Senate Hunger Caucus

THE SENATE HUNGER Caucus is a bipartisan group of U.S. senators who have joined together to promote antihunger causes. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, and Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, formed the caucus in June 2004. In the words of the cofounders, the Senate Hunger Caucus was formed “to bring awareness to national and international hunger issues, serve as a forum for members and staff to receive information through briefings about hunger issues, create a coalition of senators to support nonpartisan initiatives to help address hunger, and serve as a vehicle for local, state, and national antihunger nonprofits to communicate to Congress about hunger issues.” As of the summer of 2005, the caucus listed 33 senators as members and was chaired by Senators Lincoln, Smith, Elizabeth Dole, a North Carolina Republican, and Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat. A House Hunger Caucus led by cochairs Tom Osborne, a Republican from Nebraska, and Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, also operates.

The current Senate Hunger Caucus follows in the footsteps of similar organizations from the past. George S. McGovern, a South Dakota Democrat and his party's presidential nominee in 1972, led a prominent Senate select committee on hunger in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1984, Texas Democratic Representative Mickey Leland formed the House Select Committee on Hunger to bring attention to the issues of domestic hunger and international famine.

Following Leland's death in 1989 in a plane crash during a humanitarian visit to Ethiopia, Congressman Tony Hall, an Ohio Democrat, chaired the committee until its elimination in 1993. A House Hunger Caucus, formed in the wake of the House committee's demise, was also disbanded in 1995.

While the Senate Hunger Caucus has only been in existence a short time, within its first year its members led the ultimately unsuccessful fight in 2005 to restore $8 billion in funding cuts to the Food Stamp program and introduced the Hunger Free Communities Act of 2005, a bill that would commit the United States to cutting U.S. food insecurity in half by 2010 and ending hunger in the country by 2015, as well as providing funding for poverty data collection and local hunger initiatives.