TEFAP Alliance Blog

August 2003

In This Issue:
• Congress on Recess this Month
• Fiscal 2004 Appropriations Still Pending
• Bonus Commodities Keep Flowing
• Milk to Cheese Conversion Being Tested
• November 20 Declared “Feed America” Day
•
Congress on Recess this Month
Congressional Representatives and Senators are home in their states and districts this month, as Congress observes its traditional month-long August recess. This is an excellent time to invite elected officials to visit emergency feeding operations and to see firsthand how TEFAP and other food donation programs are working. Congress will reconvene on September 2, following the Labor Day holiday.

Fiscal 2004 Appropriations Still Pending
Annual appropriations for TEFAP in federal fiscal year 2004 have not been finalized and will not be finally decided until September. However, it appears likely that last year’s funding arrangements will be repeated, with $140 million allotted for food purchases and $50 million approved for storage, processing, and administration, with an allowance for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to transfer up to $10 million of food money for distribution activities.
The House passed its fiscal year 2003 agriculture appropriations bill, H.R. 2673, on July 14. The Senate funding bill, S. 1427, has passed the full Appropriations Committee but still awaits action by the full Senate. The transfer provision is included in both bills.
Appropriations bills will be high on the priority list for consideration when Congress reconvenes. But a stop-gap continuing resolution may be necessary to keep funds flowing into the new fiscal year if appropriations are not completed by September 30.

Bonus Commodities Keep Flowing
The transfer authority used in last year’s appropriations bill and proposed again this year has helped provide TEFAP with improved distribution resources, but at a cost of $10 million worth of badly needed commodities. However, USDA is more willing to allocate money for administrative needs if there is plenty of product available. To that end, USDA continues to purchase large amounts of surplus food for TEFAP and other child nutrition programs. USDA expects to pump nearly $300 million of bonus commodities into TEFAP during the current fiscal year to supplement the $140 million in mandatory purchases. Recently-announced bonus buys include canned peaches and white meat turkey products.

Milk to Cheese Conversion Being Tested
TEFAP was started in 1981 to help rid the federal government of huge surpluses of dairy products – butter, cheese, and dry milk. In 2003, in the face of record dairy production levels and declining consumption, dairy stocks again total more than a billion pounds of dry milk alone.
At the urging of a concerned non-profit, the Hunger Task Force of Milwaukee (HTFM), the government is finally experimenting with using some of the excess dry milk before it goes bad. After two years of negotiation, HTFM signed a Memorandum of Understanding with USDA to convert one truckload of dry milk into low-fat mozzarella cheese.
HTFM found a local dairy in Wisconsin willing to process the dry milk into cheese and package it in two pound blocks for distribution through HTFM’s food bank operation. HTFM food distributions aid about a hundred homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries in Milwaukee County. USDA is closely monitoring the conversion and is discouraging others from making similar requests until the Wisconsin pilot project is completed and analyzed, a process that is expected to take several months.

November 20 Declared “Feed America” Day
Earlier this summer, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Senate Resolution 184 to designate November 20, 2003, the Thursday in the week before Thanksgiving, as “Feed America Thursday.” The resolution, sponsored by Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), noted that 33 million Americans are food insecure and that three million children experience hunger.
The resolution may help counter flagging food donations later this year. It requests the President to issue a proclamation calling upon people in the country to sacrifice two meals on November 20 and “to donate the money that they would have spent on food to a religious or charitable organization of their choice for the purposed of feeding the hungry.”

WASHINGTON UPDATE is published periodically for the California TEFAP Alliance by Weinberg & Vauthier Consulting, 419 West Broad Street, Suite 204, Falls Church, VA 22046; telephone: 703-532-5700; fax: 703-532-5780; email: zyweinberg@earthlink.net

Washington Update
Friday, August 15, 2003

mvauthier :: Aug.15.2003 :: Washington Update :: No Comments »:: Print This Post

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