The federal farm bill has a cheerleader in an unlikely location: the industrial flatlands near South Pulaski Road.
The Greater Chicago Food Depository is gunning for increased support to food banks in the bill in the face of declining government contributions to its sprawling Southwest Side warehouse.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture gave the depository 9.1 million pounds of food in 2007, down from 12.9 million in 2004, as federal funding remained flat under farm legislation that expired Sept. 30, the food bank says. With food prices rising, the department has spent less to buy commodities from farmers as a price support  food that winds up in emergency pantries. With corporate donations also lower, the depository's annual intake has dropped by 6 million pounds, or 14%, in the last four years, to 42 million pounds in 2007.
"We need a farm bill in 2007, because no improvements are essentially a cut to nutrition programs," says Alicia Huguelet, director of public policy at the depository, which distributes food in Cook County.
The farm legislation, reauthorized every five years, is frequently criticized for the billions of dollars in subsidies it gives farmers. But more than half of the law's proceeds fund nutrition programs in the United States and abroad.
The assistance to food banks helps win over urban legislators.
"Urban members are as watchful and as interested in the farm bill" as rural lawmakers, says Chuck Spencer, director of national legislation and policy development at the Illinois Farm Bureau. "It's the nutrition title."
The House passed its version of the bill in July. It would increase funding for federal emergency food donation programs to $250 million from $140 million annually.
Illinois food banks have an advocate in America's Second Harvest, a national network of food banks based in Chicago. "The House of Representatives found $4.3 billion in new money when it passed a farm bill in July to curtail the losses in food assistance for growing numbers of hungry Americans. It is hard to understand why the Senate seems to be having so much difficulty doing this," CEO Vicki Escarra said in a statement last month.
U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., says finding funding in the Senate for the food bank programs will be tough. He says he would support reducing farm subsidies as a means of passing the nutrition provisions in the House bill.
"A lot us are talking about a new approach that is more honest and more realistic, that tears down the overall cost of farm price supports, and uses that money for things like (the Emergency Food Assistance Program) and soil and water conservation and energy issues," Mr. Durbin says.
A spokeswoman for Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, says the senator plans to begin hearings on the bill the week of Oct. 21. Mr. Harkin seeks to provide nutrition funding similar to the amount in the House bill, pending adequate funding, the spokeswoman says.