[Senate Hearing 106-909] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 106-909 INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FEEDING INITIATIVES ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS SECOND SESSION ON INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FEEDING INITIATIVES __________ JULY 27, 2000 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 70-293 WASHINGTON : 2001 _______________________________________________________________________ For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office Superintendent of Documents, Congressional Sales Office, Washington, DC 20402 COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY RICHARD G. LUGAR, Indiana, Chairman JESSE HELMS, North Carolina TOM HARKIN, Iowa THAD COCHRAN, Mississippi PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont MITCH McCONNELL, Kentucky KENT CONRAD, North Dakota PAUL COVERDELL, Georgia THOMAS A. DASCHLE, South Dakota PAT ROBERTS, Kansas MAX BAUCUS, Montana PETER G. FITZGERALD, Illinois J. ROBERT KERREY, Nebraska CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa TIM JOHNSON, South Dakota LARRY E. CRAIG, Idaho BLANCHE L. LINCOLN, Arkansas RICK SANTORUM, Pennsylvania Keith Luse, Staff Director David L. Johnson, Chief Counsel Robert E. Sturm, Chief Clerk Mark Halverson, Staff Director for the Minority (ii) C O N T E N T S ---------- Page Hearing: Thursday, July 27, 2000, International School Feeding Initiatives 1 Appendix: Thursday, July 27, 2000.......................................... 53 Document(s) submitted for the record: Thursday, July 27, 2000.......................................... 117 ---------- Thursday, July 27, 2000 STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY SENATORS Lugar, Hon. Richard G, a U.S. Senator from Indiana, Chairman, Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.............. 1 Cochran, Hon. Thad, a U.S. Senator from Mississippi.............. 30 Harkin, Tom, A U.S. Senator from Iowa, Ranking Member, Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry........................ 8 Leahy, Hon. Patrick J., a U.S. Senator from Vermont.............. 10 Daschle, Tom, a U.S. Senator from South Dakota................... 9 Johnson, Hon. Tim, a U.S. Senator from South Dakota.............. 2 Durbin, Hon. Richard J. U.S. Senator from Illinois............... 13 McGovern, Hon. James P., A U.S. Representative from Massachusetts 15 Dole, Hon. Bob, Former Senator, from the State of Kansas......... 6 McGovern, Hon. George, Ambassador, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Former Senator, from the State of South Dakota.......................................... 4 ---------- WITNESSES PANEL I Bertini, Catherine, Executive Director, World Food Program, Rome, Italy.......................................................... 22 Glickman, Dan, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, DC................................................. 19 PANEL II Brookins, Carole, Chairman & CEO, World Perspectives, Inc., Washington, DC................................................. 42 Hackett, Ken, Executive Director, Catholic Relief Services, Baltimore MD................................................... 38 Levinger, Dr. Beryl, Senior Director, Educational Development Center and Distinguished Professor, Monterey Institute of International Studies, Monterey, CA............................ 34 Levinson, Ellen, Executive Director,, Coalition for Food Aid, Washington, DC................................................. 40 ---------- APPENDIX Prepared Statements: Lugar, Hon. Richard G........................................ 54 Dole, Hon. Bob............................................... 56 Durbin, Hon. Richard J....................................... 58 McGovern, Hon. James, P...................................... 63 McGovern, Hon. George........................................ 71 Bertini, Catherine........................................... 81 Brookins, Carole............................................. 112 Glickman, Dan................................................ 74 Hackett, Kenneth............................................. 96 Levinger, Beryl.............................................. 89 Levinson, Ellen S............................................ 105 Document(s) submitted for the record: Proprietary Concept Paper: Food For Education And Economic Development, submitted by Carole Brookins.................. 118 INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL FEEDING INITIATIVES ---------- THURSDAY, JULY 27, 2000 U.S. Senate, Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, Washington, DC. The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:02 a.m., in room 216, Hart Senate Office Building, Hon. Richard G. Lugar, (Chairman of the Committee, presiding. Present or submitting a statement: Senators Lugar, Cochran, Harkin, Leahy, Daschle, and Johnson. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD G. LUGAR, A U.S. SENATOR FROM INDIANA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY The Chairman. This hearing of the Senate Agriculture Committee is called to order. We welcome all to this important hearing this morning. We convene to hear testimony on important proposals to implement a school feeding program in developing countries. Ambassador George McGovern and Senator Robert Dole have worked in recent months to promote a proposed initiative in which the United States, in tandem with other countries, would work with recipient governments and communities to establish a preschool and school feeding program. In our country, our national school lunch program feeds 27- million-children each day to maximize physical and mental development. As Ambassador McGovern has pointed out, approximately 300-million-children in the world go hungry each day. He has proposed an initiative based upon experiences with the United States program and carried out internationally to help address this issue. Given the magnitude of the challenge, the proposal would necessarily command a tremendous amount of resources. The proposal forward by Ambassador McGovern and Senator Dole calls for an investment, once fully implemented, of approximately $3 billion, shared between the United States and other donor nations each year. Of this $3 billion total, approximately $750 million would be the United States share. Clearly identifying and securing the funding for such an initiative is one the principal factors we will need to explore today in considering the proposal. This past weekend, at the G- 8 Summit in Okinawa, President Clinton proposed a $300 million initiative to improve school performance in developing nations. That program would use the Commodity Credit Corporation's surplus commodity purchase authority to implement school feeding programs in recipient nations. A number of questions need to be addressed to move these proposals now from paper to implementation, and one of the most important factors is to determine the necessary infrastructure that must be in place in a potential recipient country in order to carry the program out effectively. What sort of governmental, agricultural, and educational groundwork must be present? How does the program guard against fraud and abuse, ensuring that the resources committed are used as intended? Likewise, we are eager to learn more about exactly how the initiative would be carried out? Would it be simply a donation of commodities, or will additional funds be required? How does the program translate a commodity donation, as suggested by the President, to actual implementation of a school feeding program on the ground in individual places? Does the World Food Program assume primary responsibility, as suggested by Ambassador McGovern? And what is the role of the private voluntary organizational structure? What is the role of the private sector, the agriculture community? Clearly, these and other questions will be addressed today and in other fora as we take a look at this ambitious proposal. We are pleased to have a very distinguished group of witnesses before the Committee today, led off by Ambassador George McGovern and Senator Bob Dole, both former colleagues and, more importantly, former members of this committee. And following this testimony, we will hear from Senator Richard Durbin, Congressman Jim McGovern, who have been leaders in their various chambers in promoting this concept. Secretary Glickman will appear with Ms. Bertini, and then a whole host of people that I shall not enumerate now but will introduce fully at the time of their appearances. We welcome our colleagues George McGovern and Bob Dole. We appreciate so much your leadership in so many ways, and in this particular initiative, we are eager to hear from you. [The prepared statement of Chairman Lugar can be found in the appendix on page 54.] I will ask, first of all, if Senator Johnson has any opening comment, and after his comment we will proceed to the witnesses. STATEMENT OF HON. TIM JOHNSON, A U.S. SENATOR FROM SOUTH DAKOTA Senator Johnson. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this timely and very important hearing. Senator Daschle wanted very badly to be here, but some obligations dealing with Governor Miller, our newest colleague to the Senate, this morning has got him involved in that. But I appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing to listen to the proposals for an international school lunch program being proposed by Ambassador George McGovern and Senator Bob Dole, as you note, both former members of this committee. But I am particularly pleased and honored to have an opportunity to welcome Ambassador McGovern to the hearing this morning. Ambassador McGovern has served our State of South Dakota and the Nation at every level, from his time as a bomber pilot in World War II to his role as an educator at Dakota Wesleyan University, to his service in the House of Representatives, on President Kennedy's administration as Director of Food for Peace, as a Member of the U.S. Senate and a nominee for President, and currently as Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, of the United Nations. I am pleased and proud to think of George McGovern as a mentor, a confidant, an advisor, and, most importantly, a friend. Throughout all of his long and distinguished career of public service, Ambassador McGovern has always had food and nutrition in dealing with hunger at the very top of his priorities. This proposal to provide school lunches to hungry children across the entire globe, especially in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, I think is extraordinary. Utilizing organizations such as United Nations, private voluntary organizations, and other food assistance agencies, we have an opportunity to play a role in delivering a universal school lunch program, building on what has been a remarkably successful program in the United States. We have 300-million-hungry-school-aged children in these places throughout the world, and of that total, an unfortunate number of 130-million-school-aged kids are currently not even attending school. So this program I think is an innovative, exciting proposal. I am pleased that the Clinton administration has picked up on it with a significant pilot project proposal of their own, and I look forward to the testimony today from Senator Dole and Ambassador McGovern, as well as Secretary Glickman and the rest of the panels that you have organized for this hearing today. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Chairman. Thank you very much, Senator Johnson. Let me just outline the structure of the hearing for a minute. As has been mentioned, we will be having an important event, the swearing-in of a new Senator on the floor at about 11:00 a.m., with a roll call vote following that swearing-in and statement by incoming Senator Miller. I hope that there are not interruptions before that point, but we have important business to do, so I am going to ask each of the witnesses to try to summarize their comments in 5-minutes. The Chair will be liberal in recognizing that may not be possible, and these are important facts we need to have before us. We will ask Senators to likewise confine their questioning to 5-minutes given the spillover that inevitably happens when somebody asks a question in the fourth minute and there is an extensive answer. But in that way, perhaps we will move ahead so that we can give at least a good audience to each of our witnesses. I just want to say on a personal note that it is a real pleasure to have Bob Dole here. I asked Bob Dole, after I was elected to the Senate, for his help in getting on this committee, and as always, he was very helpful. And when it finally came down, as a matter of fact, to a trade with the late Senator John Heinz, who accepted Banking, I got Agriculture as the low man on the totem pole at the end of the table. As I pointed out, and Bob and George will recognize this, at one end of the table was Herman Talmadge and Jim Eastland, often in a pillar of smoke that surrounded both of them, and they conducted the business. Occasionally, when Bob came in, he was senior enough to interject a thought, but in essence, a lot was going on at the other end of the table. Pat Leahy and I were at the far ends. George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey were both members of our committee, and, of course, this indicates the importance of the Committee, likewise the importance that people saw in their work in agriculture as they moved on to national leadership and as leaders of their respective parties. So we are honored that both are here. I will ask Ambassador McGovern to testify first, to be followed by Senator Dole, and then questions of the two of you. Ambassador McGovern? STATEMENT OF HON. GEORGE MCGOVERN, AMBASSADOR, FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS, AND FORMER U.S. SENATOR FROM SOUTH DAKOTA Ambassador McGovern. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I am not going to read my statement, but I would like to hand it in. The Chairman. It will be made a part of the record, and that will be true of all the statements today so that each one of you will know that. Ambassador McGovern. Thank you very much. I might say, Mr. Chairman, in connection with your comment about lobbying my friend, Senator Dole, to get on this committee, when I arrived here in 1962, I lobbied every Democratic Member of the Senate to get on this committee, and I noticed some of them smiled about my appeal. I discovered later that of the eight new Senators who came here that year, I was the only one who requested Agriculture, and three people on the Committee requested to get off. [Laughter.] Ambassador McGovern. But I want to say that I have always regarded it as the most important committee on which I served during 18-years in the Senate. I was here on this committee from the first day I arrived until the day I left, not entirely a voluntary departure on my part, but I enjoyed it all. I think it is a great committee. It embraces some of the most essential concerns in our national life. And I am especially pleased to be here with my long-time friend and colleague, Bob Dole. He and I formed a bipartisan coalition when we were in the Senate on matters that related to agriculture or related to food and nutrition. And I think it is fair to say we led the way during the decade of the 1970s in reforming and expanding the Food Stamp program, the school lunch and school breakfast programs, the WIC program, developing guidelines for the American people. The reason we were so successful in that effort was not only the content of the legislation that we pushed, but because we did have a strong bipartisan base that embraced every member of this committee and many other members of the Senate. We have also both been Presidential contenders, and if Vice President Gore and Governor Bush show any signs of slippage, we are ready to take over again. [Laughter.] The Chairman. This is reassuring. Ambassador McGovern. But today we want to talk about a different vision. We virtually ended hunger in the United States in the 1970s. There have been some slippage in that, as you know, Mr. Chairman, in the 1980s and 1990s, and that in my opinion ought to be corrected. It is embarrassing to me that we have 31-million-Americans yet who don't have enough to eat. I don't say that they are at the point of starvation, as is the case with people abroad, but they don't have enough to eat, and we need to correct that as we move forward on this international scene. Basically, what we are proposing--and we know this can't be done overnight--is that the United States take the lead in the United Nations agencies, most of which are located in Rome, as far as this issue is concerned, to feed every day every school child in the world, and hopefully through a WIC-type program, do the same thing for preschool children and their pregnant and nursing low-income mothers. We think this is important because dollar for dollar it would probably do more to raise conditions of life for people in Third World countries than any other single thing we can do. The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Summers, has said that educating girls is the most important thing you can do in the developing world dollar for dollar, and the best way to get those girls into school, as it is with the boys, is to establish a daily school lunch or school breakfast program. What happens when such a program is started is that in a comparatively short time, school enrollments double, academic performance rises dramatically, and where you can measure it, athletic performance improves. The overall health and capacity to be an effective citizen improves when children have enough to eat. You mentioned, Mr. Chairman, that of the 300-million-needy- school-aged boys and girls, 130 million of them don't go to school at all. They are destined for a life of illiteracy. Most of those are girls, those 130 million that are not in school, and that is because of the favoritism towards boys and discrimination against girls and women that exists in so much of the Third World. But as the World Food Program can testify-- and we are going to hear from Catherine Bertini later on, the brilliant American director of the World Food Program--they have discovered that parents urge both boys and girls to go to school if they can benefit from a school lunch. It takes off some of the pressure on the food budget at home. It enables boys and girls to become literature and knowledgeable. And, in general, it is a very helpful investment. One other point I wanted to make before I yield to Senator Dole, Mr. Chairman, is that this program, like so many humanitarian programs, also has a self-interest component as far as the United States is concerned, and that is what it does for American farm markets. Right now almost every farm crop is in surplus. This program, as we envision it, and as the President outlined it in Okinawa a few days ago, would call on the Secretary of Agriculture to purchase farm produce that is in surplus; that could range everywhere from Kansas wheat and Iowa and South Dakota corn, to Indiana livestock and hogs, to citrus fruits, cranberries, nuts, anything that is in surplus. It would have the effect of bolstering those markets and thereby bolstering farm income. In a sense, a large part of this program would probably be financed by the additional income of farmers who would be paying more taxes in terms of the overall impact of the program. I think that is about all I need to say, Mr. Chairman, and I want to say on behalf of Senator Dole that all those years that we worked together in the Senate, I came to see a very remarkable public servant. He was the first person I called on this program after I got the idea in Rome. He said: Of course, I will go along with it if it is fiscally sound and we can figure out a satisfactory way to finance it, I will be there. Governor Bush, whom I mentioned a while ago, has talked about compassionate conservatives. This is one right here-- Senator Dole. He is a model of it, and I am pleased to yield to him at this time. [The prepared statement of Ambassador McGovern can be found in the appendix on page 71.] The Chairman. You are a great team. Senator Dole. I am pleased to yield to the distinguished Democratic leader. The Chairman. We are delighted the leader is here, and I will ask Senator Dole to testify, and if you would like to make a comment, then that would be great. Senator Dole. Do you want to go first? Senator Daschle. No, Bob. I would rather hear you. STATEMENT OF HON. BOB DOLE, FORMER U.S. SENATOR FROM KANSAS Senator Dole. I will follow the advice of the Chairman--I know you have a very busy morning, and a very busy today and tomorrow, I guess--and ask that my statement be made part of the record. I want to also indicate, I think the Chairman in his statement fully understands some of the problems and some of the challenges and some of the questions that need to be answered, and certainly Ambassador McGovern and I are here with a program, but we understand that it has to be paid for. And I think in fairness to the Committee, obviously, we would want to work with the Committee or anybody we can work with to determine how that can be done. And certainly you will hear later from Catherine Bertini. This is a bipartisan program. She served in the Bush administration and now is Director of the World Food Program, has done an excellent job. You will hear from others, and we will go back to, you know, Public Law 480, which started in the Eisenhower administration. So there are many reasons why we ought to be working together and why this should not be, certainly is not and never should be a partisan issue. I don't think they could have any better champion than George McGovern. He gives me credit for helping him over the last 30-years in many food programs, and I did every time I could. But I must say I realized how pressing the problem was when Ambassador McGovern had field hearings all across America. And we could see the poverty in America, and we could see the young people going without food, without one meal a day. And that certainly alerted me and I think alerted about every other member of the Committee and some members, like Senator Hollings, who is not on the Committee, to action. And it was truly bipartisan and has been over the years. I think during that time, as I recall, I think some people questioned our motives, that we don't really believe this, that we are doing this because he is from South Dakota and I am from Kansas, and if we feed all these people, it makes the prices go up for farmers. I mean, some people did question our motives. I never looked at it that way, and I can't remember any farmer every stopping me and saying, boy, I am glad you are voting for all those programs that make the price of my product go up. I don't think that ever happened. But there are a number of reasons that this should be done if we can work it out, and I commend the administration for the $300 million pilot program, and I think that will give us a good start. But Ambassador McGovern is an expert in this. He is at the Food and Agriculture Organization now. He has done an outstanding job. He has dedicated his life to helping others, and this is just one other indication. And if I can play some small role in this effort, I would be happy to do that. I would point out just one thing. I think everybody has the facts. We are talking about the impact on 300-million-children, and obviously, when anybody has a problem in the world, they look to the United States first. And our generosity knows no bounds. The American people, the Congress, we are spending the people's money, but I think when we can establish the need for a program and structure it in a way that is totally responsible and answers some of the questions raised by Chairman Lugar, then we are off to a good start. So I am here in support of the concept. I am not certain we have a program yet, but the concept to me makes a great deal of sense, particularly, as Ambassador McGovern talked about, the girls. There is discrimination in some of the Third World countries when it comes to females, and they don't even have the chance to learn to read or write because they don't go to school. And as he pointed out, the facts indicate that just one meal a day would double the participation of the number of young people going to school in some of these countries. So that in itself, the fact that they go there for the meal, but they also have the education, I think would have a worldwide impact. So we are here together. We belong to this fraternity that, unfortunately, not many people want to join. We both lost a Presidential race, but we haven't lost our spirit and we haven't lost what I hope is our diligence in looking at issues and looking at problems. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Senator Dole can be foundin the appendix on page 56.] The Chairman. Well, we are grateful that both of you are here with us, and we mentioned early on the purpose of having this hearing, although it is late in the session, just to try to bring some framework for the proposal so that those who are involved in authorization, appropriations, and the administration can put at least a fine point on this and move things ahead. I want to recognize the distinguished Ranking Member and then the Democrat leader, in that order, for comments or questions they may have. Senator Harkin? STATEMENT OF HON. TOM HARKIN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM IOWA, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE, NUTRITION, AND FORESTRY Senator Harkin. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for being a little late. I want to thank you for holding this hearing on an issue or an idea that you wonder why we didn't do it before. It is one of things that come up and you say, Why didn't we think of this before? We have had the food. We have the surpluses. The need is there. There are private voluntary organizations and others that are in place that I think could handle this, and you wonder why this hasn't really been a part of our multilateral negotiations with some of the G-8 countries. I am told that you mentioned in your remarks about what just happened in Okinawa. So, to use a well-worn cliche, this is an idea whose time has come. I want to thank our former colleagues Senator Dole and Ambassador McGovern for their leadership in this area, as it has been their leadership going back for many years on feeding programs, everything from WIC programs to school lunch, to school breakfast, to meals for the elderly. These two men sitting in front of us have provided the leadership for many years, and I applaud you both for that. The only thing I think about when I think of this international school lunch program that we are talking about, I hadn't really thought about it in its contextual framework, but I have been doing a lot of work in the last few years on the issue of child labor. And I have traveled to a number of countries to look at child labor and what it takes to get these kids out of these places and get them into schools. And one place where we had a great success was in Bangladesh, and that was with the International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor under the ILO, the U.S. Government, the Bangladesh Government. They were successful in getting about 8,000 or 9,000 kids, mostly girls, out of factories and into--well, what they called school. We might not call it a school. A little one-room place with a dirt floor, but at least they had a teacher, they had materials, and they were learning to read and write. And it is interesting that when I was there--this is about a year and a half ago--one of the big problems was the lack of any food during the day. And they had a real need for that, and maybe the kids would bring a piece of fruit or something with them in the morning. And I never even thought about this as being a part of the program, but I saw it as a real problem for them in terms of getting a meal to these kids. And the person in charge of these schools in Dhaka said to me that, gee, if we just had some way of getting food to these kids, this would really help bring them more into school. So I see what you are talking about as also a way of reducing the instance of child labor around the world, because it will get these kids and it will get the families now--see, we gave the families some money to help offset the loss of the kids' wages. But if you did that and coupled that with a nutritious meal, one that would provide them with their minimum daily intake of vitamins and minerals, just think what that would do to encourage families to get their kids out of the workplace and into schools. So I see it maybe from a new vantage point here that I hadn't thought about before, and that is, what this would do to help reduce the incidence of child labor around the world. Again, I want to thank you both for your leadership in this area, and I look forward to doing what we can to help promote this idea and get it moving. We should have done it yesterday. Thank you both. The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Harkin. Senator Daschle. STATEMENT OF HON. TOM DASCHLE, A U.S. SENATOR FROM SOUTH DAKOTA Senator Daschle. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for being late. I had to host a breakfast meeting this morning for our newest Senator, who will be sworn in today, Zell Miller. And I am sorry to have missed George's testimony, but I read it before, and I compliment both of you on your testimony this morning. Having heard Bob Dole remind us that we have two former Presidential nominees before us today, I think it is evidence, again, of the extraordinary leadership these two men have shown this country in so many ways, but especially on the issue of food and nutrition. These two overcame partisan bickering way back when it existed when they were here and addressed the skeptics and said we can have a school lunch program and we can have a WIC program, and they proved to the country and to the world that WIC and school lunch works. And they did it overcoming objections within their own parties and all the bitterness that comes sometimes with partisanship. They did it. They are here to tell us that they feel in the heart of hearts that they can extend this concept now internationally, and I applaud them for their willingness to once again in this Presidential period where, again, the acrimony is evidence, that they would be here on a bipartisan basis once again to show us the kind of leadership that they have shown us on so many occasions means a lot to me personally. And I thank Bob Dole and I thank George McGovern. Stephen Ambrose is writing another book, and I am glad he is writing it. He is writing about George McGovern's them way, way back after bombing on 39 missions, turning right around virtually the next day and dropping food on those same locations that he bombed the day before. I am not sure when the book is going to come out, but it goes to the heart of what George McGovern is all about. George McGovern has been working on food issues all of his lifetime, from dropping food in places where they were bombed to becoming Food for Peace Director, now working at the United Nations, writing books. ``Ending World Hunger in Our Time'' is a book that is about to come out, which simply says we can do it in our lifetime by the year 2030. And so I have had many luxuries and many wonderful experiences and many things that I will look back on with great pride, none of which will be more important to me than the fact that I have had the opportunity to serve with Bob Dole and George McGovern. And so I am grateful to them for showing us the way again on a bipartisan way to provide us the kind of real blueprint for ending world hunger. George pointed out in his testimony that there are 300- million-school-aged-kids around the country that don't have the luxury of school lunch today. That is more than exist in this entire country, more kids than there are people. I can't think of a better marriage than taking the food we have got to the kids who need it and doing something that we have already demonstrated, and probably the biggest lab test ever to be shown here in this country, a lab test that says when you provide kids with a school lunch program it works. They learn. They become students; they become active participants in society. It works. It is one of the best investments we can make. So I am grateful to them, and I am very, very pleased to have had the opportunity to be here today as they present their testimony, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Chairman. Thank you, Senator Daschle. Senator Leahy. STATEMENT OF HON. PATRICK J. LEAHY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM VERMONT Senator Leahy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know how much I love this committee. It was the first assignment I requested when I was elected to the U.S. Senate, and I have had the privilege of serving on it for more than 25-years, and much of that time with you, Mr. Chairman. And I have had the privilege of being both Ranking Member and Chairman of this committee. But I mention that long service because I remember--and I believe it was my very first meeting--Hubert Humphrey took me aside and he said, ``Patrick''--I can see Bob and George smiling. You can almost hear him. He said, ``Patrick,'' he says, ``we do a lot more than dairy farms on this committee, I want you to know.'' And I said, ``Well, yes, Sir, I understand that.'' I mean, I was 34-years-old, and I was getting the full Hubert Humphrey treatment. And he said, ``We do a lot for hungry people, and you just do whatever George McGovern and Bob Dole tell you to, and you will be all right.'' [Laughter.] Senator Leahy. And I have been doing that for 25-years, and I have been all right on this one, Mr. Chairman. But I remember that because I can think of so many times that both of you would put together the coalition necessary to move through everything from WIC to expansion of the School Lunch Program to all the different major feeding programs, Public Law 480, all the rest, and do it in a way that conservatives and liberals and moderates could join together. Hubert was right. The two of you had that soul of it. In fact, when I became Chairman of the Committee, the first meeting I did, I put the word ``nutrition'' back in there. And, Bob, you may well recall at that meeting I mentioned both you and George and what you have done. This international school lunch initiative, what a tremendous thing and how much it can help millions of children worldwide. And the partnership we have here, Dan Glickman, the Secretary, and Ambassador McGovern. I see my friend Cathy Bertini, whom I have admired and worked with all these years, the World Food Program; Senator Dole has such enormous credibility on the Hill with both parties and the American Food Service Association, Marshall Mats and all the rest. I think of the strong partnerships with PVOs that can be done, Save the Children, Catholic Relief. I see representatives of Bread for the World here, others who have worked so long on all of this. And I know that the American School Food Service Association [ASFSA] has been working with nutrition leaders from other countries through its going global program. In fact, Cathy and Marshall, I think you had a number of delegates from other countries at the National School Lunch Convention this summer. So these are moral issues. They are not Democrat or Republican issues. They are really moral issues. Hunger is a moral issue, especially for a country like ours that can easily feed a quarter of a billion people and have food left over to export all over the world. It becomes a moral issue. I look at this chart here that shows every corner of the world has undernourished children and families. So it is not just childhood hunger. It is about education, which is critical to reducing poverty and reaching poor countries alike. If you don't do that, you are not going to have democracy. And if you don't have democracy, we are going to continue to be fighting these wars that leave people devastated. Victor Hugo said that no army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. Well, the time has come for this global school feeding initiative. I think you are going to find some heavy, heavy support on the Hill, and I think it is going to reflect the kind of things that Ambassador McGovern and Senator Dole have done to make us all proud. I would ask that my whole statement and the statement from the G-8 issued in Okinawa be part of the record, Mr. Chairman. And I applaud you because I can't think of a nutrition bill that I have been involved with that you and Senator Harkin have joined in, and, of course, Senator Daschle from his very first days here in the Senate on this committee have helped us on that. We have got half of South Dakota here with Tim Johnson and Tom. [Laughter.] Senator Leahy. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Chairman. Well, thank you very much, Senator Leahy. Before you came in, I pointed out how remote the two of us were from Herman Talmadge and Jim Eastland as we sat at the ends of the table. Senator Leahy. No cigar smoke. The Chairman. We have confirmed that, but, likewise, I appreciate the testimony of our colleagues. You are an inspiration to our bipartisan instincts on this committee. And I know that Senator Harkin and Senator Leahy and Senator Daschle and Senator Johnson will be wonderful allies. I look forward to trying to frame, as I stated in my opening statement, something that gets us into legislation or into an actual proposal, and that is the purpose of our coming here today, to bring this down to the ground. And you have given us a marvelous start. Before I ask for any more questions of you, do either one of you have statements stimulated by what you have heard from this panel? Senator Dole. With all these fine statements, I am thinking about gearing up for the year 2004. [Laughter.] Senator Dole. I could use all these things in my brochure, too. Senator Leahy. You have got a good ticket right there. Senator Dole. George might be my running mate. The Chairman. Ambassador McGovern? Ambassador McGovern. You are better at picking a Vice Presidential---- [Laughter.] Mr. Chairman, I want to express my thanks for what has been an overwhelming response from the Committee. It doesn't really surprise me because I think this is the kind of an idea that will have a broad base of support in the Congress. There were just a couple of points I wanted to add. I heard that at the American Food Service Association annual convention in St. Louis last week that a number of foreign countries were there, including Japan and others, to find out how you set up a model school lunch program. They gave us the tribute of being a country that has a model school lunch program. I think it is quite remarkable. Marshall Mats, who has been referred to here earlier and is so well informed on these issues, told me about this, and I think that is important for us to keep in mind, that the eyes of the world are upon us. And there isn't anything in my opinion the United States can do on the world scene that would put us in better stead in the eyes of other countries than to move ahead on feeding hungry children. One other point. I neglected to say that when we look at these 130-million-children are not in school, most of them girls, the World Food Program has done some studies in half a dozen different Third World countries, and they have found that these illiterate girls have on the average of six children apiece, whereas girls that have gone to school delay marriage and practice a little greater measure of family responsibility. They have on the average of 2.9 children, more than cut in half, the birth rate. So to those experts who believe that to get on top of the world hunger problem we need to do more on the population explosion, as it has been called, the best way you can do that is by educating girls. This school lunch idea that Senator Dole and I are proposing will do precisely that. It will bring the girls into school. The mothers and fathers will see to it, whether they have boys or girls or both, that they get to school if they can get a nutritious meal. Senator Harkin referred to this problem that he saw in Bangladesh. It is similar all across Asia, Africa, Latin America, large parts of Eastern Europe, including Russia. So to whatever extent we bring youngsters into school, especially the girls, we will have the best results in terms of restraining population growth. The Chairman. Well, we thank you both very, very much. Senator Harkin. Mr. Chairman? The Chairman. Senator Harkin? Senator Harkin. A point of personal privilege before they leave. The Chairman. Of course. Senator Harkin. And this has not to do with hunger or nutrition, but this week marked the tenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and we have had some great celebrations over the last couple of days. Thousands of people with disabilities and their families have been here in Washington. And I just again wanted to say thank you to Senator Dole for his strong leadership 10-years-ago in helping us get through the Americans with Disabilities Act when he was Majority Leader in the Senate and, again, Bob, for your strong support over the last 10-years in making sure it wasn't chipped away at. You were missed at a lot of the celebrations. I know you were in another State celebrating. That is what I heard. Senator Dole. I was in Columbus, Ohio. They had a big celebration yesterday noon. It was really fantastic. Senator Harkin. I heard you were there, but I just want you to know that at all the celebrations here, with all these thousands of people with disabilities, you were mentioned often and praised highly, and well deserved. Thank you. [Applause.] Ambassador McGovern. Mr. Chairman, could I just add 10- seconds here? The Chairman. Yes, of course. Ambassador McGovern. A key person in all of this will be the Secretary of Agriculture. He is the man that is going to have to decide what products are purchased and in what quantities. I think we are very fortunate to have Dan Glickman as Secretary of Agriculture. He has done a wonderful job, and I think he will with this program. The Chairman. We concur with that. Thank you very much for that tribute. The Chair would like to call now our colleagues Senator Durbin and Senator McGovern to the table. Gentlemen, I would just mention, because others have come in since I started the hearing, that we would ask you to try to summarize your comments in 5-minutes, and your full statements will be made a part of the record, and we will ask Senators to try to confine their questions to 5-minutes because of the busy program on the Senate floor that will be involved in all of this. Senator Durbin. STATEMENT OF HON. RICHARD J. DURBIN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM ILLINOIS Senator Durbin. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this hearing, and, Senator Harkin and Senator Johnson, thank you for joining in on this important day. To think that we would have two giants of the Senate and of our Nation, Senator Bob Dole and Ambassador George McGovern, come here and make this suggestion today is an indication, I think, of the value of this concept. And I don't need to sell it to any member of this committee because each of you in your own way has contributed in your public service toward this very value that we are exalting today in the suggestion of this international school lunch program. I can tell you that when we had a luncheon just a few weeks ago in the Senate dining room with Senators Dole and McGovern, representatives from Senator Lugar and Senator Harkin, Congressman McGovern, Congressman Tony Hall, and Secretary Glickman, there wasn't a person who walked in that dining room that didn't stop cold in their tracks and say, What are those folks doing together? And the fact is that we have come together on a bipartisan basis with an exciting concept to address some real-world problems. Three-hundred-million- children in the world who get up in the morning hungry and go to bed at night hungry, that is more than the population of the United States; 130 million of these children do not go to school. If we can help feed these children and bring them to school, as Ambassador McGovern has said, it will have a dramatic impact not only on their lives but on the world. Last January, I went to Sub-Saharan Africa and visited South Africa and Kenya and Uganda. I went there to study food issues and issues of microcredit. I was overwhelmed by the AIDS epidemic. That is the overarching concern on that continent and will be soon throughout the Third World. This program addresses real-world concerns. I met a lady in Uganda named Mary Nalongo Nassozzi. This is a 63-year-old-widow. All of her children have died from AIDS. She has created an orphanage in her home for her 16 grandchildren who are now living with her. Her backyard is covered with stones and crosses to symbolize the children she has lost to this epidemic. We can't build enough orphanages to take care of 10- million-AIDS-orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa. But we can help people like Mary Nalongo who want to extend their family and bring in their children, their grandchildren, their nephews and their nieces. This program will help them because it gives, at 10-cents a meal, a child enough nutrition to go through the better part of a day. That is a terrific investment, not only in the future of those families but in the future of this planet. And for my friends from Illinois or Indiana or Iowa or South Dakota, and I am sure Vermont as well, we can say to them that we are going to take the surplus of our bounty, a surplus which is depressing farm prices, and invest it in people. I think that will make a big difference in the world that we live in. I just want to close--and I want to thank you for your help in this--by saying that today I will be introducing legislation which I invite you all to join me on, which is an effort to build on what the President suggested at the G-8 conference. I talked to John Podesta before that conference, and I have been in communication with the White House, and I am glad that they have endorsed the basic concept that we are discussing. But this program has to be available in the years when we may not have surpluses to continue it. And the idea that I have suggested is that money that is now in the EEP account that is not being used could be used partially for this type of feeding program so that we will have a source that we can turn to regularly. I hope you will consider this legislation and join me in reallocating unspent EEP money to school feeding and other food aid problems. When I look at all of the things that we disagree on, on Capitol Hill, all of the bipartisan wrangling that goes on, it is such a breath of fresh air to walk into this room and see such a strong bipartisan sentiment in support of what is a fundamentally sound concept that will make this a better world. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Senator Durbin can be found in the appendix on page 58.] The Chairman. Well, thank you very much, Senator Durbin, for your leadership in this. Congressman McGovern. STATEMENT OF HON. JAMES P. MCGOVERN, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MASSACHUSETTS Congressman McGovern. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you and the members of this committee for giving me an opportunity to testify before you this morning. Your years of service and leadership both on agriculture issues and on foreign aid and humanitarian issues are admired not only by your colleagues in the U.S. Senate but by many of us in the United States House of Representatives. By holding the first hearing to explore the importance of a universal school lunch and WIC-type program, this committee once again demonstrates that leadership, and I am very, very grateful. In the House, I am happy to report a bipartisan movement is growing in support of this initiative. Congresswoman Jo Ann Emerson and Marcy Kaptur and Congressman Tony Hall and I recently sent a bipartisan letter to President Clinton, signed by 70 Members of the Congress, urging him to take leadership within the international community on this proposal. And I am attaching a copy of that letter testimony and ask that it be part of the record of this hearing. The Chairman. It will be part of the record. Congressman McGovern. I also request that a letter from the National Farmers Union outlining their support for this initiative be entered into the record and a letter I just received from Jim O'Shaughnessy, the vice president and general counsel of Ocean Spray, be made part of the record. We grow a lot of cranberries in Massachusetts, so this is very, very important to Massachusetts. I also want to join in commending the leadership of Senators McGovern, Dole, and Durbin as well as Secretary of Agriculture Glickman on this issue. It is really extraordinary that this coalition has come together. And I probably should say, since a number of people have asked me about whether I am related to George McGovern, I wish I were. I worked for him as an intern in the Senate and we are ideological soul mates, but we are not related. He is one of my dearest friends. A lady came up to me when I walked in here and said that she has been a long-time and consistent supporter of my father's, and I said to her---- [Laughter.] Congressman McGovern. I said I appreciate that, my father owns a liquor store in Worcester, Massachusetts. We appreciate all your business. [Laughter.] Help put me through college. Mr. Chairman, I don't want to repeat what has already been expressed so eloquently and passionately by Ambassador McGovern, Dole, and Durbin. So I will not reiterate the many facts and statistics cited in support of this global school feeding proposal. Instead, I would like to just take a couple of minutes to state why I support this proposal and what I feel we in Congress need to do to ensure its success. Mr. Chairman, I believe the world moves on simple ideas. The simple idea we are discussing this morning is also a big idea. It is even more compelling in its potential to move us closer to achieving many of our most important foreign policy goals: reducing hunger, increasing and enhancing education in developing countries, increasing education for girls, reducing child labor, increasing opportunities for orphans of war or disease, such as HIV/AIDS orphans, decreasing population, and decreasing pressure on food resources and on the environment. Clearly, our own prosperity, now and in the future, depends in large part upon the stability and economic development of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. This proposal calls for substantial investment. But in the words of the National Farmers Union, and I quote, ``The benefits to those less fortunate than ourselves will be profound, while our own investment will ultimately be returned many times over. The international nutrition assistance program is morally, politically and economically correct for this Nation and all others who seek to improve mankind.'' I believe, Mr. Chairman, this simple idea might prove to be the catalyst to a modern-day Marshall Plan for economic development in the developing countries, an international effort in which our farmers, our nonprofit development organizations, and our foreign assistance play a significant role. To be successful, such an effort must be multilateral and ensure that these programs become self-sustaining. However, this initiative, like so many others before it, could also fail, and it could fail because we in Congress fail to provide sufficient funding. It could fail because we fail to make a commitment of at least 10-years to secure its success. It could fail because we fail to integrate this proposal into other domestic and foreign policy priorities. And it could fail if we decide to rob Peter to pay Paul, taking money from existing foreign aid programs and undermining our overall development strategy. We need to understand from the beginning that we must fully fund this program, both its food and its education components. And we need to understand from the beginning that we are in this for the long haul. We need to understand from the beginning that support for this program requires, and, in fact, it demands increasing U.S. aid for programs that strengthen education, that promote local agriculture, and provide debt relief. Mr. Chairman, I know the politics of this project are not simple, but just as Senators McGovern and Dole built a bipartisan consensus in the past, I believe we can do the same now. We don't need to reinvent the wheel to implement this program. So much is already in place to move ahead on this initiative. We already have a history of funding food aid and food education programs. We already have successful partnerships with U.S. NGOs to carry out these programs abroad and at the community level. We also have established relations with international hunger and education agencies, including the Food Aid Convention, the World Food Program, UNICEF, and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. We already have a successful history of collaborating with our farmers to provide food aid, and we already have proven mechanisms to prevent destabilizing domestic or international markets. And, quite frankly, Mr. Chairman, I would rather pay our farmers to produce than watch them destroy their crops or pay them not to produce at all. I would like to add, in conclusion, that as we commit ourselves to reducing hunger and expanding education for children throughout the developing world, we must also commit ourselves to eliminating hunger here at home. If we fully fund existing domestic hunger programs, if we pass legislation such as the Hunger Relief Act, then we can make sure that no adult and no child in America goes hungry. Mr. Chairman, if we fail to take action on these initiatives now during a time of unprecedented prosperity, then when will we? I believe we can and we must eliminate hunger here at home and, at a minimum, reducing hunger among children around the world. And I believe we can and we must expand our efforts to bring the children of the world into the classroom. And we need to make that commitment now, and I hope that you and members of your committee will lead the way. Senator Durbin has legislation, and we will be happy to work with this committee to draft legislation that could serve as the underpinning for this program now and in the future, and I thank you for the opportunity to be here. [The prepared statement of Congressman McGovern can be found in the appendix on page 63.] The Chairman. Well, we thank you very much for your testimony. Let me just say apropos of the comment that Senator Dole and Ambassador McGovern were making about the late Hubert Humphrey. This committee does lots of things. Sometimes we are accused of dealing in foreign policy, energy policy, all sorts of policy, and so we don't lack ambition. But our thought here today is to try--and our next witness is the Secretary; Ms. Bertini will probably draw a finer point on this--specifically what kind of an outline or framework, even given all the NGOs, the other people that are doing things like this around the world, how we frame this in a way that our colleagues can understand it and our constituents can understand it. And both of you will be very important in that quest because we will have to finally explain to the Budget Committee, and one reason why we are having the hearing now, even though we are in the waning stages, perhaps, of this Congress, is that the Budget Committee will be meeting pretty early in the next one, you know, maybe long before all of us gear up with our new committee assignments, whether it is authorization or appropriations. So we will need to have some idea of what the ambitions are there. This year, for example, this committee asked Senator Domenici to try to set aside money which we thought would be required for farmers' income in this country as opposed to having an emergency at the end of the trail and really to plug that money in. One of the problems with the Hunger Relief Act is that money was not plugged in. We are sort of dealing outside the box there, and we want to be inside the box if we are serious about this proposal, as we are. So I am trying to get anecdotal information from people like our colleague Senator Frist, who has been in Sudan, parts that have not been seen by any other public servant, as well as other places in Africa. All of you have traveled extensively there and know the infrastructure problems in a single country of having anything that approaches the model that has been suggested in terms of our school lunches and the audit trail of how the food got there and who got it and who politically appropriated it for what purpose. So all of this is a part of the hearing process, but a part of our learning process on this committee and with our colleagues in the House and Senate. Senator Durbin. Mr. Chairman, may I respond to that very quickly? The Chairman. Yes, of course. Senator Durbin. I would just say I totally concur, as I am sure Congressman McGovern does. I think the American people are caring and compassionate, but they don't want to think that they are shoveling money down a rat hole, that it is going into some sort of an expenditure that isn't accountable, that it doesn't really help people around the world. And I think that is part of our responsibility, too, not only to have the right humanitarian concern, not only for our farmers but for people overseas, but to say to the taxpayers of this country this is going to be done in a way that you will be proud of it. The Chairman. Yes, and that they can follow and applaud. Senator Johnson? Senator Johnson. I think given the time constraints that we have--I appreciate the insights that Senator Durbin and Congressman McGovern have afforded us here this morning on what I think ought to be a very high priority for our Nation. I know Secretary Glickman is here, and I know that we have an obligation on the floor, and so I will withhold questions that I otherwise would ask. The Chairman. Thank you very much. Senator Leahy? Senator Leahy. I have nothing further to add. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. The Chairman. Thank you very much for coming. We appreciate it. The Chair would like to recognize now the Honorable Dan Glickman, Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, and the Honorable Catherine Bertini, executive director of the World Food Program. Secretary Glickman, it is always a privilege for this committee to have you before us. We look forward to these meetings, and especially on this subject today on which you have already given leadership in your career as a Member of the House of Representatives and as Secretary of Agriculture. Ms. Bertini, we are delighted that you are here again. You have added grace and wisdom to our hearings on many occasions, and we look forward to this one. Secretary Glickman, would you proceed? STATEMENT OF HON. DAN GLICKMAN, SECRETARY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE, WASHINGTON, DC. Secretary Glickman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Senator Johnson, Senator Leahy. It is an honor to be here. I watched with a certain degree of nostalgia the witnesses, Ambassador McGovern and Senator Dole, both of whom we have all known for so long. I recall my old days in Kansas when periodically I used to spar with Senator Dole, but at the same time recognized it was all political, never personal. And what great leaders both of them are and how an idea germinates from those two people can take hold and maybe change the world. So I thought that it was a particularly poignant moment. I want to thank Cathy Bertini, who has done an outstanding job at the World Food Program. She, of course, at one point in her life worked at the United States Department of Agriculture in a senior position, so she has got a great perspective. I also want to recognize the team who are here at USDA: Gus Schumacher, Richard Fritz, Mary Chambliss, and others. They are the ones who will run these programs, and they are, at least from the Government's perspective, working with the PVO community and the World Food Program, and so their input is going to be very critical in making sure that these programs are run very well. Let me just say a couple things. The FAO has just come out with a study which indicates that world hunger is continuing despite increased food supplies. Even in 15-years, there could still be about 600-million-people suffering from chronic undernourishment, the FAO said, and that is in a recent FAO study. So, you know, the problems remain, in certain parts of the world are unabated. Last year, the United States provided 10-million-metric- tons of food aid, a record high. Just last week, I announced a 350,000-metric-ton donation to Africa worth about $145 million. The total donations for Africa this year are about 1-million- metric-tons of food. So, you know, we are trying to do what we can to get food to that part of the world. Tomorrow night I leave for an 8-day trip for Africa, my first trip ever to Africa. I have been to South Africa but never into the areas dealing with hunger. I am going to go to Nigeria, to Kenya, and South Africa with a USDA team largely to focus on food aid, food assistance, together with other economic and trade relationships with Africa, between Africa and the United States. I think it is an extremely important time to be there, to be on the ground looking at these issues. I am not going to repeat all the objectives which you have heard about this program other than to state that they are overall attempting to improve democratic participation through an enhanced and improved economy and everything that that relates to in the parts of the world that have been suffering. I would make a couple of comments. What is USDA's role in all of this? We will have several roles in managing this initiative. First, the funding will come from the Commodity Credit Corporation under the oversight of this committee. Second, FAS, the Foreign Agriculture Service, and USDA staff will administer, including monitoring and evaluating the program, building on their extensive experience in food assistance. And that is where we are very lucky to have the team of Fritz and Chambliss and others who have great, extensive, long-term experience in food assistance. Third of all, the Farm Service Agency, which, of course, manages our farm programs, will purchase the needed commodities to assure their delivery to the recipient countries. And, fourth, we will pool our resources at both USDA and around the Government to support this initiative. For example, the Food and Nutrition Service, that is the part of USDA that manages the National School Lunch Program. They also manage the Women, Infant and Children Program, all the feeding programs. Their expertise is very great in terms of how you establish these kinds of programs, and, again, working with the Agency for International Development, who are already on the ground operating some sorts of programs like these. Their expertise will be critical as well, and I am sure there are other Government agencies involved. You will have significant roles in both the PVO community and the World Food Program. Cathy will talk about that, but we anticipate the World Food Program will expand on its programs to work with host governments and private voluntary organizations to support the countries' efforts to improve nutrition in schools. The World Food Program will receive agricultural commodities from the United States and feed them to needy school children. They will also serve as a central point between the U.S. and other donors. The PVO community, which is critical in making these programs work, we will have an extensive relationship. USDA will accept proposals from the private voluntary community to participate. The PVOs may choose to work directly with the USDA on a country program or as partners with USDA or as partners with the World Food Program as well. This thing has a great degree of flexibility, but recognizing that it is people on the ground in these countries who will ultimately decide how it is done and whether it will work or not. This initiative is a pilot program, a cooperative effort between the World Food Program and PVO communities. We estimate $300 million is the beginning for the commodities and for the transporting of those commodities. It will be coordinated through the existing Food Assistance Policy Council, which is chaired by USDA. We will use the authority of the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act to purchase surplus commodities and the authority of 416(b) which provides for overseas donations. The commodities most suitable for the initiative? Well, this could change in the future, but clearly, soybeans, corn, wheat, rice, nonfat dry milk would be among the major commodities. But as you--it was talked about before. I was also at the American Food School Service convention and met with some people from overseas. They are interested in a lot of things beyond just the commodities. They are interested in the techniques of cooking, of heating, of chilling, of transporting, and of actually doing the logistics of putting food packages together, which we could also help them as well. Countries will be chosen based on their need, their contribution of resources, their commitment to expand access to basic education, their current infrastructure and ability to deliver food to schools, their commitment to assuming responsibility for operating the program within a reasonable time frame, and their endeavor towards democratic transformation as well. I mean, there are a lot of pieces that go into this. It is not just a food assistance program, as you can see. It is a development assistance program with a heavy education component to it. We will be careful not to displace commercial sales. That is something that Congress has, you know, warned us on before. There will be, however, a monetization aspect of this. Some of the commodities, as we do in most of our food assistance, may be monetized, may be sold to fund other food on the ground and administrative costs. This is something that we will have to carefully develop as part of the proposals. We do this in various parts of the world, and it has worked out very successfully. The proceeds from the sales could also be used to manage the programs, could be used to buy local foodstuffs that may be more appropriate for local tastes, or for the school meals program or buying equipment, paying storage, this kind of thing. It is very interesting. As a result of this discussion, I had a conversation with the head of the Export-Import Bank who told me they have the ability to finance longer-term purchases of services or equipment, even at low levels--you don't have to buy multi-billion-dollar things--that might be of assistance to foreign governments as they enter into these programs: storage, heating, chilling, all those kinds of things. So this is a program that may give us kind of a catalyst to try to develop more of a feeding infrastructure in some of these countries as well. Let me just close by again thanking the PVO community. I met with them yesterday, all the organizations that you can imagine. Working with the World Food Programs, they are the ones to make sure that these programs work and that we try to deal with the incredible chronic problems of hunger in the developing nations. Finally, let me just say something else, too, because I was watching Dole and McGovern here and thinking to myself--and I think you are in this same role, Mr. Chairman, as well. The U.S. has been the leader since the Second World War in virtually every humanitarian assistance project in the world. We are at the forefront. Others follow. Some argue we are not doing as much now as we should, and I happen to think that we could be doing more. But we are basically the intellectual and moral, spiritual leader of trying to help the rest of the world bring itself up to greater levels of economic and basic subsistence and beyond that. This project personalizes a lot of our food assistance a little more. It is not intended to replace the general level of food assistance we are providing. But what it does is it gives a little tie to people's lives, that the food assistance will be tied to something else that will affect their lives profoundly, and that is, the ability to become educated, and tying those two things together can have a profound effect on the future of their lives as well as democracy in their countries. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Secretary Glickman can be found in the appendix on page 74.] The Chairman. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Secretary. Ms. Bertini. STATEMENT OF CATHERINE BERTINI, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WORLD FOOD PROGRAM, ROME ITALY Ms. Bertini. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. It is very exciting to be here today on a day that I think we will look back to know as the kick-off for a program that can not only make a difference in millions of lives but save millions of lives and help millions of people in developing countries, help their communities and their countries become strong economically, and that certainly will be a great tribute to this program, to the grand idea of someone who thinks very big, Ambassador McGovern, and to the strong bipartisan support from people who know about nutrition issues and how important child nutrition is, that being you, Mr. Chairman, and the members of the Committee who have been so supportive of these issues in the past, and the strong jump-start from this administration who have come forward to say we are ready, here we are with a very significant initial contribution to the program. So, Secretary Glickman, thank you for that, and I think all people involved have helped to make this strong, quick, and bipartisan. And that certainly, as has been pointed out, is the tradition of this committee, and fortunately for the nutrition programs, both domestic and international, a tradition for the support of hungry children in the United States and malnourished children throughout the world. The concept, as Senator Dole said, of school feeding for all is a very exciting concept, and it is one where we can make a very, very serious difference. And, you know, when we think about the history and some of the success in the United States, I think back to the school breakfast program during my time at USDA and the research that was done at the time which showed that children who had access to breakfast at school showed less absenteeism, less tardiness. They paid more attention in class. They got higher test scores. And this was as a result primarily of the fact that they had breakfast at school. If we take that basic concept and expand it throughout the world, we are talking about the idea that children who, when they come to school, have some kind of food, that this will make a huge difference in the areas I just described, but also even in getting children to school. And we have seen this, as Senator McGovern said before, we have seen this over and over again in our programs. When we put in a school feeding program where there hasn't been one before, we almost routinely see at least 100-percent increase in the number of children who are going to school. And in places where the girls are much less likely to go to school, it is usually an even higher increase in the number of girls who go to school. And this is very significant for the reasons that have been pointed out before. I must say also that Secretary-General Kofi Annan has recently announced an initiative for girls education worldwide, and he did this at the Education for All Conference in Dakar, where he said we must all band together to do more to get more girls in school, because it probably is the single most important development input that we could make to affect the rest of the country over the long term. So that aspect of this program is absolutely significant. We have seen so many success stories, not just in getting children to school but in developing an infrastructure in a country where one has not existed before. And I would like to cite in that case the small country of Bhutan, where recently I met with an official from that government who was about 45- years-old, and he told me that he had gone to school and he was now able to participate in the workings of his country, but his sister, only 5-years older than he, had not. And the reason, he said, was ``because the World Food Program came in in between my sister's school years and my school years and provided school feeding in the schools. And since we live in a mountainous area where it is difficult to get to the school, parents weren't going to send their children unless they were going to be able to eat. So I have an education, but the people just 5-years older than me have not.'' That is the kind of difference I think school feeding can make, and over and over again those are the kinds of stories that we hear. When we talk about this vision that Ambassador McGovern created, I think we talk about three aspects of it. First is the advocacy, that it is important for every child to have a meal at school, that is something that we all must be advocating worldwide. It is something that is not necessarily needing to be funded because it could be countries that could well afford to do it but may not appreciate all the reasons why this is important. So, first, to me, we are talking about advocacy. Second, we are talking about providing technical assistance because, again, some countries may have the resources or some of the resources, but they don't have the right technical skills. And there is a great wealth of technical resources, as has been pointed out already, here in the United States and also, I should say, in other countries where school feeding are strong programs. But to give an example, the people at the Food and Nutrition Service, they have been running school lunch and breakfast programs for years and years, yes, in the United States where everything is not necessarily replicable to a developing country, but their expertise could be extremely useful to the World Food Program, to the NGOs, and ultimately to other countries as well. The expertise of an organization like the ASFSA, who has been mentioned several places here before, we have talked to members and the leadership of ASFSA about this program and the prospect of using some of their people who have been experts in setting up school lunch programs in their own communities to be able to share that expertise elsewhere. And I can point to a seminar that the World Food Program held last December in Colombia where we invited all the Ministers of Education of South American countries, and almost all countries were represented. Most countries do have school feeding in South America. And we also invited experts, Spanish- speaking experts, from ASFSA, and what happened was a new understanding of some of the kind of things that networking and expertise from other countries such as the U.S. could bring. And as a result, the countries who were at the meeting in South America are now aggressively organizing the ways in which they can network among themselves and with the expertise available from the U.S. These are some of the kinds of things I think could be extremely useful as we continue down this road. Then, finally, of course, the major piece of this whole idea is the provision of food assistance and technical expertise to help countries to be able to put in school feeding projects. And I think that when we proceed in this way, we have to be careful in order to be sure that countries meet, for instance, the objectives that Secretary Glickman outlined, but we also have to follow up to ensure that the countries will make a commitment to running these programs over the long term themselves, because if they do not, it is not necessarily effective for us to go in with an open-ended program but, rather, we need to be organizing with countries a time-limited program and find an agreement with the countries up front that they will take over managing this program after a certain amount of years, and with that understanding it could proceed. We have found that when we do talk about these countries, we, again, talk about several different kinds of countries: OECD countries who we hope will be contributors, but who also we should talk with about their own programs and whether or not there is any need to look at them; relatively well off developing countries who would receive just only perhaps a small amount of technical assistance; middle-income countries where we would be talking about the prospect of food commodities, technical assistance, perhaps equipment; and then lower-income countries where, of course, the needs are far greater for all aspects of the school feeding program. We do have to demand accountability. We have to build that into the system from the beginning where we--we, the World Food Program, the PVOs, whomever--can be accountable to the donor, the U.S. Government, for how the food is distributed and who receives it and the process in which it is managed. If I can say also, when we look at the World Food Program, it has been mentioned many times today, I know you know WFP well, but in my formal testimony that you will have in the record, we talk about the number of people WFP served, for instance, last year 89-million-people. Over 11 million were children in school. In over 50 countries we were serving children in school. We, of course, have a large logistics base so that base has been very important because we have been able to move food and other commodities for our sister UN agencies as well as NGOs and, of course, the food provided through our own program. We work with about 1,200 nongovernmental organizations throughout the world, and we have very close partnerships with major American PVOs, many of whom we have a memorandum of understanding outlining how the two of us--or each of us can work together in order to try to support the work done in developing countries by our teams. We have the advantage, as was mentioned before by the Secretary, of working with other donors through the board of WFP. Our board is made up of 36 member governments, including the United States, and they approve the development and the refugee projects in which we are involved. We have had great flexibility in the tonnages that have come forward to WFP over the years, and we have been able to shift our program accordingly when we have a lot of food 1-year that we didn't have the year before, or, conversely, unfortunately, some years when we don't have enough, and we have been able to make those changes accordingly. Accountability is a very important issue for us, this issue that you mentioned, Mr. Chairman, and we put a high priority on it. In fact, I established the office of an inspector general about 5-years ago who is very aggressive in terms of ensuring that our food and other resources go to where it is intended to go. We would hope in this initiative to work with other partners in addition to the PVO community, in particular UNESCO from whom we get educational advice and expertise; UNICEF, who is very involved with programs for children throughout the world; and the United Nations University nutrition experts who have already offered to provide help, as well as technical expertise, as I mentioned, from other entities as well. I would be glad to go into more detail on these issues, but I want to close by saying, again, how exciting this prospect is, that we are actually at the beginning of launching a program where every child in the world could have food at school. It will make a major impact on the number of children in school and on their well-being and economic development of all of the countries of the world. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Ms. Bertini can be found in the appendix on page 81.] The Chairman. Well, I thank both of you for very detailed statements, and your presentations will be made a full part of the record, the text as well as your oral testimony. Let me just start, Secretary Glickman, by mentioning that on pages 4 and 5 of your testimony, you mention that in the United States the program will be coordinated through the existing interagency Food Assistance Policy Council, which is chaired by USDA but includes representatives from USAID, the Department of State, the Office of Management and Budget--OMB. This group has a very important responsibility because in a way, just to get to the nitty-gritty of the problem, you are going to be discussing which countries are the most likely candidates. So right off the bat, some decisions that are rather fateful, at least, are going to be made by this group, and the criteria that you have listed on page 5 are their need but also their contribution of resources, their commitment to expanding access to basic education. So at this point now we move sort of beyond the nutrition situation to a very important policy commitment. Of course, Senator McGovern earlier on and both of you have talked about the girls coming into these schools and the basic changes really in the life of those countries could come from that. But that is a very important criteria which perhaps will be acceded to by other countries happily, maybe some resistance, I don't know. But, second, you move beyond that to the program has to have a reasonable time frame, which is true, because essentially these programs in terms of our policies, our appropriations and decisionmaking, are sort of year by year. We need to know, somebody who has some hope of making this work in a year or two or three, as the case may be, their current infrastructure, including ability to deliver food to schools, which in some cases may be very sparse, these resources. And yet at the same time, on the one hand, of course, we are trying to help them stimulate the boosting of those resources, maybe through some of these PVOs or other organizations even providing some of this infrastructure, as well as the technical assistance that you mentioned even with the Japanese, the thought of how do you package the food, how do you cook the food. Technically, how do you provide, as we heard from other hearings, the food safety aspect so that we do not have a very severe problem in which we are perpetrators or create problems in another country? Then you added also beyond your text, Secretary Glickman, the idea of democracy or sort of their general outlook toward how people are treated, human rights, which is another criteria or set of criteria beyond that. So I see some heavy lifting by this policy group right at the outset, and I am wondering just from your first cut at this problem, let's say that we try to formulate a resolution, a piece of legislation or something that gives you some support. You can do a lot of this, perhaps, administratively and so that would be helpful, of course. But to the extent that you can't, how do you suspect you are going to go about determining, for example, in year one or even year one and two, how many countries, how many make the cut with all of these criteria. And then as we take a look at that situation, we come back into this overall theme that Senators McGovern and Dole brought forward, namely, 300-million-children in the world. But as Ms. Bertini has pointed out in her testimony, with 50 countries being served now by the World Food Program, 11-million-children, as I recall her testimony, that is a good number and a lot of countries already. So we have some experience with this, but obviously 11 is not 300 and I am sort of curious as we begin to frame this issue what increments we move in or do you envision--someone said a 10-year plan, but if so, what does it look like in, say, years one, two, three. Then, finally, just to add to your burden of answering this question, Ms. Bertini has said there are 50 countries involved in some sort of feeding of 11-million-children, 89-million- people all together, I guess. But who does this international diplomacy of inviting others to help or negotiating really the allocation of who does what? Now, obviously, in a program of this sort, we would have confidence in the Congress; you would have confidence in USDA, if USDA were doing it. You would have some accountability all the way through the process, and we could ask you to come to the Committee, ask Ms. Bertini to come, and say how did it work out, and you can report this. But now you have 36 countries, 50 countries, whatever the groupings that you have mentioned, Ms. Bertini, in this. You are over in Rome. Obviously, the American taxpayer would say what are the other countries doing. So, on the one hand, why, we want to make sure everybody is doing their fair share, but then when you come to accountability, that is, who actually is doing this. Now, in other fora, we get into problems like Kosovo, for example, presently where it is not clear, given four zones, or maybe even a fifth involving the Russians, and the UN, but the UN, poverty stricken for resources most of the time. Who does what in this proposition, and particularly if it is to be a sustained situation that goes through several Congresses, several administrations, with some credibility all the way through? This is a heavy load for one question, but these are the sorts of things that we want to grapple with because this is going to change the situation from something that is a remarkable idea to something that might happen in some form that we would recognize. Secretary Glickman. That is a fair amount of challenges you have just given me. Let me just make a couple of comments. One is that I think we can do much of this administratively, but I personally believe that legislation will ultimately be necessary to create a model to give this any long-term legs. Just simple things, for example, like Cathy mentioned how the Food Nutrition Services run school lunch programs and related things, but I am not sure they have a lot of legal authority to go help people around the world set up their lunch programs. And so I can think of many things in which you would need to provide some resources, for example, in the transportation side that you cannot do right now. There are a variety of things that I think would have to be dealt with legislatively if you want to make this program a real success. Second of all, you know, the President did bring this idea forward in the G-8 in Okinawa, and he talked with those folks who were there, and there was a general interest in what he talked about. He talked with Tony Blair, the Japanese, and others, particularly about this effort and how this could not be a unilateral United States effort, although we have probably more experience than anybody else in the world running this kind of a program. The third I would say is that some of these issues have been raised ever since we started food assistance programs. We, of course, have an interagency task force that disposes of millions of tons of surplus food every year in the international arena, so we have an infrastructure which we currently do to do that already. And a lot of the same questions you asked are relevant to--for example, all the assistance to Russia, which was extremely complicated, oversight, accountability, how was the money spent, how are proceeds monetized, all those kinds of things are things that we have been doing with respect to those other food donation issues. Generally speaking, it is a multidisciplinary effort in the Government, but, by and large, USDA has taken the leadership role in putting these things together, which we would expect we would continue to do because most of the funding would come out of the Commodity Credit Corporation account. Richard Fritz runs the Commodity Credit Corporation and has great experience in this area. I think it would be worthwhile to hear his perspective on this. The Chairman. Mr. Fritz? Mr. Fritz. Thank you, Senator. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Basically, we can run this program with existing authority; however, I think it could run better and smoother if we could change some of the parameters of the number of programs that we have to work in, including providing some international authorities for groups like the Food and Nutrition Service of USDA. I think the Secretary has laid it out well on how the Food Assistance Policy Council works. The official members are those that you mentioned, but very often other parts of the U.S. Government come and attend those meetings and have their inputs from a variety of views. This is certainly a work in process. We had one meeting with the PVOs yesterday. We will continue those meetings in August. We are meeting with the staff of your committee, and we will be looking at countries basically on what they can provide. Obviously, those that are well-off will have shorter graduation time periods than those who are less well-off and can provide the infrastructure necessary to deliver a preschool and school feeding program. So we have a lot of work to do ahead of us, and we will be working with you and the community to make sure that this is a successful program. The Chairman. Well, I appreciate both of your responses. It just occurs to me--and it is appropriate that Senator Cochran is here because he is the Chairman of the Appropriation Committee for Agriculture. At some point, let's say you handle it all in-house and you suggested legislation might be useful for longevity of this program, but maybe you would say for the first year we have got to get this thing off the ground. Now, this has to appear somewhere probably in your budget submission, whether it is $750 million or a more modest sum. And then this raises some questions of competing interest in the USDA budget which are not inconsequential. You face these all the time. Here is something probably over and beyond anything you have requested before from the Department, and that comes up pretty soon. I mentioned the Budget Committee starting right off the bat in January, and Senator Cochran and his group coming right after them as the appropriators. So the reason I am raising these questions now is that the time frame of this doesn't exactly fit. We have national elections going on. We have an interim period. We have Congress being sworn in, committees and all the rest of it, and a new administration, either Mr. Gore or Mr. Bush, who may or may not share all of what we have been thinking about today, but could maybe be brought up to speed by some of us. So I am sort of requesting some idea of the money that is going to be required, anticipating that even though there is enthusiasm in this room for what we are doing here, we have hearings every day of groups that come here. We had sugar people yesterday, for example. Secretary Glickman. I have heard of that issue. The Chairman. A very different sort of meeting. [Laughter.] And it was just as large a crowd. But we will have others, all of whom have requirements. Now, what I am also suggesting probably is that the construct that both of you have committed of some legislation that makes this a permanent entity or some rules of the road, if we are to have some hope of this being a multi-year thing is probably required. Without getting into a lot of stories that are totally not related, but in a way, the School Lunch Program comes to mind here in this country. You know, in 1995 and 1996, there was a movement that was fairly substantial to change the character of the American school lunch program. One was on the books, and it said it was universal, it applies to all 50 States. A child in the United States is a child in the United States, not in Indiana or Ohio or what have you. There were other Members of Congress with very strong motivation and idealism who said in a Federal system Ohio ought to run its own program and have criteria, or Illinois, or what have you. Now, I took the position--and ultimately that was the one that prevailed because I would not sign the conference report and, therefore, the change couldn't be made--that we would have a universal program, that a child was defenseless, could not move from State to State to take advantage of who had a program here or didn't somewhere else. But if we had not had a framework that was there already of a universal program, we might have been in some trouble. Administratively, whoever was Secretary of Agriculture then, or whoever, might have decided let's try a pilot project or let's try something else. And this is what I anticipate with this program. If there are not pretty good criteria as to who is selected, who runs it, all the way through, that may be amended by other Congresses. But at least there is a structure there that was not something being handled day by day even by people as competent as yourselves at USDA. So that is just sort of an editorial comment, but a concern that I hope that you share. Secretary Glickman. I do. And let me just say this: You know, I think that we can start this program administratively through the surplus removal authority under the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act. We would have to get an allocation, an apportionment in the Office of Management and Budget to do it. But anything longer term will really require, if not a legislative solution, some sort of approval process from the Congress. And in addition to that, we probably can't run this program over the long term very effectively without additional infrastructure ourselves. For example, we tripled food aid donations last year with actually less staff than we had 5-years-ago, 10-years-ago, 15- years-ago. And if the United States is going to assert its role in trying to deal with these humanitarian issues in the world, you have got to have the domestic infrastructure to deal with it. And, quite frankly, it is real thing right now. So if our ideas aren't met with a way to accomplish these objectives, it is not going to be very successful. I agree with you there. The Chairman. And it is a remarkable idea, as everybody has commented, because in terms of our own humanitarian interests, but likewise our own foreign policy, if the infrastructure is done right, if we are thoughtful about the cooking, the packaging, how you do a model school lunch program around the world, this is an extraordinary American influence that comes into the grassroots of all sorts of places. Secretary Glickman. If I just might, not so much a point of personal privilege, I am not going to do what Senator Harkin did, but Mr. Schumacher was in Indonesia, and I would just like to have him tell you just briefly what we have done with milk product there in the schools and how it affects people's lives. And it is the U.S. that is doing it. It is largely done through some PVOs, I think. Mr. Schumacher. Very briefly, Senator, I was out there a few months ago. With 6,000 tons of reconstituted milk powder that we donated, they are now feeding 600,000 children every day. We are going to be doing 60-million-little-cartons of milk that cost 10-cents each, UHT, and it has worked very, very well. In addition, we are providing rice to school children who, because of the crisis, dropped out of school because they have to go to work, regarding Senator Harkin's concerns. And the rice is provided through the school teachers to bring those school children back into school; 900,000 children are benefiting from that program. And this is the product of American dairy farmers and American rice farmers, and it is working very well. The World Food Program is very active in the rice. In the inner city, we were in garbage dumps that people are picking rags, and the local private voluntary organizations from local universities were brought in by Cathy's people, blue hats, and they are energizing people who are little bit better off to help people who are a little bit worse off. It is working very well. I think American farmers should be proud of that. The Chairman. Well, that is remarkable testimony. It just occurs to me that members of this committee, probably even a broader group, need to have at least a map of the world or some matrix to know really the things we are doing now to sort of fill in that background. Listening to all of this, I am sure we all understand the poverty of our own knowledge about what America is doing. Senator Cochran. STATEMENT OF HON. THAD COCHRAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM MISSISSIPPI Senator Cochran. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I am glad to have a chance to come over and find out what this is all about. I looked at the notebook that my staff members had prepared in preparation for this hearing, and I was interested to see that not only was Ambassador George McGovern going to be here this morning and Senator Bob Dole and other colleagues, Richard Durbin and others, but Catherine Bertini, whom I have respected and known for a good many years in her capacity as Director of the World Food Program--I also remember when she was in the administration here and had responsibilities for food programs--and Secretary Glickman and others. I read through some of the statements while trying to catch up a little bit because I was late getting here, and I noticed that Ellen Levinson has some interesting comments to make on this subject, too. We have assembled some impressive experts in this area, people who care about not only feeding the hungry around the world, but who have had personal experience in doing just that. I came over to congratulate them, and to let them know that I am interested in this idea. It sounds like something we should seriously consider, and I am confident that under the leadership of Chairman Dick Lugar we will seriously consider this proposal. One observation that I have comes from the statement that Catherine Bertini submitted, and that is that the World Food Program is the right organization to take responsibility of the overall management of this program. The challenge is to help countries launch and sustain the programs that are national in scope and only those governments can do this. That is something that I think we need to realize, that we can pass a bill here and we are going to have a lot of work to do to follow up and make it work, and a lot of that is going to have to do with how successful we are at getting other governments involved. Individual school feeding projects can help specific communities, but they will not be enough to reach the goal of providing food to school children around the world. So, we need to be cognizant of the caveats that are sprinkled through here, too, in some of these statements, and to recognize that what we are hearing proposed is a one-year pilot program, as I understand it, and $300 million was the President's suggestion. That is something that I believe we should keep in mind. So I am here to learn more about how we do it and what the trade-offs are what the effects would be on other programs. We usually take surplus commodities held by the Commodity Credit Corporation to make donations. We may or may not have the surplus commodities in years to come that we do right now. So there are a lot of considerations, but I am glad to be here to lend my support to the effort to find a way to achieve some of these goals, and I hope we can do that. The Chairman. Thank you very much, Senator Cochran. I would just mention that the $300 million the President talked about at Okinawa was certainly an important idea. The idea that Senator McGovern and Senator Dole presented and that has been amplified by Secretary Glickman is obviously a much more ambitious idea. It is with regard to children all over the world and for some period of time. This is why I have been interrogating the Secretary about the selection of who and which countries, what order. Let me just ask one more question along that line. President Clinton visited, as you pointed out, with Prime Minister Blair and with others, but sort of at what level does our Government really get solid commitments from our friends from other countries who are part of that G-8 group who have the wherewithal to be serious about this type of thing? Some of this can occur over in your shop, Ms. Bertini, and you visit with these people all the time, and they make commitments and they are helpful. But this is a very ambitious idea if it is taken really to the full extent, which probably requires some heavy lifting close to the top, if not the President of the United States himself, with others who have a long-term view also and who may say we sort of share this vision. So this is what I am wondering, even at this working level of this interagency committee, you make some selections of who seems to pass muster. For example, when the group gets together and you discuss universality of educational opportunity, democratic tendencies, which, on a scale of 1 to 10, may be somewhere--this becomes even more complex with world leaders trying to decide what we do at this point. If you had, for instance, Prime Minister Putin in the conversation, he might have a different set of ideas as to who is worthy, and he might be right. In other words, it may be in our interest to be involved in some countries that are sort of suspect on a number of these areas but have a lot of hungry children and have a need, we believe, for an American presence or a need for others who may come into their economies. We talk about this all the time on the China trade issue, that we are going to influence a country by having business people but also journalists, missionaries, everybody in the country, the engagement of the whole situation might change minds and hearts. But that is also a very big set of circumstances, and this is why I--I don't mean to hop on pages 4 and 5, but when you get into the selection of countries and who sustains this and the time frame and their ideals, that is a complex set of questions in terms of our international diplomacy. Secretary Glickman. Well, I think perhaps Cathy may want to comment on this, too, but let me just quickly state that the President made this a priority in Okinawa. There was a significant interest there. It is true, however, that this initiative cannot be sustained unless there are other folks involved, and it can't just be the United States only, although we do provide I guess between 30- and 50-percent generally of-- -- Ms. Bertini. Fifty-percent the last 3-years. Secretary Glickman. Fifty-percent the last 3-years of the receipts of the World Food Program. So we are a big player here. But I think this again points out why you have to have the PVOs. The non-governmental organizations working with and cooperatively with the World Food Program have got to be in a position to help us direct where these things are going, because I would hate to see a central decision made by the U.S. Government with respect to each one of these projects, you know. I think we need to set up the thematic organization that needs to be accountable, but ultimately it is on the ground that is going to decide where it is going to be most effective. The Chairman. Ms. Bertini? Ms. Bertini. Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. It will need to be a simple list of what are the criteria in terms of what countries should be involved, but I think perhaps an example, maybe a stark example, is Afghanistan. If girls can't go to school, clearly they are not committed to education for all; therefore, it would be assumed that would not be a country where we would propose that we would have a program here. However, there might be a program where there would be a commitment to education for all, but still very few girls in school. In that case, I think we would have to put some sort of an agreement together with the Government that we will come, but the girls' enrollment has to increase by a certain amount each time or else we can't continue over the long term. So I think those are some of the kind of issues that we have to work out together. If I could address a couple other issues you mentioned, first of all, on the broader scale, if we are to be in an advocacy role, and, in fact, if we are to promote this idea that every child should eat at school, there are really two ways to go. One, it could be a totally American project and proposal, managed totally by USDA working with the PVOs, WFP, whomever it chooses to work with. The plus side of that is that then USDA could manage every part of it. The negative part of that is that no other countries will really particularly want to participate in something that is strictly and totally a bilateral American project. The other side, of course, if it is multilateral, which is the way that I think it is being discussed, then we have to discuss certain things. Certainly advocacy, getting other countries involved, requires the involvement of an international or multilateral institution, and that is, I think, a key place where WFP can come in working with USDA. The management in terms of the program in each country then is more or could be more flexible. When we talk about this over the long term, there are several--in terms of the importance of congressional involvement and leadership and decisionmaking here, there are several points that the Secretary has made. One is if we are to use the expertise of the domestic folks, then there may need to be some legislative changes to allow that. Another is that currently when USDA gives us, or AID, for that matter, gives funding to us or to PVOs, they can pay for the internal transportation cost in poor countries if they give us funding for emergencies, but not funding for development. And now if we are trying to get a school feeding program up in some of the poorest countries in the world, they don't have the funds available to provide the transportation. So that is something that also could be looked at. And I don't believe that requires additional funding because it could come out of the total package, whatever the total package is, if I am not mistaken. A third issue that I think the PVOs are probably best suited to answer is the issue about the process, and the process of the Policy Council and how it works. And my guess is that the PVOs would have some good thoughts about ways to streamline that process while still having the oversight responsibility at USDA. So those are some of the technical things that we can see at least early on, and then on the longer term, of course, the commitment over the long term for food, because assuming that this is a successful launch, I am sure everyone is interested in providing the wherewithal to continue the program, because 1-year of a school feeding program is almost nothing at all. It is really long term. The Chairman. I thank you for those clarifications. Clearly, as you pointed out, in the poorest of the poor the ability to get a program, to interact with us or with other countries is limited, and yet those are countries that we are going to have to be thoughtful about. The other point I want to make is that out of this committee we have already passed legislation which would say our country cannot have a sanction with regard to food. But that has not passed two Houses of the Congress, and as a matter of fact, there are disputes about using food as a sanction, as a weapon, within our own Congress, our own Government. So that is something we will have to resolve in due course, but it does get into this international diplomatic aspect. I appreciate your coming. Let me just say before I recess the hearing--which I am going to do because we will have the swearing in of Senator Miller at 11 o'clock, and obviously Senators will want to be there for that very important ceremony. That will be followed, as I understand, by a roll call vote on a cloture petition, and then I will be back, and maybe other Senators with me, for four very important witnesses. So I apologize to those witnesses and to all of you who have been faithful in viewing this hearing, but we will have to try to work with our colleagues on the floor for a few moments, and I hope people understand. We thank you both very much for coming. [Recess.] This hearing is called to order again, and the Chair would like to call the panelists: Dr. Beryl Levinger, Senior Director, Educational Development Center, and Distinguished Professor, Monterey Institute of International Studies; Ken Hackett, Executive Director of Catholic Relief Services; Ellen Levinson, Executive Director of the Coalition for Food Aid; and Carole Brookins, Chairman and CEO of World Perspectives, Incorporated. We thank you very much for your patience, but we have had a remarkable ceremony, greeted a new colleague, heard his maiden speech, which is a tribute to our departed colleague. And the roll call vote has occurred, and now we are back in business, and we appreciate so much your staying with the hearing, and those in the audience who likewise share our enthusiasm for this. I am going to call upon you in the order that I first mentioned you, first of all, Dr. Levinger. STATEMENT OF BERYL LEVINGER, SENIOR DIRECTOR, EDUCATIONAL DEVELOPMENT CENTER, AND DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR, MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, MONTEREY, CA. Dr. Levinger. Good morning, Mr. Chairman and colleagues. Thank you for inviting me to share my views this morning on the world school feeding initiative. Before I begin my testimony, just let me say a few words of introduction about myself. As Chairman Lugar has already mentioned, I work with Educational Development Center, but what is relevant about my career actually is that I have worked in the area of international education and poverty alleviation for more than 30-years and have provided short-term and long-term technical assistance to more than 70-countries in the area of education, health, and nutrition. And in the last 15-years, I have authored three major books that are particularly relevant to my testimony today: a comprehensive review of international school feeding programs published by USAID; a book published by UNDP on the relationship between health, nutrition, and learning outcomes; and then, finally, a review of factors that contribute to human capacity development, also published by UNDP. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you, if I might, what I have learned in the course of this academic work and on-site technical assistance in terms of what difference school feeding might or might not make. And I am going to focus my remarks first of all on situations of extreme poverty, and I would like to begin by addressing the area of learning outcomes. There is a substantial body of research to support the following assertion: The level of a student's cognitive performance is, in part, a function of the adequacy of his or her diet. The importance of this research is that it establishes a theoretical and empirical framework for a major claim made by the supporters of the initiative, namely, that when such programs provide malnourished participants with an adequate diet, learning can be reasonably anticipated--learning in the form of cognitive development, to be sure. Unfortunately, this assertion is only partly correct, and we need a caveat to make that assertion fully correct. Let me share with you what that caveat is, namely, again, meaningful learning and meaningful cognitive development will occur only when a facilitative learning environment is present to complement the food that a child receives. Food alone just doesn't do it. And we know that because for generations upon generations we have been saying man does not live by bread alone. In the late 1960s and in the early 1970s, it was assumed by many researchers that the brain changes produced by malnutrition led directly to an impairment of learning which was often irreversible. Well, great news. In recent decades, this position has been abandoned and, in fact, reversed. Currently, the most widely accepted hypothesis is that malnutrition exerts its major influence on behavioral competencies through dysfunctional changes in attention span, responsiveness, motivation, and emotionality rather than through a more direct impairment of the child's ability to learn. This situation implies hopeful prospects for the reversibility of the effects that occur when a child is hungry or malnourished. But what it also says to us is that we need to create facilitative learning environments so that teachers, for example, can provide feedback and encouragement while engaging children in stimulating learning tasks. In most developing countries, this entails investments in teacher training, texts, and other learning materials. The truth today is that most schooling in the developing world is far from facilitative. Children sit in severely overcrowded classrooms, or outdoors, with poorly trained teachers, and spend countless hours repeating meaningless phrases in a language they often do not understand. They have no books, no blackboard, and frequently, no desks or chairs. We are all too familiar with the results of this environment. Millions of children never enroll in school throughout Africa and Asia, and millions more drop out before completing the first four grades of primary. For those who do attend, little learning takes place. In one recent study in Ghana, a study that was sponsored by USAID, fewer than 3-percent of all sixth graders had achieved basic literacy and math skills as stipulated by the curriculum. That is fewer than 3-percent on a test that was designed so that the average pass grade should have been 90-percent. Similar results have been noted in other African countries that have undertaken the rather daunting task of measuring student mastery of curriculum objectives. In an environment of such extreme educational impoverishment, school feeding may get more children to come to school, although, as I will show in a moment, this assumption is questionable; but it is doubtful that feeding alone will get them to learn more. Why? Because the educational environment in which the feeding is going to occur allows very little learning to take place. In my written testimony, I have cited two studies. In one, food alone was offered to children, and in the other, feeding was accompanied by an enriched learning environment. Sustainable long-term academic performance gains were only observed in the educationally enriched setting. In summary, then, the proposed initiative needs to include provisions for a portion of the commodities to be monetized, preferably over a 3-year period. Funds obtained through monetization should be used by PVOs to engage parents as partners in the educational enterprise, to train teachers in active learning methods, to create motivational textbooks and other learning materials that are cognitively stimulating, to improve sanitation so that schools are not major disease vectors, and to create classroom learning environments that are conducive to learning. I don't mean that these things should be carried on maybe by somebody else at some future time to be negotiated. What I am saying is that these components need to be intimately integrated at the outset, at the design phase, into a school feeding program. Let me just say a few words, if I might, on another assumption that has been made, which is the question of school feeding in relation to attendance and enrollment. Many studies have explored this relationship, and it is interesting that the most positive relationships are generally found in the least rigorous, most impressionistic studies. When control groups have been used, when retrospective attendance data consulting records has been used, we get findings that are far more ambiguous. I should also note in passing that PVOs have taken the lead in performing the most ambitious--in terms of methodological techniques--studies. In general, we find that where parental perceptions of school quality are very low and poverty is extreme, feeding cannot overcome the factors that lead parents to keep their children, particularly their daughters, at home. However, if families live at the border of the terrain that separates extreme poverty from marginal self-sufficiency and if the quality of schooling is at least sufficient so as not to dampen or even destroy demand, then and only then can feeding bring children, especially girls, to school. Once again, though, the quality of schooling is critical in terms of school feeding impact, and, once again, I might add, there is a critical role for PVOs to play in improving educational quality through the partial monetization of commodities, not for in-country transportation, not to buy the equipment with which to cook or prepare the food or to store the food but, rather, to actually improve the schooling that is attached to the feeding. Finally, allow me to comment on how school feeding programs influence nutritional status and hunger, the third area of expected program benefit. There is little evidence to support nutritional status change as a result of school feeding, and there are many reasons for this. Parents often provide one less meal at home so that the food received in school is not additive in terms of a child's dietary intake. Programs are often too irregular in terms of the percentage of days in the school year where food is actually served for logistical reasons, for management reasons; and, therefore, when we realize that a child to be well nourished has to eat 365-days- a-year, the school feeding program simply doesn't offer enough of a difference. In conclusion, I would like to offer a few additional observations relative to the proposed initiative. Number one, host governments are expected to significantly contribute to the cost of the program over time. Is there a hidden trade-off between adequately paid teachers, quality textbooks, sufficient classrooms, parental outreach, and the costs of a feeding program? I believe there is, and it is not one that I for one would be willing to make. I do not believe that food alone can lead to improvements in learning, attendance, and enrollment in those countries where poverty is rampant and school is nothing more than meaningless repetition of phrases in chaotic conditions. School lunch programs did work in the U.S. precisely because the quality of education in our schools was high enough so that the lunch was that extra added factor that made all the difference in the world. When you think about the costs of the proposed initiative and the fact that governments are going to be picking up those costs, I think we also have to take a moment to do some stock taking. Typically, in developing countries, the budget that is spent on learning--that is to say, expenses other than school construction, recurrent costs--is something on the order of $5 to $10 per year per child. What would it cost to do school feeding when a country is to assume that responsibility? Probably something at least on the order of $5 to $10 a year per child at a minimum, and probably quite a bit more. How could this be sustainable when countries are already taxing their budgets to the extent generally of 22- to 25-percent, and they can't even get textbooks and teachers into classrooms? U.S. PVOs must play a major role in implementing the proposed initiative. This is my second concluding point. Such organizations as CRS, CARE, and Save the Children already have major education initiatives underway that are designed to introduce the qualitative elements so necessary if parents are to enroll their children in school. Make no mistake about it. In study after study, we see that parental perception about school quality is often the key factor in determining whether and for how long a child is to attend. Third, monetization with at least a 3-year window for spending monetized funds is necessary in order to introduce the education quality elements that are required to transform a school feeding program into a potent intervention. We must not mistake food for education or food-aided education with food for learning. This is where children actually learn and where presence in a schoolhouse truly contributes to overall development goals. Food for learning must be our vision, and to enact it we must build strong, productive linkages between the consumption of a meal and everything else that occurs during a typical school day. PVOs have an important role to play in the transformation of school feeding programs into food for learning, and I hope that the proposed initiative entails specific provision for their participation as well as for their monetization of commodities so that the needed investments in quality can be made. Only then will feeding lead to meaningful societal transformation. Mr. Chairman, thank you for this opportunity to testify, and I will be glad to answer any questions you might have. [The prepared statement of Dr. Levinger can be found in the appendix on page 89.] The Chairman. Thank you very much, Doctor. Mr. Hackett. STATEMENT OF KENNETH HACKETT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, CATHOLIC RELIEF SERVICES, BALTIMORE, MD. Mr. Hackett. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I really appreciate this opportunity to testify on behalf of the Catholic Relief Services, which is the official relief and development agency of the U.S. Catholic community. I am also here on behalf of a group of American private voluntary organizations that have a very long history in the management of U.S. foreign food assistance. We as a group deeply appreciate the efforts of Ambassador McGovern and Senator Dole, the administration, and others who have dramatically raised the profile on this important topic. The global school feeding initiative is founded, it seems, on the most laudable of American humanitarian principles: our concern for and solidarity with the poor overseas. CRS and the other PVOs have experience in managing U.S. Government-funded school feeding programs since the very inception of those programs in the 1950s, and I would like to take an opportunity to discuss the lessons we have learned in our implementation of those programs. Our comments are intended to enhance what is an already commendable initiative and strengthen it so that it will have a lasting impact on those it is designed to assist. I just returned on Sunday from Zimbabwe where I spent a few days meeting with my staff from 14 countries in East and Southern Africa. And I have to pick up on what Senator Durbin said about the AIDS crisis. It is having a tremendous impact demographically and on the very fabric of society. And it is initiatives like this one that may contribute to an improvement of the lives of those people who are being so dramatically affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic throughout Africa and other parts of the world. So we look at it in a very positive way. We have learned over the years in managing food-assisted education programs in schools and at the community level that any program designed to improve access and impact on primary education must be broader than simply school feeding, as Dr. Levinger said. In fact, there is a great coincidence between most of what she said and what I have to say here, so I will shorten it because you have heard it and we agree with it. We must involve communities directly in such programs. Such programs must be multi-faceted, multi-year, and be comprehensive in their approach. And to truly impact on learning and academic achievement, food must be complemented by other interventions. In our programs, we have activities with the development of PTAs, and other types of involvement of parents directly in schools. In addition, we have programs for micronutrient supplements, vitamin A and things like that. But then you also have to deal with the teachers and the management of the school. The learning environment in its totality, as Dr. Levinger said, is most important. We believe that food can be an important resource, but it alone is not sufficient to improve educational achievement. Improving educational quality and coverage in economically impoverished communities calls for a long-term and reliable commitment in policy and multi-year resources. The provision of food for only short periods of time does not allow time for systems and standards and relationships to be sufficiently established and would jeopardize, if they were only run for short periods of time, any impact. Resources allocated for the program must be in addition, we feel, to the current levels of U.S. Government food assistance. Not to do so takes away from ongoing programs that successfully address the needs of some groups of people. And as has been said--and we were very happy to hear Secretary Glickman's testimony--complementary dollar funds are also essential for success. To be most effective, this program must be targeted to the neediest communities in the neediest countries, and only in the context where food is an appropriate intervention. The American private voluntary community has experience, it has capacity, and it is interested in this concept. You may be aware that over the last decade the engagement of that community in education programs has diminished--diminished significantly. This is due in part to shifting public assistance priorities, increasingly burdensome and costly management requirements, and lack of financial commitments to accompany available food assistance. We would like to increase our engagement, and as I say, we are heartened by what the Secretary had to say about how the program should be designed. But to do so, I propose that a global agreement be established between the administrative agencies of the U.S. Government--if that be USDA, so be it--and the PVOs, the American PVOs, to identify, develop, and carry out effective programs of food and other resources. Such an agreement would help to address the increasingly burdensome regulations and costs that the American PVO community have encountered in operating food assistance programs. The American PVOs, such as CRS, should have direct access to food and cash resources in a manner similar to what has been evolved with the UN agencies. This would heighten the interest in the involvement of American PVOs and their constituents. The American PVO involvement is important, we believe, for two reasons: First and foremost, we have extensive experience in implementing school feeding and other types of programs. We have community contacts, not just national government contacts. We have built up trust, and we have existing programs. Second, we believe and understand U.S. official humanitarian foreign assistance to be essentially an expression of American solidarity, and we see American PVOs as the best expression of American solidarity. The global school feeding initiative and the subsequent momentum it has generated in Congress and in the administration are positive signs of general concern for the poor and the sense of responsibility for those in need. We would like to harness the good will and the energy evident in the initiative to have a real impact on improving the quality of education for children in the developing world. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Mr. Hackett can be found in the appendix on page 96.] The Chairman. Thank you very much, Mr. Hackett. Ms. Levinson. STATEMENT OF ELLEN S. LEVINSON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, COALITION FOR FOOD AID, WASHINGTON, DC. Ms. Levinson. Thank you. My name is Ellen Levinson, Mr. Chairman. I am government relations adviser at the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. Today I am here on behalf of the Coalition for Food Aid, which is comprised of private voluntary organizations with whom you are familiar who do international work. In particular, I will focus my oral remarks, because I hope that my written statement can be submitted for the record---- The Chairman. It will be completely recorded. Ms. Levinson. I want to focus on some of the issues that you have been asking regarding this large-scale global food for education initiative. First of all, how would it be implemented or how could it be? It is something that takes planning, but there is a desire to get a kick-start this year. We have surpluses in the United States, and I think that the President's announcement reflects the need and desire in the agriculture community to get some of these surpluses off the market today and to use them constructively overseas. I can see where the kick-start is a very positive step, both in the desire and needs of our American agriculture community to move their commodities, and to try to target it to something positive. Thus, initiative is going forward. On a positive side of the initiative, in the first year, in the pilot phase little time can be taken to allocate commodities under Section 416. We have to ship them by the end of December 2001. Thought needs to be given about not just distributing those commodities, because that is a short period of time to identify appropriate targets and start a whole distribution system. Find where there could be additionality and expansion of programs or new programs that are ready to go and may be ready to start distribution. The monetization that Dr. Levinger is referring to, the sale of the commodity in the country and the use of the proceeds for building the basic structures for education, is an important element that could be very constructive in the first year of the program. Those funds could actually be spent over several years under the current law. You could sell in 1-year and use those funds over several years to support the development of the PTAs, the school structures, the training of teachers, etc., to create the environment where education can take place and also where distribution can take place, This is an approach that could be very positive this year. A second thing that could happen very positively in a pilot program is to search for new ways and innovative approaches to using food assistance. PVOs are trying a variety of ways, and probably others are as well, to make these programs more effective. I know that you are going to be hearing soon from the private sector. There may be some ways in this pilot phase to see how the private sector can partner with the organizations tat do the work on the ground and with local administrators--how they could come together in some more creative ways. Allowing this flexibility would be very important. Third is an issue that Mr. Hackett just raised, and that is an administrative issue. This year will be a jump-start of the program. Secretary Glickman pointed out that they have been doing a lot more food aid than usual at USDA, a significant amount, and their staffing for that is pretty thin. It is important to somehow facilitate the relationship between USDA and non-governmental groups. It is very easy for USDA and the World Food Program to relate because they have what is called a ``Global Agreement.'' When USDA wants to make an additional commitment to WFP, they can just add on to it. However every time a PVO comes up with an idea or a plan, it has to go through a much more rigorous review. However, if a PVO has been in this field for many years--I mean, you are talking about organizations. I know my members work in over 100 countries and have on-ground expertise and really capabilities, and they show best practices. They have computer systems for tracking and monitoring the food. They have in place measurements to not only measure the food and how much gets there, but the impact, in other words, progress of the program. So if they have these best practices in place and they can basically show that they are capable of handling these programs, that the USDA should enter into this type of a global agreement that Mr. Hackett referred to, that would help USDA in its administrative struggles as well. So, for example, if Catholic Relief Service had identified three particular locations where it wanted to pilot some interesting work or additional work, it could do this under this agreement without USDA feeling the obligation or need to go through a whole series of analysis and time constraints. So I think some of these ideas could come forward in this pilot regarding countries of choice. Many of these PVOs are, you know, now that there is a pilot announced, looking at their programs, I know, and I am sure the World Food Program is, too, because they are dealing a lot with national governments and probably looking there to see which ones would be appropriate. I would be happy to answer any other questions that you raise, but I just wanted to throw out some of those ideas for you directed to some of your questions. Thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Ms. Levinson can be found in the appendix on page 105.] The Chairman. Well, we thank you for that testimony. Ms. Brookins. STATEMENT OF CAROLE BROOKINS, CHAIRMAN AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, WORLD PERSPECTIVES, INC., WASHINGTON, DC. Ms. Brookins. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First of all, my name is Carole Brookins, and I am Chairman and CEO of World Perspectives, which is a company I founded 20-years ago to do analysis and consulting globally on political, economic, and trade factors affecting agricultural markets and the global food system. And I appreciate the opportunity to be with you today to discuss this very exciting concept. I certainly applaud everything that has been said all morning, both starting with Ambassador McGovern and Senator Dole, and, of course, Secretary Glickman, and, your very important kick-off to this hearing today. I have considered this issue myself for several years, and I think that the question that we are really grappling with is not the merit of the concept, as you have said, but the best means to carry it forward. I can remember back in the 1970s--I guess when you get old, this is what they pay you for, your memory, but, you know, I can remember back in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger said we would ``end hunger in my generation.'' You know, well, Henry is still around and we still haven't ended hunger. And I think we have been grappling, even with the recent World Food Summit, to try to get our arms around this again. But when we take a look at this concept and how to carry it forward, I truly believe if we implemented appropriately and effectively, it could be to the next 50-years what Food for Peace brought to the world's hungry over the last century, and on top of it have a very profound impact on the economic development of countries around the world. In terms of the merit of the concept--I will submit my testimony to the record--I think we all can agree on the importance that this concept brings. But I think that we have to throw one other point in--that humanitarianism and good citizenship and good business are not mutually exclusive. Think that has been something that has been very much lacking in this morning's hearing, with the possible exception of how this very much fits into a child labor initiative. In fact that is where my ideas began came a year and a half ago. If we want to eliminate child labor, we are going to have to give children education, and good education. And we are going to have to give incentives for parents and the ability for parents--to let their children go and get an education while they have to be concerned about making sure they have adequate diets. Whereas the President made some very important statements on this issue in Okinawa, the great focus of the G-8 now is on eliminating the digital divide. I think that we have kind of jumped a lot of steps, because before we can aspire to ending the digital divide, we must first end the nutrition divide and are bringing many, many more people in the marketplace. Now, as to the means to the end, a very wise person once told me when I was starting my business that 10-percent of a successful business venture is the idea and 90-percent is the implementation. So with this in mind, I would like to raise a few considerations that I think are critical to putting a sustainable program in place instead of just getting good advocacy discussion about something and rounding up the usual suspects again, as we have done on many occasions. First of all, we know that bilateral and multilateral food aid programs have been operating for more than 50-years, that some have been more effective than others. There have been problems in implementing other school lunch programs over the years such as cost-effectiveness and practical implementation issues, including logistical problems which have been identified. But, most importantly, the sustainability of the programs has been a problem because most such programs have relied almost exclusively on government budget support. And I think when we look even at surplus commodity disposal, trying to get the European Union and others to agree even to a tonnage commitment on food aid, apart from a monetary commitment, has been a real problem in maintaining a sustainable supply. This isn't to say that the World Food Program's work has not been highly successful in many cases and that many non- governmental organizations, including the leadership here at this table, have not been extremely effective in delivering both food and technical assistance in a cost-effective way that has obviously been provided by donors, by official donors through bilateral or multilateral assistance. And they bring tremendous resources and experience to this program. I agree that all these players need to be involved in creating a sustainable initiative. However, I think that past experience and the structure of today's globalized economy means that this ambitious goal cannot be sustainably achieved by simply adding on to the broad programs that are already being carried out, or by using only public sector financing and administering only through national and multinational public sector initiatives. If there is anything we have learned from the last two decades in particular, it is that the tremendous momentum of wealth creation, flexibility, innovation and productivity, and real-time response is in the private commercial sector. So I would like to set out my own implementation guidelines. First, this must be a real private and public partnership initiative. And when I say that, this is not just a matter of PVOs or NGOs and Government entities, but also getting the private commercial sector involved, both private corporations and foundations. There is not one country that I have visited--and I am sure the same is true for you, Mr. Chairman--where we have not seen our companies involved very directly in community outreach wherever they are in the developing world. And what better way to meet the two goals of creating a highly trained workforce and also creating real buying power in a country than beginning to focus on getting children educated and getting children adequate nutrition. Second, this must not be a food dumping initiative. It cannot be a one-year commitment when we have surplus commodities, or when there is an election coming and, we have to show that we are moving product. This must be sustainable over time in terms of both monies pledged and commodities pledged. It must have a multi-year commitment to it. Third, it must not be layered into existing bureaucratic agendas. Too many good ideas get swamped or drowned in bureaucratic channels. We have seen this over and over again, and that is why I suggested a year and a half ago to set up a new private-public institute which I have named Food for Education and Economic Development [FEED]. FEED could be mandated much as the National Endowment for Democracy was in 1983 and has had a tremendous record with a very targeted, focused mandate involving both Government money and private money. And fourth it must begin, as far as I am concerned, on a small targeted scale, be it at a national level, or be it, as Ellen Levinson said, at a very local level. You need to come up with very solid terms of reference, and you need to do it also on competitive submissions. Instead of our going to people and saying; ``Look what we have for you,'' let's find out who the people are out there who really want to put something together and let them bring to us what they are going to do to implement it, and then help them achieve it. I think this would set a whole new groundwork, a new base in place for the way we deal with these initiatives around the world by letting people who are ready come to us and letting us then say, yes, we will help you achieve your goal. Fifth must also support global market development. I think we have to look at this in terms of our whole farm program and the way we look at our farm program. Does it make sense to be taking acreage out of production or doing other things when there is such a need for resources around the world? Perhaps we could console some new iteration to freedom to farm in the next farm bill that we could include in terms of farmers planting certain land for this purpose. In closing, I think it is perfect timing to move this forward, but I would urge that the Senate Agriculture Committee seriously only support this proposal with a view to directly involve, engage, and commit the private business community, both local and global, in designing and implementing the programs to be carried out. Thank you very much, and I would be happy to answer any questions. [The prepared statement of Ms. Brookins can be found in the appendix on page 112.] The Chairman. Thank you. The collective output of you four is formidable, and I would really start with Dr. Levinger's thought. First of all, it is a sobering set of facts which she has as far as the learning situation, that learning doesn't necessarily occur because children are fed. At least she has sort of said there is a different threshold, and that is an important concept. As we think through all of this, our instincts are clearly to feed people, and that may still be where we end up. In other words, as you get more and more goals on top of this, as I was in dialogue with Secretary Glickman, democracy, human rights, all sorts of things, this becomes a very ambitious program in which we sort of take on the entire agenda of our Government. But, still, that is why we asked you to come, to bring some perspective to this, because it is a school lunch program, the idea of schools--and you have described, Dr. Levinger, what, unfortunately, is the plight of schools in many countries in which we might be involved. They are pretty rough-and-tumble situations, ill-financed, bad teachers, bad curriculum, language that children don't understand, and the achievements are low. Now, then this is more jarring, and I noted down not only in your testimony but just to make a note to myself that nutritionally people may not be better off if the parents simply don't feed them another meal, sort of subtract that, so that the number of calories per day might not change. Now, that is very sobering. How in the world do we affect that? In other words, you can't have guidelines for parents, or at least that is so intrusive, that is sort of beyond capability of administrative, to make sure that this is in addition to. But in real life, this might be the case, that many people don't learn very much more and, in fact, are not even much better off nutritionally. So those are pretty tough criteria to start with, and then, finally, the sustainability, which all of you have talked about. Clearly, there is always enthusiasm for the use of surplus commodities, but my own view of this is that not much of that is going to make much difference to what we are talking about today, because very quickly all of you in one way or another get into so-called monetization. That is a way of saying we are going to sell the commodities. You know, the typical view of this is that we have excess food in this country, maybe in bulk form or processed form, as the case may be, but let's say the bulk form and so we don't need it and we ship it rather than waste it. But what you are pointing out is, of course, a practical measure. This is of very little use to most of these programs in that form, and what is of great use is that you sell it, get money for it. What you are saying, Dr. Levinger, is that you sort of shore up these schools. If the whole educational initiative is $5 a child a year or some very modest amount like that, and you can get $5 a child a year out of selling some of these commodities in Country X, well, you have doubled at least the amount of educational opportunity for that child. Already we are some steps divorced from the basic concept here. The idealism of getting food into children because we are shoring up the school so that the school will be good enough that the children will go to it, learn something, therefore, like our school lunch program, have a benefit. You wanted to make a comment? Dr. Levinger. I just wanted to be clear that what I was describing was a partial monetization, certainly not a full monetization. The Chairman. I understand. But it still is there, that somehow we sell in these countries, and for other purposes maybe shore up the school, but maybe the infrastructure, the whole preparation process, whatever. Now, Ms. Brookins, you have also added child labor here, and that is an important objective, and others have touched upon that, too, Senator Harkin earlier this morning, and it might very well be a part of this if the parents support the children going to the school and the children stay there and all the rest of it. You know, I think as you get into this--and you as a very sobering panel, you have just realized how many problems people have all over the world. You try to fix one problem here, and, of course, you are right in the middle of a whole host of them, and anybody who has done any work in any other country understands that. But, still, it is useful to remind ourselves how much we want to do all at the same time. But, nevertheless, we are here in the Agriculture Committee, and we are dealing with a food program and with USDA trying to guide us through. So I think, we have to understand that, too, that our means are somewhat limited, even if our aspirations are very high. Now, I think all of you have said that the global agreement that sort of permeates this discussion has been largely between USDA and the international group. But PVOs, after all, are doing most of the legwork, or could, and the problem is there are a lot of them. They come in all sizes and shapes. Some are good and some are not so good. So what I think you are qualifying to say is that if a PVO sort of qualifies, begins to meet the criteria as a group that has a track record of doing very well in this, is very sophisticated, there may be sort of a blue ribbon group--or maybe that is not the right terminology, but there is some--so that global agreements can occur with these groups without, as you say, negotiating one by one each of these innovations. And that I think is critically important, but it is an important point just in terms of our own organizational infrastructure in this country that we have these kinds of agreements and we do so at the outset. We sort of find out who is in the field, who has a track record of achievement, who could do a lot if, in fact, we do not have the bureaucratic problem of paper shuffling each time one of you gets involved in this. So I would hope that whoever is writing up this legislation sort of includes that concept because I think it is just very important. I noted, Ms. Brookins, that you pointed out that the problem of sustainability as we have discussed it today--and I tried to touch upon this a little bit in my colloquy this morning--really does boil down to annual appropriations. That is what we do here, and this is why the presence of Senator Cochran was very important this morning. Senator Cochran I saw on the floor during our recess, and I told him how much I appreciated his coming over. He has to wrestle with the hard realities of all of this, namely, after it leaves our care and concern as an authorization committee. And I think it will have very strong support in this committee, and that was manifested this morning. But then people come in that are part of our economy and say if you are going to spend X number of dollars somewhere in the world, there are some Americans that need help. Well, we can say we can't be that hard-hearted, that myopic, but the fact is, as some of you have commented, our foreign aid has been declining precipitously year after year. It has gone on now for several years without surcease, just a secular decline. I made a mission to see the President 1-year after he was just re-elected and asked him really to overrun OMB and to ask for $1.5 billion more, just for the sake of argument, and he did ask for $1 billion more, and he got it. That was the only singular reverse of this secular pattern. But, nevertheless, it has gone downhill ever since. So we are in an atmosphere in which in our own activities in Government, whether they are in nutrition or whether they are just foreign aid for whatever purposes, development, language training, whatever we do, we are doing less of it--and in terms of real dollars, much less. And you sort of have a line out in the future. So we are talking about making water run uphill here because even if you have a lot of surplus commodities and you monetize them in some way and you don't account for them exactly dollar for dollar and you get the PVOs and some other money from American philanthropy--and a lot of that would have to be a part of this, I think. Still, there is an outlay. Senator Cochran has people that have to deal with this. Now, in a practical way, we have had Dr. Borlaug and people like this that I admire very much before the Committee. They are talking about world hunger, about what we need to do in the next 20-years, 50-years, and so forth to feed the world. And Dr. Borlaug as a witness in India, in China, now in Africa, is there. And you finally get back to cutting-edge research, things that we need to do to increase either yield or quality or resistance to problems or what have you. Now, this committee 3-years ago passed a bill for 5-years of cutting-edge research, $600 million, $120 million a year. But the appropriators in the House X'ed it out, year one, year two, you know, a wonderful idea, everybody from the scientific community, humanitarian community, the food community in here praising that initiative and it passed the Senate, but not the appropriators. Now, USDA to their credit has managed to figure out how to get $120 million for this year, and I give great credit to Secretary Glickman and his staff, even over the protests of the House people who are still trying to X it out. But when we are talking about sustainability, we are talking about the politics of appropriation and competing interests in this country. And this is why these PVO and global agreements you are talking about are not only interesting in terms of bureaucracy, they are probably what we are talking about in sustainability. Catholic Relief Services, it goes the course every year, regardless of the ups and downs of politics here, changes in committees. So, you know, that somehow we have to sort of factor into this. Then, you know, we talked earlier this morning, Ambassador McGovern started with 300-million-children in the world. But each of you seemed to me to be saying you need to walk before you run, and the targeting of this is probably important. Nobody would deny that. We went through it with Secretary Glickman. What are the criteria? And he had some for this working group that does this sort of thing. But, of course, then it becomes much less ambitious, and the people whose enthusiasm for feeding all children say here you folks are already tailoring this down and, furthermore, maybe the countries, as one of you suggested, who really want it--I think you said that, Ms. Brookins. That makes common sense not to force it on somebody who doesn't want it. But if you are looking at it from a humanitarian standpoint, there are a lot of countries that have very indifferent and sometimes strange governments. And so what do you say to them? You are out of luck, history has dealt you a bad hand in terms of your leadership? Well, maybe we have to say that, as a practical matter, even with our ideals, and we may not be able to intrude into some countries. And Sudan--I mentioned Dr. Frist's experience. It is clear the Government of Sudan is trying to systematically starve a large part of its own country. This is unthinkable, but it happens in the world, and that is not the first instance of this in which food is used as an internal weapon for political hegemony of one group over another. So that is a pretty tough prospect. Even if Dr. Frist gets in with some money to try to work on the AIDS problem there, or whatever, for the good of all of us, it is still pretty tough to run a school lunch program. So there has to be some willingness for this, but I suppose we are going to find out a very checkered pattern in terms of willingness and how much intrusion countries are prepared to have. The people over in Ms. Bertini's shop in Rome have a pretty good idea of where the politics of this lies, that we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. But as we are trying to think through it in terms of our own governmental response, we all have to become more sophisticated. And you can be helpful in this well beyond your testimony today and what you have already looked at. I noted, for example, Dr. Levinger, for the benefit of all who are witnessing the hearing, you have given some website references to studies and books that you have written which give a great deal of the research and background, and that would be helpful. And I know many will want to avail themselves of that additional testimony that comes in that form. Well, I am sorry to have conducted this monologue, but I want to stimulate the juices again with all of you. As a practical matter, what do you foresee as you take a look at this from our perspective in the Senate or the House as a practical way of proceeding, say in the year ahead or in a 2- year period of time? You have suggested the monetization of the commodities under 416. That sort of takes us out to the end of calendar year 2001, perhaps, as sort of one place where we get some money from that standpoint. USDA already has indicated that administratively they are doing a lot of things, and the Secretary indicated a whole lot of programs that were impressive. So something is going to happen, anyway, given the impetus of the Secretary and people who have testified, but what should we do as a practical matter both in the short run but, likewise, in terms of the sustainability of this idea, something that might grow, that might be here for a long while? Does anybody have a contribution? Mr. Hackett? Mr. Hackett. If I may start, Mr. Chairman, I think the time invested right now in trying to formulate how this thing could work over a 5-year horizon is well worth it. It allows then the American private voluntary agency communities that are not deeply involved in this right now because of the burdensome issues that I mentioned before to re-engage, and to re-engage their constituencies, which is particularly important. The Chairman. Yes. Mr. Hackett. So I think the investments that actually are starting this afternoon with USDA people and the PVO communities and WFP are well worth it, and we can begin to formulate kind of a road map for the longer term. But we have got to think out at least 5-years. The Chairman. Well, I like the idea of re-engaging constituencies that you have and others have. I talked about this broad decline of foreign assistance or even foreign interest, but it comes from the decline of constituencies in this country. People have found other things to be not only more important, but have relegated this to such low importance. So it may be that the private people have been discouraged or have gotten some other signals, but maybe as you say, to re- engage, sort of find the rest of the world out there, and some very exciting possibilities. Yes, Ms. Levinson? Ms. Levinson. Well, I would like to add to that. What has happened--and Dr. Levinger was--she went through the literature. When it was found that really school feeding couldn't have an impact on nutrition and sustainability is difficult, turning it over to a government, in the early 1990s USAID under Public Law 480 Title 2 program had asked the PVOs who were conducting those types of programs, the school feeding, the distribution type programs, straight, basically, mainly just distribution, to basically eliminate those programs under Title 2. And what happened at that point--and Catholic Relief Service took a lead in this, but other PVOs got involved and, actually, Dr. Levinger was very much a consultant in this whole process. There was what we would call a reinvention of school feeding so that--remember, you were just saying before these are hard issues to tackle if you have a working family, if you have a family that doesn't have enough money and they make their children work, how can you compensate? Well, they have created models to take care of that with take-home rations. There are other ways to attack that, and they have come up with methods to do that through distribution, as well as, of course, you do have to have better education. But you have both. So there are methods, and one of the things that could be done in this pilot program, since these PVOs have already developed these new methods and have been doing it under agreements with USAID over the past 6-years, this would be a good opportunity, this pilot phase, also, to work with some of those new techniques, and also to perhaps build in some new ideas that if there could be partnerships with some of the local agricultural interests or businesses who would perhaps want to also somehow contribute and participate, that may be another element to explore in this pilot phase. The Chairman. Yes? Ms. Brookins. Well, I want to pick up on that because I really do believe that there has been a serious lack here. If there is going to be a meeting today with USDA of the PVOs and World Food Program, why is it that representatives of the business sector have not been involved, be it from U.S. commodity groups and farm groups, but also non-agricultural people? I have talked to people at several of the business councils who think this is a very interesting idea. Many of our corporations are on the ground everywhere virtually in the world, and are doing humanitarian outreach in the local communities, helping children with education and schools, that type of thing. Plus, if you are looking at logistical support in-country and you are looking at developing logistical support, especially in local or regional areas, what better place to be looking than the business community. Would you let me digress for 1-minute on that? The Chairman. Yes. Ms. Brookins. Several years ago, I had the privilege during President Reagan's administration of heading up a task force on food hunger and agriculture in developing countries. It was organized at the State Department. We had some people coming in to testify, to talk to us about different things. Someone came in at one point and was talking about the problem AID had experienced delivering seed in Zaire--it was Zaire at that time, you know. In any case, he said how difficult it was because they had to get the seed delivered before the planting season, but the Government had no trucks and no agency to deliver the seed. But someone from the private business community was sitting at the table and said to the aid official there; ``If you travel through Zaire throughout the country, is there any product that you see everywhere in the country?'' And the AID official said, ``yes, there is a beer that is produced in Kinshasa.'' So this business person said, well, all you need to do then is contract with the brewery distributor and get those seed bags put on the beer trucks. I didn't mean to digress, but I want to make my previous point once again, that it is the private sector which produces the tax receipts which allows the Federal Government to spend money for all these different priorities. But then it comes to a program like this where we have businesses located everywhere in the world, and commodity groups and farm groups, who are involved everywhere in the world, and they are not being brought to the table. I am not representing, I am not lobbying for any of them, but I think they need to be involved in helping to plan and design these types of activities. The Chairman. I think that is a very, very important point. Let me just sort of underline it anecdotally from my own experience, the hunger programs in my home State. It is not a new finding. The U.S. Conference of Mayors and others have suggested that there are many more demands on the food pantry, the food banks in our States, than has been the case in recent years. This is counterintuitive to many people because they would say at a time of fuller employment in the country and greater income that these demands should not be occurring in this way. But, in reality, they are. And as I have visited with the major food banks in our State, the problem comes down--and Second Harvest is an umbrella organization--to such figures as 96-billion-pounds of food in this country are not needed ultimately by households, by restaurants and what have you. Ninety-five billion of this is wasted. It is destroyed, and it comes down to the point that some of you are making. To convert part of that 95 requires money. It has to be packaged and preserved and transported, distributed in some fashion. And so the problems and the costs of doing all of that as opposed to simply disposing of it on site are economically difficult. Now, I have proposed legislation to enhance the deduction for companies but, likewise, to include for the first time partnerships, individual farmers, other people who would receive the same tax treatment for doing this, so that, that somehow changes the economics to a point that there is some reason why some of this might be convertible to food banks and others in our country. A lot of people think that is a great idea and have cosponsored it. It hasn't happened because tax legislation is very difficult to pass this year, and all the vehicles thus far have run into some problems, but, you know, hope springs eternal and each time around we try this one out. But it makes the point in a domestic situation that food is there, but converting this situation either by transportation, monetization, some other form, to something that is going to help the people that we are talking about here today really takes a lot of planning and sort of a stream of decisions. Now, that does involve the business community. In fact, even without the deductions, large corporations routinely make shipments of huge cartons of all sorts of things coming into the food banks, and they are taking on warehouse capacity, and you know many of these places. And they send the word out and station wagons come in, in one case to 150 agencies, small churches, sort of underneath the radar screen of life in my State. About 10-percent of people are receiving some benefits from all this. So this is a significant thing just in our own country, but as I say, converting it to abroad really requires even more imagination, and it has to have American companies because they have the ability to do this sort of thing, and in many cases, the eagerness to do this. We are routinely in touch with foundations of people who want to know how they would go about doing this and do not have the expertise. So we want to get these folks involved right along with the PVOs or however they want to set up their situations, because at the outset they have to be on the ground or sustainability of it won't occur for those of us who are in the temporary business of politics and appropriation. Some of you will be around a lot longer to sustain this. Well, I appreciate very much your coming and your patience and, likewise, your thoughtfulness in responding to these questions. And perhaps you will be stimulated by this to think of some more questions as well as answers. So if you have supplemental testimony, we would appreciate that. Yes? Ms. Levinson. I want to thank you very much because I have to say listening to you is a very great joy for those of us who work in the field in this area to hear someone put it all together verbally, just sitting there. It is just--you know, it makes me happy just to be here and hear it. So thank you. The Chairman. Thank you. 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