have the effect of eliminating childhood hunger.

Among the center's specific recommendations:

• Include a SNAP/Food Stamp benefit boost in stimulus/economic recovery legislation.

• Pass a good child nutrition reauthorization bill in 2009.

• Cities, counties and states need to use their existing options under federal rules to greatly increase participation in the nutrition programs.

Worldwide, obviously, the problem of "food insecurity" is far worse. Some estimates put the number of children who die each day from hunger at 18,000. That's an enormous problem interwoven in all manner of issues, from the production of biofuels to global warming, from family planning to patterns of land ownership, from drought to ethnic cleansing. Measured against the enormity of global hunger, America's is but a blip, imminently solvable. That there has not already been the political will to solve it borders on the criminal.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Hungry in Zimbabwe: 'If you rest, you starve'.