Foreign Food-Aid for School Kids Among Cuts Proposed for USDA

by Alan Bjerga

An international school food-aid program backed by former Democratic Senator George McGovern and Republican Senator Bob Dole would end under President Donald Trump’s budget blueprint, with the White House arguing its success isn’t proven.

The McGovern-Dole Food for Education program, created in 2000 after advocacy from both the South Dakota Democrat and Kansas Republican, both of whom had left office, “lacks evidence that it is being effectively implemented to reduce food insecurity,” the White House said Thursday in its “America First” budget blueprint request.

The program, routinely reauthorized with bipartisan support in U.S. farm bills, cost $195.5 million in the 2016 fiscal year. In that period it served meals to 2.22 million school-children in countries such as Cambodia, Ethiopia and Haiti, administered through partners including the UN World Food Program and CRS Students eat lunch at Ceramica primary school in the coastal city of Beira in Mozambique. Photograph: KPA/Zuma / Rex Features

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