Like kissing babies and eating apple pie, there’s not a politician around that would deny that every child in the country deserves access to an abundant supply of healthy foods. The growing evidence of the benefits, from students performing better in school and improved health to a more productive work force and reduced health care costs, provide a strong rationale for making child nutrition a top national priority.

Calories from healthy foods tend to cost significantly more than less nutritious options. As one in four children now receive SNAP assistance (formerly called food stamps), lower cost foods understandably take precedence for many Americans. And unfortunately the trend is in the wrong direction, as we have added 10 million additional SNAP/Food Stamps recipients in the past two years. USDA reports that 14.6 percent of households were food insecure for at least part of 2008, the highest level since USDA started tracking the data in 1995.

The jump in food prices a couple of years ago, combined with the national recession and spike in unemployment, demonstrates how fragile food security really is for so many people. The federal government spends nearly $50 billion on SNAP/Food Stamps,  nearly $7 billion annually on the WIC program, and $9.3 billion on the National School Lunch Program, and as incredibly important as these programs are, they are still insufficient to meet the need.

President Obama’s proposed fiscal year 2011 budget demonstrates that the Administration recognizes the food challenges facing so many families. The President proposes to increase the funding for Child Nutrition Act programs by $1 billion a year and a $7.6 billion increase in SNAP/Food Stamps. This is an admirable commitment, but rather than making a significant dent in the number of food insecure people in this country, the extra funding will probably simply lessen the overall pain of the persistent recession.

Food insecurity in the U.S. is just one of the many examples where federal policy options appear inadequate or work against other policy initiatives. The nutrition programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture are primarily funded by two pieces of legislation. The Child Nutrition Act, which needs to be reauthorized sometime in the next several months, provides the legislative authority for school meals and WIC. The Farm Bill, which is expected to be reauthorized in 2013, funds SNAP/Food Stamps.

So advocates for child nutrition can keep very busy just maintaining support for these programs. But this is just part of the story of how federal legislation and child nutrition interact. Also within the Farm Bill are a myriad of commodity programs, many of which require farmers to grow certain crops to participate.  There is little thought to how child nutrition is impacted when policies create incentives for farmers to grow crops like corn and soybeans, which are often directed to feeding animals or industrial uses, rather than crops that directly feed people. Or how child nutrition is affected when incentives are created to transport and export crops internationally rather than building local markets.

Things get much more complicated when we realize that food systems are significantly impacted by agencies well beyond the USDA. The complexity of the legislative picture of the food system is well documented in a new IATP report “Beyond the USDA”. The Department of Energy’s ethanol subsidies and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuels Standard have had a tremendous influence on the cropping decisions of farmers and the end use of corn and soybeans. The Department of Health and Human Services oversees many food safety, food labeling and dietary guidelines. The Department of Commerce manages crucial agricultural water supplies in western states and the Department of Labor oversees how farmworkers are treated.

This complicated array of departments and programs discourages efforts to improve the food system as a whole, and instead encourages special interests to support individual programs. The result is that most food and agriculture-related programs focus on one primary goal and have limited success in creating multiple benefits. The National School Lunch Program, for example, is a tremendous benefit to the health and wellbeing of schoolchildren, but it could also provide a significant boost to local farm economies by making local procurement a higher priority in purchasing contracts. But since the school lunch needs are so great and budgets are so tight, the emphasis is on low-cost foods, and the potential health and economic benefits of fresh local foods are lost.

Similar arguments could be made against commodity support programs that encourage environmentally harmful monocultural production practices, conservation programs that reduce the real estate tax base of local communities, renewable energy programs that incentivize the farmers’ use of fossil fuel-intensive chemicals, and the many policy drivers that have made it more profitable for corner stores and fast food restaurants to advertise and sell highly processed, calorie dense foods rather than more healthful alternatives.

Given the scenarios that we are currently facing – severe federal budget constraints, growing food security challenges, an agricultural economy in economic disarray from wild price swings – one could argue that the best course is to continue the traditional approach, where public interest groups focus on their particular areas of expertise. Anti-hunger groups should simply concentrate on getting as much funding as possible into WIC, school meals and SNAP/Food Stamps, conservation groups should focus on land reserve programs, and rural development organizations should center on economic development opportunities.

But sometimes economic crises present new ways of thinking. For example, the estimated 2009 farm income is $57 billion, a number that is somewhat notable because it is considerably less than the estimated $77 billion that all levels of U.S. government spend on food assistance, including outlays to the SNAP/Food Stamps and WIC food assistance programs. In fact, government purchases of food come to about eight percent of the value of food purchased by families and individuals in the United States.

In addition to the $77 billion in food assistance, other food system support includes the roughly $10 billion in annual farm commodity payments, five billion in crop insurance subsidies and five billion in farm conservation payments. Add all of that up and just the USDA is spending about $100 billion annually on the food system. 

We could get more benefits from that investment if it was utilized with a broader food systems perspective. Food assistance programs targeted at consumers should also provide an economic pull for environmentally sound agriculture that revitalizes rural economies. Farm-oriented programs such as commodity payments, crop insurance subsidies, and conservation payments should also support food production that provides consumers with an abundant equitably distributed supply of healthy foods.

One method of placing a holistic lens on policy is with impact statements, such as environmental impact statements (EIS). Federal agencies are required to perform an EIS on actions that significantly impact the quality of the environment, which serves as a decision tool that helps to quantify the positive and negative impacts of various actions and explore alternative actions. An EIS avoids the formation of policies that inadvertently conflict with the federal government’s environmental goals. Policies abound that conflict with the societal goals for a nutritious, safe, abundant, and reasonably priced food supply, and a mandated food systems impact statement may be a method of reducing that conflict.

As the growing coalition of organizations attempting to reform farm bill policies experienced in 2008, developing the political strength to get funds moved from one farm bill program to another is quite difficult. Perhaps a more successful approach would be to simply place appropriate criteria on the existing food systems related programs. Many policy tools have been used in other arenas, from compliance provisions to impact statements to listings that protect historic buildings or endangered species. The fiscal crisis that the federal government is facing should force all of us working for a better food system to think more creatively about policy.