page_title: Food for Peace
section_title: Kennedy era and Food for Peace Act (1966)
hierarchical_section_title: Food for Peace / Authorizing legislation / Kennedy era and Food for Peace Act (1966)
caption_attribution_description: U.S. President John F. Kennedy (left) with George McGovern, who Kennedy has appointed the first Director of the Food for Peace program.
context_page_description: In different administrative and organizational forms, the Food for Peace program of the United States has provided food assistance around the world for more than 50 years. Approximately 3 billion people in 150 countries have benefited directly from U.S. food assistance. The Office of Food for Peace within the United States Agency for International Development is the U.S. Government's largest provider of overseas food assistance. The food assistance programming is funded primarily through the Food for Peace Act. The Office of Food for Peace also receives International Disaster Assistance Funds through the Foreign Assistance Act that can be used in emergency settings.
  While U.S. food aid started out in the 1950s as a means to donate surplus U.S. commodities, the U.S. government moved away from this decades ago, and now purchases food from American farmers through a competitive process. The Office of Food for Peace donates food based on an identified need, in close consultation with the host government requesting the assistance.
  During the 2010s the program underwent revisions offered by in the Administration's Fiscal Year 2014 budget.
context_section_description: In 1961, President John F. Kennedy termed the law "Food for Peace," stating, "Food is strength, and food is peace, and food is freedom, and food is a helping hand to people around the world whose good will and friendship we want." Through new amendments, the law switched its focus from disposing of surplus agricultural commodities to addressing humanitarian needs and responding to growing food crisis demands. In signing the extension of the Agricultural Trade Development and Assistance Act in 1959, President Eisenhower criticized the shortcomings of the amendment.  He specifically referred to the extension as the Food for Peace program.  Although Kennedy may have expanded the program, he was not the first to refer to the program as Food for Peace.
  Former U.S. Representative from South Dakota George McGovern was picked to become a Special Assistant to the President and first director of Kennedy's high-priority Food for Peace program, which realized what McGovern had been advocating in the House. McGovern assumed the post on January 21, 1961.
  As director, McGovern urged the greater use of food to enable foreign economic development, saying, "We should thank God that we have a food abundance and use the over-supply among the under-privileged at home and abroad." He found space for the program in the Executive Office Building rather than be subservient to either the U.S. Department of State or U.S. Department of Agriculture. McGovern worked with deputy director James W. Symington and Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. in visiting South America to discuss surplus grain distribution, and attended meetings of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.
  By the close of 1961, the Food for Peace program was operating in a dozen countries, and 10 million more people had been fed with American surplus than the year before. In February 1962, McGovern visited India and oversaw a greatly expanded school lunch program thanks to Food for Peace; subsequently one in five Indian schoolchildren would be fed from it, and by mid-1962, 35 million children around the world. During an audience in Rome, Pope John XXIII warmly praised McGovern's work.
  McGovern resigned his post on July 18, 1962, wanting to resume his electoral political career. Kennedy said that under McGovern, the program had "become a vital force in the world", improving living conditions and economies of allies and creating "a powerful barrier to the spread of Communism". Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that it was one of the "most spectacular achievements of the young Kennedy administration," while Schlesinger would later write that Food for Peace had been "the greatest unseen weapon of Kennedy's third-world policy".
  McGovern was succeeded by Richard W. Reuter, who had been the executive director of CARE.  In 1965, during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the program was folded into the State Department under Secretary Dean Rusk.  A year later Reuther resigned his retitled position of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State for Food for Peace, reportedly dismayed by the direction the food program had taken.
  The Food for Peace Act of 1966, P.L. 89-808, 80 Stat. 1526, revised the basic structure of the programs and placed the emphasis clearly on the humanitarian goals of the program. The policy statement shifted from surplus disposal to planned production for export to meet world food needs.
caption: George McGovern as Food for Peace director in 1961, with President John F. Kennedy
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