WASHINGTON - The United States must dig deeper into its pockets to feed the world's hungry, the head of the World Food Program said on Tuesday, urging the world's top provider of food assistance to increase aid budgets.
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the Rome-based organization, underlined at an oversight hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives the severity of need among the world's hungry and malnourished: each day, 25,000 people die from hunger or related illness, one child every five seconds.
While some victories have been scored in past decades, Sheeran sees ahead a "perfect storm of challenges" - a changing climate and increasing droughts and floods, the scourge of HIV/AIDS, a boom in commodity prices, and slipping levels of food aid that have dropped to their lowest volume in 15 years.
With officials here scrambling to stretch aid budgets and cope with growing crises abroad, debate is raging this year in Washington over how best to deliver U.S. assistance.
The House has already passed a bill that would tweak U.S. food aid policy as part of the 2007 farm bill, which sets agriculture, food aid, and nutrition law for the next five years. The Senate is now working on its version.
In recent months, lawmakers have clucked about inefficiency and waste in a system that, however well-intentioned, spends 65 percent of emergency funds on overheads, and often delivers aid woefully slow. But it's unclear what real steps toward change the final law will take.
The House has appropriated $1.2 billion for emergency food aid in fiscal 2008, slightly more than the previous year.
