Hunger Crisis Prompts Call for Government 'Food Czar.'

During the 1960 presidential campaign, George McGovern hatched an idea he thought would help John Kennedy appeal to Midwest farmers and also do something about world hunger.

Farmers could feed their world, McGovern thought, if only the U.S. government did a better job of buying up crop surpluses and sending them around the world. He advised Kennedy to pledge to appoint someone in the White House to make sure that got done. [...]

Their bill grew out of a study released this summer by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. The report called the recent crisis with food prices a "moral and humanitarian threat" that requires a "new, coherent vision that is not piecemeal or business as usual."

Read the article