On the recordJune 15, 2011
This amendment reduces $100 million for Food for Peace. I don't know if the gentleman from Arizona was here last night, but there was a lot of discussion about the American image abroad. Certainly, at a time when the world economy is hurting, this Food for Peace program is exactly that. We buy American goodwill. We buy this food from American farmers. They produce it. We buy it. We ship it in American ships, and we distribute it in a food program that buys a lot of goodwill for America at a time when the conflicts of this globe are generated in cultures of poverty, where people don't have access to proper nutrition, diet. I know from being a Peace Corps volunteer that the first thing people try to do is figure out where they're going to get enough food to eat. You can't go to school with kids because you're hustling to get firewood or you're hustling to get water or you're hustling to find anything that will produce food for the day. A woman can't do any of the other things, maybe raising livestock, if she is just trying to hustle for food all-day long. I mean, it just seems to me that the most basic investment in preventing violence and war is the investment in nutrition and in trying to get fed particularly those people in the poorest sectors of the world. We've got Sub-Saharan Africa, and if people don't get fed there, you're going to have migrations of millions and millions of people, and there is going to be no place to put them.…
