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BY GARY REMAL
Staff Writer 03/21/2008

Staff Writer

AUGUSTA -- The director of the National Center on Hunger and Poverty says that charity and advocacy for the poor are failing to meet the nation's hunger crisis, and that it'll take a major federal effort to end hunger.

"We are spending over $90 billion each year to pay for a problem that could be ended by about $12 billion more in federal spending," Dr. J. Larry Brown told about 200 people at the "Hungry for Answers" conference Thursday in Augusta.

"But my efforts, and those of my colleagues, have had precious little impact on politicians or public policy."

The policy chief, who serves on the faculty of the Harvard School of Public health, said that charities feeding the poor should attempt to spark quick action by announcing that they'll close in four years, and take on the role of tough advocates demanding action, by throwing the problem squarely into the lap of government.

Brown was one of several speakers at the one-day conference, which was sponsored by the Maine Nutrition Council and the Maine Dietetic Association.

"Our job is not going well," warned Brown, who had chaired the national Physician Task Force on Hunger in America in the 1980s

"Those whose nutritional well-being we care about, the children and adults for whom we advocate, are not getting our best efforts, and certainly not what they deserve," Brown said.

"Hunger is no longer considered intolerable," he said. "Actually ending hunger is a goal that can be, and usually is, ignored. We have so few teeth that political leaders need to do little about the pervasive hunger problem that now is endemic rather than epidemic in nature. Hunger is acceptable in our nation, and we are in no danger of getting our political leaders to end it."

It's the youngest among us who are likely to need food most, pediatrician Michele Rock told conference-goers.

Of Maine's 1.3 million residents, 12.9 percent live in households categorized by federal officials as "food-insecure," said Rock, of Boston Medical Center's Growth and Nutrition Clinic.

But 19.3 percent of Maine children live in homes short of food, she told listeners.

Rock, who treats many low-income and malnourished children in a Boston clinic, said the numbers from the survey, are likely to worsen because the economy has declined since the data was collected from 2003-06.

"This does not reflect what we are going through with the cost of living and the high fuel prices affecting everyone," she said.

Nationwide, she said, 35 million, or 12.1 percent of the population, live in "food-insecure" households. Of them, 12.4 million of them are children.

Maine Senate Majority Leader Elizabeth Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, who also spoke at the conference, said she is pushing for legislation in Maine to provide free school breakfasts to any student who qualifies for subsidized school lunches.

Mitchell proposes to spend $214,000 a year from the Fund for a Healthy Maine, comprised of money from the state's settlement with tobacco companies.

"Feeding hungry children is worthy of this fund's resources," the Vassalboro Democrat said.

Studies show that children who suffer from malnutrition also experience higher rates of infection, decreased resistance to illness, and gastrointestinal and respiratory problems, Rock said.

Such children also experience learning and behavioral difficulties at higher rates, and these are problems that can set them back at school and later in life, Rock said.

With the average pediatric-hospital stay costing more than $11,000, she said, feeding families is the better alternative.

"We shouldn't justify feeding children to save money, but there is economic analysis and it is economic to feed them," Rock told her audience. The $11,000 cost for even a relatively simple hospitalization "would pay about five years of the average family (food) benefit."

Dr. Edward Cooney, executive director of the non-profit Congressional Hunger Center in Washington, D.C., also told conference participants that hunger can be successfully addressed if the nation applied sufficient political will.

He criticized the government's recent $3 billion bailout of commercial lender Bear Stearns rather than plowing those funds into anti-hunger efforts.

Unlike more complicated problems of hunger and health care, Cooney said, feeding everyone in the nation is an achievable goal.

"You could certainly end hunger in the United States," he said.

Naomi Schalit, opinion page editor for the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel, sparked the topic for this year's conference with her 2007 newspaper series on hunger in Maine, said Mary Ann Bennett, planning chairwoman for the conference.

Schalit's series was one of eight winners this year of the New England Newspaper Association's "Publick Occurrences Award."

"When we started running our series, I can't tell you how many people told us that they had no idea how much hunger was around them," Schalit told the group. "And while it will take years and decades to adequately address hunger in Maine and across this country, we have to start somewhere."

"What we at the newspapers hoped, more than anything else, was to get people talking about this problem, to bring hunger out of the shadows."

Gary Remal -- 621-5642

gremal@centralmaine.com

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