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It was bad enough that Republicans from Newt Gingrich on down derided Barack Obama as the “food stamp President” during the last campaign.

Now they’re trying to take food stamps out of the hands of the hungry.

On Wednesday, the House Ag Committee voted to cut $21 billion out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

The cuts would yank food stamps away from 2 million people, and get this: 200,000 poor and hungry kids would no longer able to get free school lunches.

Deciding how America will nourish itself and sustain its farms would seem a top policy priority— yet as the US Farm Bill demonstrates, sustainably grown, healthy food and livable incomes for farmers and workers remain an afterthought in a process controlled almost entirely by agribusiness and a handful of farm-state legislators. Despite strong public opinion supporting local food, farmer’s markets, organic agriculture, food workers’ rights and access to fresh produce, agribusiness and commodity interests continue to dominate food and farming policy.

Volunteers fill bags for a school lunch program at the Cleveland Foodbank. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta.)Lost in the shuffle of last year’s big fiscal cliff deal was the deal that didn’t happen on a new farm bill.

Nature has given us a cornucopia of biodiversity rich in nutrients. Malnutrition and nutrient deficiency result from destroying biodiversity. The Green Revolution has spread monocultures of chemical rice and wheat, driving out biodiversity from our farms and diets.

Conflict in Mali has driven nearly 70,000 refugees to Mbera camp in the Mauritanian desert, where appalling conditions and inadequate assistance are leading to severe malnutrition and deaths from preventable diseases, the international medical humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said in read more

An unemployment line. (Credit: Reuters)America’s social safety net, such as it is, has recently come under some scrutiny. Chana Joffe-Walt’s in-depth exploration of the increase in people getting Social Security Disability benefits at NPR got many listeners buzzing.