Jim McGovern

We ought to be increasing the benefit.

The hard reality is that obesity and hunger are often two sides of the same coin.

I think we also have to be looking at food security at the domestic level as a national security issue.

I visited a pilot program in Colombia several years ago when Ambassador Patterson was the ambassador.

This whole topic of how agriculture relates to our national security is important because usually when we talk about national security, we usually only talk about the military relationship to it.

I am interested, ultimately, in developing a strategy to end global hunger, not just to manage it or contain it or limit it, but to actually end it.

I support our investment in all of you, and it is important that we brag about it a little bit more.

I am confident that America's outstanding academic and research institutions can made a vital contribution in the years ahead.

But there is a lot of talk in this Committee and in Congress about the need for more flexibility when it comes to SNAP. And I always worry that flexibility is a code word for block grants. That would be a terrible mistake and would lead to…

I appreciate the innovation as well as the willingness to make the necessary adjustments to make the program as effective as it possibly can be.

I am a big fan of the McGovern-Dole Program, which has been in operation now for slightly over a decade.

It is one of the great success stories in our foreign aid programs, especially with regard to food assistance, and we ought to do more of it.

I am all for flexibility, as long as it is not code for cutting the program, or eliminating the benefit.

If flexibility means block granting this program and limiting the amount of resources to go to help feed hungry people... I have a problem with that.

We need White House leadership to convene all the agencies and the departments together.

We should all be ashamed that there are so many people, of all ages, in our country--the richest country in the history of the world--that are hungry.

I thank the Ranking Member for yielding me the time.

Promoting Food Security for All Children

Hunger is essentially a political condition because we know what we need to do to solve it, but we, for whatever reason, don't muster the political will to do it.

We need to make sure that SNAP works and provides a benefit that is adequate to feed children and to feed families.

I think every single person in this Congress should be ashamed of that fact.

This is a program to make sure people do not go hungry in this country, and the benefit is inadequate.

We need to get this right. We need to do this better.

Well, thank you very much. And I want to thank the witnesses for being here.

But the problem is there are a lot of Members of Congress who are instinctively against SNAP because they think it creates dependency, when the evidence is the opposite.