We're all familiar with the loud beeping sound made by a truck or construction when it shifts into reverse. It warns of imminent danger. We stop and pay attention, and reach out to grab the hand of our child. Shouldn't there be a similar warning when our children are threatened by social progress sliding into reverse?

Last month a new analysis of census bureau statistics revealed that the percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty is higher today than it was in 1975. The McClatchy Newspapers analysis found that the number of severely poor Americans grew by 26 percent from 2000 to 2005. That's 56 percent faster than the overall poverty population grew in the same period. If anything merits alarm it is seeing such an official measurement of human desperation going backward.

This trend is particularly disturbing in the face of so much progress we've witnessed in other areas in the same time frame: gains in worker productivity; revolutions in technology and communications; remarkable discoveries in science and medicine. For most of us the quality of life has improved substantially since 1975. Yet 16 million Americans now live in extreme poverty, which is defined as half the federal poverty line - an annual income of $9,903 for a family of four with two children.

Tragically, poverty has held its grip on millions of American families through every economic cycle over the past 30 years. But one difference today is that we at least know how to address one of poverty's most devastating consequences: the hunger and poor nutrition that impacts a child's growth, development and ability to succeed in school.

Over the last 30 years good bipartisan public policy and heroic private efforts have combined to create a system of food and nutrition programs to guarantee that our most vulnerable children, even if poor, won't go hungry. We know that programs like school lunch and breakfast, summer feeding, and nutrition education work. But not all kids have access to these programs. Those who don't are every bit as much in harms way as if standing in the blind spot of a steamroller backing down the street.

There may be reasons why we can't solve poverty but there are no excuses for going backwards. At a time when alarms should be sounding to warn us of imminent danger, our moral obligation is to ensure every child is out of harm's way.

70% of the hungriest children in America live in 10 states. They are not Census Bureau statistics to us at Share Our Strength. They are Robert and Orlando and Julia and Sarah and Xaxier and Terrell, and too many more. We've spent enough time with them at their schools, clinics, playgrounds and churches to know what they need and how to get it to them.

State by state we are forging comprehensive partnerships and intensive interventions to ensure that every child has access to food where he or she lives, learns, prays or plays. And we are rallying hundreds of other anti-hunger organizations to make ending childhood hunger their top priority.

We can't afford the kind of division in America represented by most of us enjoying all that American life has to offer in 2007 but the most vulnerable among us losing even what little they've gained since 1975.

As the novelist James Baldwin once said: "For these are all our children, and we shall profit by, or pay for, what they become."