Editorial: The food safety net would grow a bit stronger

One recent night, a woman with two children in tow approached shoppers in the parking lot of Sacramento's Arden Fair Mall and begged for money. She said they needed it to buy food.

Elsewhere, an elderly homeless man standing on a traffic island in the middle of Folsom Boulevard begged for money, too, "to buy something to eat."

According to officials at the Sacramento Food Bank, fully one half of the 15,000 people who eat the groceries handed out at their agency's food closets every month are children under the age of 12.

It's unlikely that many of the hungry in Sacramento and across the country are tracking the 2007 farm bill lumbering through Congress this week, but the bill's fate will affect them.

A tiny portion – $4.3 billion of the $286 billion proposed for the omnibus appropriation – is slated to go to programs that help feed the poor. For food stamp recipients, the most significant reform in the bill reinstates a cost-of-living-adjustment formula scuttled a decade ago.

Under provisions contained in both the Senate and the House versions, the standard deduction used to calculate food stamp benefit levels would be increased from $134, where it's been frozen since 1996, to $140 in the Senate version and $145 in the House, and indexed to inflation. That simple change would end the erosion in food stamp benefits that has reduced a typical food stamp recipient's benefit to a shamefully inadequate $1 per meal.

Both House and Senate versions would also increase the allowance from $2,000 to $3,000 for assets that people could hold and still qualify for food stamps. And for the first time, under the bills, retirement and education savings would not be counted toward the asset limit.

Both bills also would increase the minimum benefit a person could receive. Frozen at a minimum $10 per month since 1977, the Senate version would raise the minimum to $18 a month by 2009 and index it to inflation. The bills also would increase the child care deduction, allowing more working poor families to qualify for food aid, and would raise the amount the government spends on commodities that go to food banks from $140 million annually to $250 million.

A provision in the Senate bill would require states such as California to prove that finger-imaging of food stamp applicants, a wasteful and humiliating practice, cuts down on fraud. Audits have shown it does not.

While the nutrition piece of the legislation is vital, there is much in the 2007 farm bill not to like. Both versions are bloated with wasteful subsidies for cotton, sugar, wheat, rice and corn growers. The bills would fund crop insurance programs that have defrauded taxpayers.

But an age-old political strategy is at work, with lawmakers tying a food safety net for the poor to a measure that contains staggering levels of waste and fraud. The 2007 farm bill ought to help feed the hungry of America, not fatten the bank accounts of the rich and powerful. As usual, it would do both.