27 February 2004	Friday	06 Muharram 1425

WASHINGTON: It's difficult to pin down the exact numbers, but most nutrition experts agree that on any one day, about 13 million children go hungry across the United States. For older children, the situation improves during the school year when many receive free or reduced-price lunches.

But when the schools close, like they did in the Washington region and up and down the East Coast recently because of heavy snow, these children - instead of cheering over the free day off - must put up with emptier stomachs than usual, child advocates say.

Even more worrisome to people who help feed such children are the long summer months of school vacation. "The food banks see an increase of families with children during the summer months," Lynn Parker, director of nutrition policy at the Food Research and Action Centre in Washington said in an interview.

A massive private effort by humanitarian and religious organizations across the country feeds about 23 million people a year, including 9 million children, many from an ever growing category of people in the United States called the working poor. Second Harvest, which coordinates the programmes, says that's a 9 per cent increase since 1997.

Other groups, like the US Conference of Mayors, report a 17 per cent increase in just one year in requests for emergency food assistance. Whatever the figures, the federal government takes up much of the slack by supporting free and reduced price school breakfasts and lunches at schools. And critics say it's just not enough.

President George W. Bush's proposed budget for 2005 raises the amount slightly to 12 billion dollars for 29 million children in the school programmes. But child advocates, while admitting the budget cuts do not undercut current food programmes, say the figure fails to provide better nutrition in the form of fruits and vegetables instead of traditional high starch diets consumed by the less affluent.

"Cafeterias would be able to buy fresh vegetables and fruits instead of having to serve cheap but empty-calorie food like macaroni and cheese," said Erik Peterson, spokesman for the American School Food Service Association.

Other child advocates say Bush's proposed 12 billion dollars will not accommodate the rising need stemming from unemployment and economic recession in the past years, or to cover the rising food need for children during the summer months.

"There hasn't been such a demand since 1998 because families are struggling to find jobs and the recession hasn't been taken into account," said Deborah Ortiz, director of family income at the Children's Defence Fund. "We are very disappointed with the President's budget plan."

"He's talking about a funding increase for going to the moon (and Mars)," she added. A stronger federal budget for food for children would help diversify their diets and provide more vegetables and fruit and other healthy foods, Ortiz said.

But political conservatives disagree. They say that the nutritional programmes are not necessary. "Child hunger is not nearly as bad as the Washington food advocacy groups make it out to be," said Kirk Johnson, welfare research analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "Anyone who says there are more than 1 million children hungry in the US, their numbers are not accurate."

He points to the fact that instead of going hungry, about 15.3 per cent of US children are considered obese. "Statistics show that poor people are even more likely to be overweight," he said.

His statements reflect a popular attitude that poor people on the welfare dole, including the many adults who receive food stamps, abuse the system and perhaps even overeat because of it.

However, food advocate groups say recent research shows that often, hunger is the cause of obesity. "If people are hungry, they will eat high fat food to fill them up," said J. Larry Brown, director of the Center on Hunger and Poverty. Especially in the United States, fatty fast foods like hamburgers and French Fries are cheaper and more accessible than fresh fruit and vegetables.

That is a fact that the Heritage Foundation's Johnson found hard to believe. "It's a preference issue, not a money problem. You can get the salad. The question is, would you rather have the salad or the hamburger? I would rather have the hamburger," he said.

Another fact cited by critics of public nutrition programmes as proof of the affluence of food aid recipients is the more than 75 per cent of American households defined as "poor" by the US Census Bureau that own a car.

But to Brown, director of the Centre on Hunger and Poverty, driving in one's own car to the food bank to pick up dinner for the kids is not a contradictory image.

"Hungry people in the United States don't look like hungry people in Africa," said Brown. As members of the growing "working poor", they often own cars and hold jobs - but don't earn enough to buy food after paying rent and other expenses.

Carolyn Genia is one such person. In her hometown of Logan, Ohio, she earns 6.5 dollars an hour, more than 2 dollars above minimum wage. But the mother of two says there are days she struggles to feed her children.

"There are times my children would go hungry if it wasn't for the local food pantry," she wrote in one of the many "Hunger Stories" Americans regularly post on the website of the hunger relief organization Second Harvest.

Brown said the country would need to spend about 90 billion dollars a year to end hunger in the US. "That's not going to happen in the current political limate," he said. -dpa