(RNS) — This past week, a single mother in America’s Southwest tried to find out why her food assistance benefits — once a reliable safeguard for her family’s dining table — were gone.

She is not alone. Recent federal legislation has enacted the deepest cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in the program’s history — a reduction of nearly $187 billion over 10 years. The Farm Bill that just passed the House of Representatives locks in those cuts through 2031, without restoring a dollar of what was lost. And the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s annual household food security reports — 30 years of data measuring the state of hunger in America — have been discontinued. 

Nationwide, 1 in 5 children — nearly 14 million kids — are not getting the food they need, a problem especially prevalent in families with single mothers.

This was not inevitable. In 2021, child poverty dropped by nearly half over the year prior, to its lowest level ever recorded, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s because the government invested in SNAP, school meals and the child tax credit. When those investments expired, the numbers climbed back.

We have seen what is possible. The question is whether we still believe it is worth doing.

Pope Leo XIV has spoken directly to this moment. Hunger, he said, “is a cry rising to heaven and requiring a swift response from every nation, every international organization, every regional, local or private entity.” No one can remain on the sidelines in the fight.

What is less visible, but equally consequential, is what is happening with hunger beyond our borders.

With the ongoing conflict in the Middle East disrupting one of the world’s most critical food supply channels in the Strait of Hormuz, the hunger crisis is spreading well beyond the region. A rice farmer in Thailand, according to a recent Washington Post report, found that her crop would cost $33,000 to grow but sell for only $22,000 — the result of fertilizer prices surging nearly 50%. So, she will not plant.

All in all, we are facing an even more unstable, even more hungry reality around the world — and the security net that might catch what falls is fraying at exactly the wrong moment.

America’s flagship global hunger program, Food for Peace, shares the Farm Bill as its legislative home alongside SNAP. Both programs reflect the same national conviction: that hunger is solvable and that addressing it serves America’s interests at home and abroad. But recent policy changes — the transfer of Food for Peace from humanitarian agencies to agricultural ones, and an administrative agreement restructuring how recipient countries are selected — are reorienting the program away from those most in need, and in the end will make the return on our U.S. taxpayer investments far less impactful.

According to plans recently reported on by development news outlet Devex, countries will now be evaluated in part on whether they are opening their markets to U.S. agricultural goods. Food for Peace’s staff has been reduced from 300 to 26, the report noted. Dina Esposito, my former colleague at the U.S. Agency for International Development and a previous director of Food for Peace, puts it plainly: “Almost certainly, fewer of the world’s most acutely hungry people will be reached under these criteria. Famine-prone countries like Sudan may not qualify at all.”

Feeding the hungry and advancing American prosperity have never been in competition. History has proved they are the same investment.

The scale of what is converging abroad should stop us cold. An estimated 318 million people worldwide face crisis levels of hunger — more than double the number in 2019, according to the World Food Programme. Two simultaneous famines have been confirmed in Gaza and parts of Sudan, the first time this century that has happened.

The World Food Programme needs $13 billion to reach even a third of those in severe hunger, and forecasts suggest it will receive barely half of that. Meanwhile, conflict in the Middle East has sent fertilizer prices surging up to 50%, disrupting food supply chains from Thailand to Bangladesh. And the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations‘ chief economist warns that El Niño will not create a new crisis but amplify the one already underway. “This is no longer a sequence of separate crises,” he writes in Devex. “It is the convergence of conflict and climate risk.”

Even with midterm elections on the horizon and Americans facing affordability concerns, this is not an argument about whom to vote for. It is an argument about who we are at America’s 250th anniversary.

Some say that the faith community should lead, and I agree. Churches, synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras and congregations across America have a role to play, but they cannot fix this alone. Food pantries like my own church’s here in Chicago, and in neighborhoods across this city and every city in America, are seeing record demand as families lose food assistance.

They are doing sacred work. But they are not a substitute for policy. In fact, the need for faith-based leadership on hunger is a sign American policy is not working.

People of deep faith across the political spectrum — evangelical Christians, Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs and people of no particular tradition — share a bedrock conviction that hunger is an affront to human dignity. The question before every American who holds that conviction, regardless of how they vote, is whether we are willing to raise our voices together at the scale the moment demands.

We have been here before, and we have chosen differently.

Food for Peace was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 and expanded by President John F. Kennedy, who declared: “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.” At its 30th anniversary, President Ronald Reagan called the program “one of the greatest humanitarian acts ever performed by one nation for the needy of other nations” — noting that eight of America’s top 10 agricultural markets, including Japan, were once Food for Peace recipients. The program built those commercial relationships by feeding people first. PEPFAR, launched under President George W. Bush, extended the same logic to the HIV/AIDS crisis and saved an estimated 25 million lives.

These were not Democratic achievements or Republican achievements. They were American achievements. A nation that has done all of this before can do it again. The leaders we have been waiting for are people of every faith and none, of every political background who believe that hunger is not inevitable. It is a choice in how we respond that reflects our values. It’s time to choose wisely.

(Adam Nicholas Phillips is a nonprofit executive, civic and faith-based leader with 25 years of experience in poverty solutions, both domestic and international where he previously served at USAID. He is a board member of Bread for the World and the author of the forthcoming book “Power: Leadership for the Common Good.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)