Congress should learn from Eisenhower’s best Christmas gift

With global hunger escalating during this pandemic, it’s urgent Congress increase global food aid. They can look to history for inspiration in President Dwight Eisenhower’s Christmas Food Plan to feed the world’s hungry.

In Eisenhower’s first year as president he launched “Operation Reindeer” during the Christmas holidays, to deliver food packages to nations suffering in hunger.

At that time Germany, Japan, Austria and Italy were some of the countries in peril from food shortages. They had not fully recovered from World War II and needed a little more help to get across the finish line to recovery. It takes time for nations and food systems to bounce back from the trauma of war, something we need to recognize for those today in similar predicaments.

Eisenhower’s Operation Reindeer

brought food, hope and also won friendships. “It reminds us that we have not been forgotten.” One German wrote, “tell Americans that they have admirers in Germany.”

A governor in Austria said that “his country is very grateful and the only reason that recovery has been so miraculous has been due to U.S. aid and friendship.”

A U.S. aid observer, Mr. Newton Leonard, wrote, “we wished that the packages weighed a hundred pounds for we realized how quickly the contents of the packages would be consumed by the hungry and ill children and adults.” Leonard recommended expanding child feeding, including school meals.

Eisenhower’s Christmas food packages were a forerunner to the creation of the Food for

Peace program in 1954. Food for Peace would send U.S. surplus food overseas year-round to fight hunger.

Today we need Eisenhower’s

Christmas food plan more than ever with hunger growing worldwide. There are 25 nations facing devastating levels of hunger according to the United Nations.