Hunger-free 2024: FRAC highlights nutrition New Year’s resolutions for US Congress

14 Dec 2023 --- The Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) urges US members of Congress to prioritize four New Year’s resolutions — full government funding of the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, strengthening and protecting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, ensuring permanent healthy school meals for all students and reinstating tax credits to fight child poverty.

Nutrition Insight sits down with FRAC president Luis Guardia to discuss these nutrition policy priorities.

“When people are food insecure, they are more vulnerable to obesity and poor nutrition because they don’t have access to good and healthy foods. Children experience worse outcomes when it comes to their physical and mental health, which then affects their physical development and educational achievement,” says Guardia.

“At FRAC, we always maintain that hunger is a political condition. It can be addressed with programs. We know the root cause of hunger is poverty, and other things contribute to it, including housing instability, access to jobs with good wages and lack of transportation. The connection between these factors and groups in the country that have been historically marginalized and subjected to racism is very well known,” the president asserts. 

FRAC president Luis Guardia (Image Credit: FRAC).Fully funded WIC
Guardia explains that WIC provides additional benefits to women with children, allowing them to purchase highly nutritious foods. “This program is a lifeline, it’s currently serving 6.7 million women and their young children in the US.”

“How the US budget is set up, we start a new fiscal year in October. It could be that in January, with more people coming onto the program, there may be a gap. If the WIC budget isn’t approved, or if WIC is not fully funded for what it truly needs, we’re going to see a tremendous cliff, and that is going to unravel all of the benefits that the program has been able to generate over the last 30 years,” he argues.

Guardia further warns that if this prediction comes true, for the first time in decades, people will have to be added to waiting lists to access the program.

“We need to make sure that Congress fully funds WIC in 2024, but that it also considers funding WIC in the long term, so that families can continue to be eligible for the program and not have their benefits interrupted. We cannot go back to a time when women and their very young children had to wait in long lines to be able to access the program.”

Protecting SNAP benefits
The SNAP program is described by Guardia as “the country’s first line of defense against hunger,” with the Farm Bill as the main piece of legislation governing it.

“Even though it’s a great program, we know that it’s only providing, on average, US$6 per person, per day,” he points out.

Another hurdle to SNAP that the FRAC president highlights is “policymakers working to undermine the slight gain we were able to get in the program that was approved in a bipartisan way in the previous Farm Bill back in 2018.”

He outlines that the baseline for SNAP benefits is called the Thrifty Food Plan. The last Farm Bill included a provision to update it based on the “contemporary modern ways people consume food.” 

Through this consideration, the USDA was able to increase the benefit. “We need to make sure that SNAP is protected and not pulled back,” urges Guardia.

“It serves over 40 million people in this country, including families with children. We know that 13.4 million children in this country are experiencing food insecurity, and we know that the people who are experiencing food insecurity the most in this country are households with children and black and Latin X households.”

“They sometimes face food insecurity twice (during the pandemic almost at three times) the level of that of their white household counterparts. It is important for us to safeguard the Thrifty Food Plan adjustment that was made and also to protect and expand access to the program.” 

Studies show children receive the healthiest meals they can access at school.School meals for all
FRAC has been fighting for free school meals for a long time. According to Guardia: “It is a tremendously efficacious and beneficial program where we want to see every school child in the US receive access to healthy meals, regardless of income.”

He points out that studies have shown children receive the healthiest meals they can access at school. Furthermore, he remarks that no other part of the school day is tested in the way that food is. 

“No other part of the school day do we ask, are you too rich for textbooks? Are you too poor? Are you too rich for transportation? Are you too rich to have access to teachers? We don’t do that with any other part of the school day, but we do it for food, and we know how essential food is to achieve educational achievement,” Guardia exemplifies.

He adds that households with children tend to be more food insecure, which also means that they are more likely to have to choose between paying for food or rent and other necessities. 

“We know it’s the right thing to do. We believe classrooms and cafeterias shouldn’t be places where children feel a stigma or shame of being different from their peers. In some cases, where they do have to pay for meals, the child can accumulate school meals and be brought into that shaming process as well. It just undermines so many important things that we want schools to provide our children.”

Reinstate child tax credit 
Guardia spotlights the child tax credit as “tremendously important,” pointing to the outcomes it has achieved: “Even before it was enacted, the estimates were it would cut child poverty in half, and it did cut child poverty by about half.”

“We know there are studies that show that the expanded child tax credit reduced hunger and households with children, and it helped purchase family foods. One study showed that it was the number one thing households used to buy nutrition. Two-thirds of households that received it reported using the child tax credit to buy food. The next two things were housing and utilities.”

Highlighting the interconnectedness between the necessities covered by the credit, he states that reinstating it will not only improve people’s ability to put food on the table but also be an economic driver in a similar manner to SNAP.

“We know it’s an economic driver — these benefits will help spur the economy and create more jobs because ultimately that’s what we want people to do. We want people to have access to more economic mobility, more jobs and to be able to purchase food and do all the things that presumably you and I and other people can do with our incomes.”

Lastly, Guardia reminds us that “it’s important for the general public to understand the role of organizations like FRAC and others who are trying to move and change things at a policy level.”

 “Sometimes it’s assumed we will continue to do it. They can only continue to do so if people direct their philanthropy toward it, and they can. People who are in philanthropy know that if they contribute to advocacy organizations, there is a multiplier effect,” he underscores.

By Milana Nikolova