Congress did the right thing by passing the Keep Kids Fed Act, which supports school meals for children in America through the coming academic year. Now let’s turn our attention overseas as hunger is worsening because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Impoverished nations need our help more than ever as global food prices have skyrocketed.
So it’s alarming that because of low funding, the UN World Food Program is being forced to reduce or cut school meal programs for children in South Sudan, Yemen and other starving countries. We need to increase our support of school feeding worldwide.
School meals are a lifesaver in nations suffering hunger emergencies, because they give kids often their only meals of the day. Food at school keeps these kids safe instead of them searching for food or being forced into hard labor.
The world’s children need school meals desperately with the scope of the current hunger crisis. According to the World Food Program, “In 2022, up to 345 million people are estimated to be acutely food insecure or at high risk across 82 countries.”
We have to go back to the World War II era to find a comparable global hunger crisis, but that reference underscores the importance of schoo lmeals.
During and after WWII, we supported school feeding abroad. The National War Fund issued a grant to American Relief for Norway to provide milk to malnourished children living under Nazi occupation. This milk helped save many Norwegian kids from malnutrition.
Gen. Lucius Clay said U.S. school lunches “saved the health of German youth” after World War II. The U.S. Army and Catholic Relief Services fed schoolchildren in postwar Austria. Donations from the U.S. Friendship Train provided school meals in France and Italy. A small school lunch program in Japan grew to feed 7 million thanks to U.S. help, which did much to save kids there from hunger after the war.
President Dwight Eisenhower continued to support school lunch programs in Italy and Japan, and help start them in South Korea and other nations that needed help. When President John F. Kennedy succeeded Ike, he supported a massive expansion of global school feeding led by George McGovern. Forty million children worldwide received school meals from the United Sates when JFK was president.
We should aspire to those numbers again, for children are going hungry in so many countries. Think of the children in Central African Republic, a country where half of the population does not get enough food. School meals can save children and families there, if there is enough funding.
In Sri Lanka, the government had to suspend school meals because of the high food prices, according to Save the Children. The D.R. Congo, a neglected crisis where 26 million people suffer from hunger needs a national school lunch program to build stability. In drought-ravaged Madagascar, the World Food Program needs funding to reach hungry children with school meals.
Catholic Relief Services, which provides school meals in several countries including Burkina Faso and Benin, could do even more with extra funding.
You can help by asking Congress to increase funding for the McGovern-Dole global school lunch program.
William Lambers is an author who partnered with the UN World Food Program on the book “Ending World Hunger.” His writings have been published by the New York Times, Newsweek, Chicago Sun Times, History News Network and many other news outlets.