Shocking report documents extent of hunger in America

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legislators don't think the bill is harsh enough! Woody Jenkins (D-Baton Rouge)

resolution to suspend the SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1991 Twenty-five years after President Lyndon Baines Johnson kicked-off the so-called "war on poverty," more people than ever are living in hunger.

"In a nation whose wealth and resources are the envy of the world, literally millions of children do not get enough to eat on a regular basis." This is the finding of the Community Childhood Hunger Identification Project (CCHIP)-called the most rigorous and comprehensive study of childhood hunger ever conducted in the United States.

The $1 million study, conducted by a private organization, the Washington, D.C.-based Food Research and Action Center, concludes that 28 percent of families with children under the age of 12 in the U.S. are either going hungry or at substantial risk of hunger.

The fact that people go hungry in this country may not be shocking to many, especially when we see people living in the streets of all our major cities. But the extent of hunger amidst plenty, and the refusal of those who control the resources to eliminate it, are shocking.

In 1984, the President's Task Force on Food Assistance concluded that it could not "report definitive evidence on the extent of hunger" because an "acceptable" measure had not yet been developed. For the purpose of the CCHIP study, however, hunger is defined as "the mental and physical condition arising from not eating enough food due to insufficient economic, family, or community resources."

The study was conducted over an 18month period from February 1989 to August 1990 by surveys in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, Michigan and New York. A total of 2335 families were surveyed.

Eight key questions were asked, and an affirmative answer to five or more classified a family as "hungry."

Many families answered "yes" to questions like, "Do any of your children ever go to bed hungry because there is not enough money to buy food?" or "Do members of your household ever cut the size of meals or skip meals because there is not enough money for food?"

Children suffer most

According to the study, an estimated 5.5 million children under the age of 12 are hungry. This means that one out of every ...Louisiana (continued from page 1: “Louisiana anti-abortion law denies women right to choose”)

10 years in prison. There are no penalties against women seeking abortions.

Gov. Roemer-an antichoice Republican-vetoed the bill because its exceptions were not broad enough. But other Louisiana legislators don't think the bill is harsh enough! Woody Jenkins (D-Baton Rouge) plans to introduce a resolution to suspend the exemptions for rape and incest victims. Jenkins expressed concern that women may falsely report rape and incest in order to obtain abortions for unwanted pregnancies.

The law will not take effect until sometime in August, pending a hearing in federal court on July 23 on its constitutionality. Whatever the outcome of that hearing, the bill is already in the pipeline to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Louisiana bill is the latest result of the Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which allowed states to place restrictions on women's right to choose abortion. So far, Pennsylvania, Guam, and Utah have eight children under the age of 12 living in the U.S. is going hungry. An additional six million children live in homes experiencing food shortages. With these children taken into account, one out of every four American children is likely to experience "going hungry" at some time in their childhood.

Hunger is causing children to suffer from health problems including weight loss, fatigue, irritability, headaches, dizziness, and inability to concentrate. Lack of food makes children more likely to suffer from infection-based illnesses, such as colds and ear infections. As a result, hungry children miss twice as much school as other children. According to CCHIP, just receiving breakfast at school decreases children's absences.

Although unemployed households are more than one and one-half times as likely to be hungry as employed households, many working families (even those with a member employed full time) cannot escape hunger.

The cost of shelter dominates the budgets of most low-income families. Participants in the CCHIP study spent an average of 54 percent of their gross monthly income on passed antichoice bills. The Louisiana bill-by far the most restrictive-was specifically designed to be a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.

Test case for abortion rights Unlike the other states' measures, the Louisiana bill is seen by experts on both sides of the abortion debate as the test case for women's constitutional right to aborhousing costs. The poorer the family, the greater the proportion of income that is spent on shelter.

The poorest households spent over 60 percent of their income on shelter, while the median-income American household spent 22 percent of its income on housing in 1987.

While hungry households spent nearly a third of their gross income on food, they were able to spend an average of only 68 cents per person per meal [!]."

After paying for food and shelter, poor families were left with an average of only $39 per person to cover all their other monthly expenses, such as transportation, shoes and clothing, medical costs, phone bills and other basic needs.

Profits before human needs Despite federal programs to help address hunger, such as the Food Stamp Program; the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Program; and the Child and Adult Care Food Program, children continue to go hungry.

In fact, the hungry families surveyed tion.

For instance, the Pennsylvania law deals primarily with procedural obstacles to abortion, such as spousal notification, 24-hour waiting periods, and counseling about fetal development. The Supreme Court could rule narrowly on these provisions and sidestep the issue of whether the right to abortion is protected by the constitution.

However, given the broad restrictions to receive Food Stamp benefits. Many hungry families surveyed were not receiving benefits, often because they didn't believe they were eligible or they felt it was too humiliating to apply. The WIC program serves only half of those eligible for benefits.

The Thrifty Food Plan, a list of foods developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as the lowest-cost grocery list meeting minimum nutritional requirements, is used to determine Food Stamp Program benefits. The average allotment per qualified household is $182 worth of benefits per month. Yet according to CCHIP, the average poor family was able to afford only 77 percent of the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan on food, even using food stamps and other benefits.

Obviously, federal government standards of poverty are far below people's basic needs. In Pontiac, Mich., for example, CCHIP estimates that all families would have to have incomes of at least twice the poverty level to ensure 95 percent of the household would no longer be classified as hungry.

What is the solution?

The CCHIP study calls the extent of hunger in the United States a "national shame."-a shame because, in a society with no scarcity of food and no lack of resources to provide nourishment for its members, millions of children go hungry.

The CCHIP report is limited to citing poverty and insufficient social programs as the reason hunger exists. It doesn't approach the underlying private profit system—the logic of which determines that people will go hungry while fields lay fallow and surplus food goes to waste.

The CCHIP study concludes: "The long term solution lies in quality education and training, jobs with living wages, affordable and available housing, childcare and healthcare, and adequate income support for those who need it." These are fine goals, but in truth an even more far-reaching solution is necessary.

Hunger is the result of the anarchic production of food for profit rather than to satisfy the most basic human needs.

Conscious intervention and cooperation would begin with the nutritional needs of all the people and translate them into a comprehensive agricultural plan, instead of the cruel chaos of the free market. Prices of staples could be fixed and their production subsidized to guarantee them to all.

If the majority of people, the workers and farmers, were in control of the government and production, there would be no hunger. Food production would be socially planned and based on human needs. Working for these changes is part of the struggle for socialism.

contained in the Louisiana bill, it will be impossible for the Court to rule on the bill without taking a stand on abortion itself. The Court must decide whether the state has a compelling interest to protect the fetus, or whether abortion is a fundamental constitutional right.

In the meantime, however, the law has already devastated women's lives. A family planning clinic in Shreveport, La., closed immediately after the override vote and sent home women scheduled to receive abortions. After clarification about when the law takes effect, the clinic opened for business the next day, but confusion and frustration continued.

"We actually had one patient in tears asking us how she could abort herself," said Esther McGuire, director of the Delta Women's Clinic in Baton Rouge. "That is what this law is all about, intimidating women and driving them to unsafe actions."

The immediate response from pro-choice advocates has been outrage mixed with pessimism. Nancy Strossen, president of the American Civil Liberties Union, predicts Roe v. Wade eventually will be overturned.

"I think it has, in practical effect, been overturned for poor women, women of color and young women," Strossen said. •

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the restoration independent Polish state.

Kowalewski wrote : "No one thought it appropriate to point out that this so-called Third Republic was based on false credentals, not on the force of a decision made in free elections for a Constituent Assembly. It appeared rather in the form of a National Assembly, the majority of whose members do not sit there in accordance with the will of the society, but only on the basis of a deal established by the Magdalenka Pact [an agreement between Solidarnosc and the Stalinist military junta of General Jaruzelski].

"There was an attempt to cover this up by organizing a big ceremony in which Walesa assumed the symbols of the presidents of the [interwar] Second Republic, which it should be remembered was established by a Constituent Assembly. ... The proclamation of the Third Republic, in violation of all principles of the constitutional democratic process, is a bad omen for Polish democracy."

Kowalewski pointed to the failure of the supposedly democratic governments to rep-

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... other Louisiana plans to introduce a ns for rape and incest victims