At this. Lets look and see if the threat you have faced caused by the fear you identified. Very often, it is not, particularly when it faces the issues of undocumented immigrants. You can watch this on our companion network, cspan. The Consumer Federation of america held their annual food policy conference recently here in washington, d. C. Up next, a keynote address from congressman, jim mcgovern here in the u. S. And his suggestions on how to address it. A panel of experts discuss what they thought would be the food policy priorities of the Trump Administration and how they would contrast with past objectives of the obama and bush administration. My name is thomas kremion, the director of the Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of america. I would like to welcome you and thank you p ffor attending our h annual, National Food policy conference. Today is also the second day of the jewish passover holiday. I would like to say, happy passover. As many of you know, Consumer Federation of america is an association of nearly 300 nonprofit consumer organizations. We were established in 1968 to advance the consumer interest through research, education and advocacy. We focus on a lot of different Consumer Protection topics but particularly relevant to this conference, we do food safety, nutrition and agriculture policy. M so this Conference Provides an opportunity to hear from some of the key policymakers and players in the food policy world. It is an opportunity to explore food policy from a diverse range of perspectives. I hope you agree we have a really Great Program for this years conference. That program reflects the exemplary work of our Advisory Committee. I dont have a packet up here with me. If you look in your packet, you can see the listing of our Advisory Committee members. I would just like to say thank you. One of our ideas was to try Live Audience polls. I am going to test that out now. Look up at the screen behind me. We have our first Live Audience polling question, the least important question you can answer at this years conference. I think it will be interesting to see how we feel about that. There are two way that is you can participate in this Live Audience polling. You can get on your phones browser, your phone or laptop or tablet browser. And put in the whole ev. Com foodpolicy. Or you can text food policy to the number 22333. Write out foodpolicy in the message of the text. As you see, it must be a millennial, has already gotten on and answered. So we are going to try this out. Lets see if we get any yeses and let you experience with that. While you experiment with that, i do want to reflect a little bit on this being our 40th anniversary, National Food policy conference. What a Great Program we have this year. In a few minutes, congressman, jim mcgovern, will be talking with you later this afternoon. We are pleased to have dr. Susan main, director of the u. S. Food and Drug Administrations center for food safety and applied nutrition. Tomorrow well start the program with addressing chuck mcconnor. He is president and ceo and former acting secretary of agriculture and member of president trumps agriculture Advisory Committee. That will be followed by a conversation with estherdyson, who is an entrepreneur and Angel Investor and whose initiative is helping five communities to ship resources to producing Health Rather than trying to recover it. Part of that strategy has a lot to do with changes to the food supply. I think thats going to be very interesting. Lets check in on our poll. I have to interpret that as a lot of disenchanted albright isolationists. Or another interpretation. So i think we can close the door on this one. This vital question. I think we are continuing with our experiment. This will give us a better sense of our audience today. The food policy conference. We are proud to attract a very diverse mix of folks. You guys are head of the curve. Our interests tend to fall in these three categories. Well give you some time. I know i wouldnt have responded by now if it was me. I want to recognize some of the people that made this conference possible over the years. 40 years ago, ellen haas started this conference while she was with a group called the Community Nutrition institution. For many years after that, art jaeger kept it going. He also ran an awards ceremony called the golden care awards during the 90s, which i know was very popular. It has become a really beloved institution. A lot of folks that attend. O we have a mix of interests represented at the food policy conference. It r started as very nutrition focused. It is not surprising that a lot of us are most interested in nutrition. But we do have we have a large food safety contingent as well. I think that reflects in no small part the influence of carol tucker foreman, who ran the conference and played a big role in Consumer Federation of america for many years and had an outside effect on food policy generally but food safety in particular. So i should also hasten to add that a lot of our program for everyone in each of these interest groups. Dont feel bad if you are a food safety minorities. Get me off this stage, well move on to our final polling question. To test out all of the features of our platform. Use a number here. Dont right in. This is kind of a work cloud feature. It would not have occurred to me to say zero, because you are here now. I know that there is at least 113 out there. I believe it is 13. Im thinking of chris wall drdr for a lot of you, chris has been the face of the food policy conference for as long as you have attended before i took over for him last year. Chris had organized the food policy conference for 13 years. I know he has attended at least 13. He took a welldeserved break. I am really glad to have him back. I want to say thank you to chris for being such an invaluable member of our Advisory Committee. A lot of the program reflects his input. Even for that matt feer, whats your packet today. Back and forth with chris. He has been very generous with his time in sharing the wisdom he accrued over these years of lead t leading this event. Well be ironing out the kinks of the Live Audience following the next day and a half. Thank you for participating in that. Thank you for being here. Whatever you do, wherever you are from, this conference is a great opportunity to mingle and network with a Diverse Group of folks and thank you for joining us here. We hope you enjoy the program and the networking reception we have added at the end of today. Please make sure you hang around for that. If any of you are on twitter, you can follow us at cfa food policy. The for the conference is pound cfafpc 2017. A couple of points on logistics. We are in the ballroom, where we will be having lunch and where our networking reception will be at the end of the day. Two of the breakout locations are on this floor. The breakout rooms to the left, and our third breakout room is on the third floor where it says health club and pool on the elevator. Keep that in mind. Give yourself a little bit of time to get up there. You can take the stairs but it is a bit of an adventure. Restrooms are located out the door to my left. A map in your packets. If you get lost, you can also go to the Registration Table and we can help you. There is also a description of the panels if you are having trouble deciding. A few exhibit tables outside. The registration area to my right. We have exhibit tors from the union of concerned scientists. The National Association of county and city health officials, dupont. The interNational Food council. We also have a table for General Information if anyone has reports, brochures or handouts they would like to make to your fellow attend tees. I would like to take a minute to thank our sponsors. They are listed on the back of your printed program. We are very grateful to all our sponsors for their support. These companies and organizations really recognize the importance of supporting an event like this where we can foster an open and vigorous exchange of ideas. I would like to change this years underwriters and benefactors, cargill, interNational Food and dairy association, dupont, general mills, mars, a few charitable trusts and walmart. I would also like to thank Sally Squires and her team at food wellness. You have seen their excellent design work and the registration emails and colorful programs and brochure designs. Finally, special thanks to the cfa staff. They have put in an enormous amount of work to register all the participants, prepare the conference materials, deal with much of the logistical work to help make this conference happen. I would like to specially thank Anna Marie Lowery and the rest of the staff that are here today. I would like to thank all of you very much for being here and once again, welcome to the 2017 National Food policy conference. To kick off the program, i am thrilled to present our opening keynote speaker. He is a native of worcester, massachusetts, which he now represents in p congress. Since being elected in 1y50irk9s 96, he has been a leader on food policy issues and particularly outspoken on hunger issues. He has promised one hell of a fight to those proposing cuts in food aide and he counts dole interNational Food for educational and child nutrition program, a program that gained notoriety as a target for elimination in the Trump Administration proposed budget. He is the second ranking democrat on the house rules committee, a member of the house agriculture committee, the Ranking Member on the House Committee on agriculture, subcommittee on nutrition and cochair of the house hunger caucus among many other credentials since 2013 as part of his, , inhunger now campaign. He has given nearly weekly speeches focused on food and security in america on the u. S. Floor of the house of representatives. We are happy to have him talk about hunger and other food policy related issues with us today. Please welcome congressman, jim mcgovern. Good morning, everybody. I know it is not easy to get up early in the morning. The only thing worse is being the first speaker of the morning. Thank you very much. I want to thank the Consumer Federation and representatives from the consumer advocate organizations, Food Industry, nonprofits as well as governmental officials. We come together to have some important conversations about agriculture, food policy and nutrition. I welcome the opportunity to be here. I probably should state at the outset that sometimes people think because my last name is mcgovern, that i am related to George Mcgovern who was a senator from south dakota and ran for president in 1972 and while i worked as an intern in his office in the senate when i was in college and he became one of my dearest friends and a great inspiration, we are not related. I say that because when i was getting a coffee in the lob by, somebody in this room came up and told me they were longtime supporters of my dad. They seemed a little shocked when i said, thank you, my dad owns a liquor store in worcester, massachusetts and i hope you keep on supporting him. I thought i should just clear the air on that. I welcome the opportunity to talk about the issue of hunger and Food Insecurity in this country and around the world. I think it is an important issue. It is one of those issues that is maddening, because it is solvable. I tell people all the time hunger is a political condition. We have the money. We have the resources. We have the infrastructure. We have the brain power. We have everything but we dont have the political will. I have a tough time grasping why that is the case. We live in the richest country in the history of the world and we have 42 million americans who are hungry or food insecure in the United States of america. As a United States congressman, as a citizen of this country, im a shamed of that. I find that so unacceptable. It is unconscionable with all of our riches in this country, with all of our knowhow and all of our ingenuity, that is the reality. We talk about hunger. It is more than just about talking about people who dont have enough to eat. There are other issues related to it. There are Health Issues related to people who on a regular basis go without food. If you are a child who misses meals on a regular basis and you show up in school, you are less likely to be able to learn. You are more likely to have developmental challenges in your lifetime. If you are a pregnant mother and you cant get the adequate nutrition, that oftentimes results in the birth of an unhealthy baby. If you are a worker who on a regular basis goes without food, you are going to be less productive in the workplace. So there are all these avoidable costs that are associated with hunger. When we talk about it, i think we need to look at not just immediate problem but the impact it has on our country and on so many people that live in this country. I have had a blessed life. I am not talking about getting elected to congress. I dont know if that is a blessing or a curse some days. I have had a blessed life in the sense i have never had to worry about basic necessities. I have always had a home. I have always had shelter. I have always had enough to eat. Ive never been hungry. But i believe that those of us who are blessed, have blessed lives and a special obligation to make sure that we worry about and care about those who are having challenges. I think thats just decent thing to do. Whether it is in our communities or whether it is in congress, i think this is a matter of decency to address issues like hunger. I get frustrated in congress because while i think this issue should not be a partisan issue and for many years, it wasnt. George mcgovern and bob dole worked together in a bipartisan way during the 1970s to help strength be then our programs. We are on our way to eliminating hunger in this country. We begin to reverse some of the progress we make. Now, what i find is that this issue is become very polarizing. You are never going to find a member of congress who is going to tell you they are pro hunger. They will never say that to you. When you look at the voting records of some of my colleagues, i dont know how you could come to any other conclusion. Because what ends up happening is that they are chipping away at programs that provide the basic necessity of food to our children and to parents and to older people. When i look at the president s budget, we are told in that budget, there may be cuts to programs like wic, womens infants and children program, basic nutrition for pregnant mothers and Young Children after they are born. It is important. If we neglect that, we are going to have to pay in other ways down the line. I hate to talk about it in terms of the bottom line and dollars and cents. We should be moved to do something. It is our moral obligation. Because we want to prevent human suffering in this country. I get the feeling sometimes that thats not enough. I get to become friends after i was running, when i first got elected with john kenneth galbraith, the great economists and a great visionary. I remember him saying to me one time, ill ask you to go out and comfort the aflikted but in these days, that might be ac centric so i will ask you to go out and aflikt the comfortable. We have to aflikt some of the comfortable and get them to start responding in ways to make progress on issues like hunger. We have when we have these debates in congress, it is always about the fact that the people that need these programs get characterized as somehow lazy or somehow undeserving. Or they are poor because they want to be poor. Ive never met anybody who wants to be poor. Ive never met anybody who wants to be hungry. By the way, just so the facts are clear, when we talk about snap. The majority of people or snap are children. They are Senior Citizens or people disabled. Of those that can work, the majority work. Why isnt the question in washington how can it be that somebody who works is still so poor they need to rely on snap to put food on the table . Why are we talking about increasing wage ns ths in this y so people could earn a liveable wage and be able to put foods onned table aon the table and the kind of foods they want. The debate tends to demonize the most Vulnerable People in this country. It is frustrating. The perception in washington is so different from the reality all throughout this country. We talk about we want people to make better choices. We want people to make healthier choices. We all need to make healthier choices, not just people on snap. We have studies that show that knows of us that are able to afford our own food make lousy choices too. We need to have this better and more Effective National dialogue on nutrition. With regard to snap recipients, i serve on the nutrition subcommittee. I dont know how many hearings we have. I lost count up to 206789 we have had so many hearings. I have lost count. During one of the last hearings, somebody raised the issue, why dont theed people make better choices. The reason why, the aver