From FoFPL Melissa Boteach at Jewish Council for Public Affairs:

Last week, both the House and Senate passed the 2008 Farm Bill by veto-proof majorities. Although a procedural kink will delay votes to override the President’s veto until early June, passage seems within reach for a bill that has caused anti-hunger advocates their share of headaches over the past year-and-a-half.

However, apart from legislation-induced migraines, domestic anti-hunger advocates have much to smile about. After 18 months of organizing, advocating and mobilizing on behalf of nutrition programs, the bill that passed both chambers last week includes a robust nutrition title with significant improvements to Food Stamp funding and access, emergency food assistance, and other anti-hunger programs.

The Farm Bill is admittedly imperfect. At a time when food prices are skyrocketing, it continues a system of payments to American farmers that distort world trade, contribute to global poverty, and frankly, just don’t make much policy sense. In a year that many faith advocates hoped would be a turning point in reforming our nation’s agriculture policy, the Farm Bill’s commodity subsidies did not undergo substantial change.

The same, however, cannot be said of the Jewish community. The activism on behalf of the 2008 Farm Bill can be seen as a transformative moment in Jewish communal efforts on hunger and poverty, a spark that kicked into gear a powerful movement to “Speak up, judge righteously, champion the poor and the needy” (Proverbs 31:9).

In a year when critics are slamming the Farm Bill for its deference to corporate special interests, little has been written of the massive grassroots mobilization effort by the Jewish community to advocate, agitate and educate on the inadequacy of the Food Stamp Benefit and the need for increased emergency food assistance.

Last September, The Jewish Council for Public Affairs led hundreds of Jews in over 30 communities nationwide in taking the “Food Stamp Challenge”, where participants lived on $1/meal for a week to show the inadequacy of the Food Stamp program and prove the nutritional deficiencies of such a diet. Jewish agencies and communities built interfaith coalitions and recruited faith, civic and political leaders to take the Food Stamp Challenge with them. We were joined by four members of Congress from different faiths, including Representatives Keith Ellison, Raul Grijalva, Chris Van Hollen and Jim Cooper. Participants forged new partnerships and created new mobilizing structures that ultimately secured the strongest possible nutrition title in a tight budget year.

Many of our friends in the faith community could not join us in supporting this bill. I agree that more could have been done to reform subsidies to large farming interests that constitute a hefty part of the Farm Bill’s spending, and I am certainly not writing to issue a blanket endorsement of every provision in the bill. However, I respectfully depart from many of my colleagues on the need to speak out in favor of the bill, despite its flaws.

When 73 percent of the bill’s total funding and almost all of the new money invested in the legislation is directed toward nutrition programs, I must conclude that the benefits in this complex and morally awkward legislation far outweigh the costs.