Editorial

Grassroots idea grows to feed 3 billion people

Friday, July 18, 2014

Driving through freshly harvested fields of wheat, thriving fields of corn and soybeans and it's hard to believe that there is hunger anywhere in the world.

This year, especially, our Golden Plains are producing an abundance of food -- at least the majority of fields, those that didn't receive hail -- and there is no reason some of it can't get to people who would otherwise starve.

That's the thinking of Peter O'Brien, a young farmer and rancher from Cheyenne County, Kansas, who suggested just such a thing at his county Farm Bureau meeting in September 1953.

As recounted by Jordan Hildebrand in a recent Wheat Scoop, a publication of Kansas Wheat, the cooperative agreement between the Kansas Wheat Commission and the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers, the St. Francis, Kansas, farmer's idea was soon embraced by the Kansas Farm Bureau and American Farm Bureau Federation.

U.S. Sen. Andy Schoeppel from Kansas sponsored by the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act in 1954, and it was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Sixty years later, Food for Peace has been credited with saving more than 3 billion lives.

The grass-roots movement was founded on a common-sense idea: giving some surplus grain to countries in dire need, saving lives and building goodwill in one simple gesture, according to Hildebrand's story.

Kansas wheat is a key part of the U.S. Food for Peace Program, which, according to research, increases net farm income by 52 percent, which leads to effective land and labor use and increases employment by 93 percent. The aid improves local diets to increase healthy diets through 42 percent more fat, 26 percent more calories and 16 percent more protein, all necessary components of a healthy diet.

The USDA estimates most food insecure countries have a food gap of 15.4 million metric tons, and that is expected to increase to 19.7 million by 2023. Last fiscal year, almost 14 million bushels of hard red winter wheat were exported for Food for Peace Programs, according to Wheat Scoop.

Like the best ideas, Food for Peace came from the people on the front lines, acting in their own best interest as well as those they hope to help. In this case, as well as most others, the government's role is most effective when it acts as a facilitator, rather than a hinderance, to those efforts.


Read the original article here: http://bit.ly/1jF3GEf

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