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The federal government is about to put $100 million behind a simple idea: doubling the value of SNAP benefits — what used to be called food stamps — when people use them to buy local fruits and vegetables.

This idea did not start on Capitol Hill. It began as a local innovation at a few farmers' markets. But it proved remarkably popular and spread across the country.

"It's so simple, but it has such profound effects both for SNAP recipients and for local farmers," says Mike Appell, a vegetable farmer who sells his produce at a market in Tulsa, Okla.

The idea first surfaced in 2005 among workers at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. They were starting a campaign to get people to eat more fresh produce.

"I think we were trying to confront the idea that healthy foods, [like] fresh fruits and vegetables, are not affordable," says Candace Young, who was director of the department's nutrition programming at the time. (Young now works for The Food Trust in Philadelphia.)

Young recalls that one of their workers pointed out that some SNAP recipients live near farmers markets "and we thought, how about we incentivize them to use their SNAP benefits at these farmers markets?"

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Crossroads Farmers Market is located in a heavily immigrant neighborhood on the boundary between Langley Park and Takoma Park, Md. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Charles/NPR

Crossroads Farmers Market is located in a heavily immigrant neighborhood on the boundary between Langley Park and Takoma Park, Md.

Dan Charles/NPR

The city made a few thousand dollars available for the program. So at a few markets in the South Bronx and Harlem, when someone spent $10 of SNAP benefits, they then received an additional $4 in the form of coupons called HealthBucks, which they could use to buy more local produce.

This desire to make farmers markets more food-stamp friendly seems to have been floating in the air at that time. A farmers market in Lynn, Mass., used a $500 donation to do something similar the very next year.

Then, in 2007, the idea mutated into a form that really caught on.

It happened with the birth of the Crossroads Farmers Market, on the boundary that divides the towns of Langley Park and Takoma Park, Md. The area, near Washington, D.C., is home to many immigrants.

The Salt

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"A lot of Latinos come to this market," says Michelle Dudley, the market manager. "I would say that 70 percent of our customers are Spanish-speaking, but we also see people from the Caribbean. Folks from West Africa."

Back in 2007, a man named John Hyde organized the Crossroads market with this immigrant community in mind "and then realized — these people did not have a lot of money," says Gus Schumacher, Hyde's friend and collaborator at the time. (Hyde can't tell the story himself, unfortunately. He died in 2009.)

Schumacher says he and Hyde got to talking about this money problem and had a brainstorm: If they could raise some money, they could use it to double the value of food stamps, as well as vouchers from the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program and food benefits for seniors.

Schumacher, a former top officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, used his connections to raise the money. "I asked the National Watermelon Association if they would provide a small stipend, and they were very generous. they provided $5,000," he says.

They set up a system that has remained almost unchanged ever since. On a recent visit, I see SNAP recipients lining up to speak with a market volunteer named Rosie Sanchez. They tell her how much money they want to spend from their SNAP benefits. Sanchez swipes their SNAP card and gives them wooden tokens that they can spend at the market. But she actually gives them tokens worth twice the amount that she took from their SNAP benefits; up to $15 more.

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Rosie Sanchez handles SNAP transactions at Crossroads market. She also doubles the value of vouchers from the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program. Dan Charles/NPR hide caption

itoggle caption Dan Charles/NPR

Rosie Sanchez handles SNAP transactions at Crossroads market. She also doubles the value of vouchers from the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program.

Dan Charles/NPR

Rosie Sanchez is a SNAP recipient herself. This program "is very important," she says. "You know why? Because I get up to $15 for free. So I have $30 dollars every week. With my $30, I'm able to buy fresh, local — it's not expensive. It's the best!"

Gus Schumacher loved it, too. The same year this market started, he co-founded, together with chef Michel Nischan, an organization called Wholesome Wave, which has brought this idea of doubling SNAP benefits to farmers markets from Connecticut to California.

Private foundations were happy to contribute, because they realized that their dollars could do several things at once: ease poverty, promote better health and boost the local farm economy.

The Salt

Two For One: Subsidies Help Food Stamp Recipients Buy Fresh Food

In Michigan, a food activist named Oran Hesterman set up the Fair Food Network, which called this idea Double Up Food Bucks and got it working in more than a hundred places across the state.

"We wanted to take it from the seed of an idea to a demonstration that this is something that you could do at scale," Hesterman says.

Hesterman was thinking big. He wanted to sell this idea to the government.

He invited one of Michigan's senators — Democrat Debbie Stabenow — to see Double Up Food Bucks for herself. And last year, Stabenow, who chairs the Senate's Agriculture Committee, proposed including it in the so-called Farm Bill.

On the other side of Capitol Hill, the chairman of the House agriculture committee, Republican Frank Lucas, from Oklahoma, was hearing about this idea, too.

Farmer Mike Appell had brought Double Up Food Bucks to the Cherry Street Farmers Market in Tulsa and talked about it to a member of Lucas' staff.

"It didn't seem like it required much of a sell," Appell recalls. "They seemed to be on board with it." If the program was supporting farmers, the congressman wanted to support it.

The Salt

Nudging Detroit: Program Doubles Food Stamp Bucks In Grocery Stores

Earlier this year, the Farm Bill passed, and included $100 million, over the next five years, to boost SNAP dollars when they're spent on fresh fruits and vegetables. Those taxpayer dollars have to be matched by private funding, so the program could add up to $200 million in total.

That's a huge increase. According to some estimates, it may be 10 times what these programs spend right now.

As a result, small programs like the Cherry Street Farmers Market and the Crossroads market are now applying for funding to expand. And Michigan's Fair Food Network, one of the biggest programs, is even moving beyond farmers markets. It's now working with supermarket chains to see whether SNAP recipients shopping there can double their dollars for fresh produce every day and all year round.

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A suicide bomber who was reportedly dressed in a student uniform detonated explosives at a large boys' high school in northeastern Nigeria, killing as many as 48 students. The attack during a morning assembly is being blamed on the insurgent group Boko Haram.

From Lagos, NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton reports:

"Disguised as a uniformed high school student, a bomber disrupted weekly assembly by detonating explosives.

"Survivors say about 2,000 students had gathered at the Government Technical Science College in Potiskum, in Nigeria's northeastern Yobe state, when an explosion ripped through the hall.

"One boy said they were waiting to be addressed by the school principal when he was blown off his feet by a deafening blast and that people were screaming and running.

"The military rushed to the scene, but furious residents hurled stones at the soldiers, accusing them of failing to counter a deadly insurgency that has killed thousands of people and displaced hundreds of thousands more."

On today's Morning Edition, Ofeibea adds that Boko Haram has been linked to most attacks in northeastern Nigeria, particularly in violence that targets schools. And she notes that the deadly attack comes weeks after government officials announced they had brokered a peace deal with the Islamist group.

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In general, it's a good idea to have the number of the poison control center handy.

That's an even better plan if you have laundry detergent and small children at home.

For decades, poison centers received many calls each year about children swallowing laundry detergent or getting it in their eyes.

That problem has gotten worse due to new highly concentrated single-load liquid laundry detergent packets.

The study says in 2013, poison centers received reports of 10,395 exposures to highly concentrated packets of laundry detergent by children five and younger.

The pods are brightly colored and children want to play with them and put them in their mouths.

In some cases, the effects are more series than when children have ingested regular laundry detergent.

A study released today by the American Association of Poison Control centers, published in Pediatrics, says: Some children who have gotten the product in their mouths have had excessive vomiting, wheezing and gasping. Some get very sleepy. Some have had breathing problems serious enough to need a ventilator to help them breathe. There have also been reports of corneal abrasions when the detergent gets into a child's eyes.

The Associated Press reports that some manufacturers already have revised packaging and labels in efforts to make the detergent packets or pods safer for children.

The study found calls dipped slightly after some of those changes were made.

Poison control centers and the Consumer Product Safety Commission remind parents not to let children handle the pods, and to store the pakcets so children can't see them or reach them.

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As far back as the early 1990s, Washington thought trade and investment eventually would make China more democratic. In the past couple of years, though, the Communist Party has doubled down on repression at home and become more aggressive overseas.

In short, things have not turned out as Washington had hoped, and relations between the world's two major powers are tense these days.

President Obama will continue to work on that tricky relationship after he arrives in Beijing on Monday for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit The gathering provides Chinese President Xi Jinping with an international platform as he hosts leaders from Japan, India and Russia and tries to boost China's standing in world affairs.

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Two decades ago, Republicans, Democrats and some prominent China scholars argued that economic engagement would change China's political system over time.

"By working with China and expanding areas of cooperation, dealing forthrightly with our differences, we can advance fundamental American interests and values," President Bill Clinton said in 1997.

James Mann, author of The China Fantasy: Why Capitalism Will Not Bring Democracy to China, says the conventional wisdom was China's authoritarian system naturally would evolve.

"Part of the theory was, it was just inevitable," says Mann, a scholar-in-residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. "Any country that became prosperous and had growing trade and investment ties with the world would automatically liberalize."

One popular U.S. columnist argued that as Chinese enjoyed greater and greater consumer choices — such as various types of coffee at Starbucks — a desire for political choice would follow. After meeting with then-premier Wen Jiabao in 2005, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters China was heading towards a more open political system.

"The whole basis of the discussion I have had in a country that is developing very fast — where 100 million people now use the Internet, and which is going to be the second-largest economy in the world — is that there is an unstoppable momentum toward greater political freedom," Blair told reporters in Beijing, according to Bloomberg News.

But Mann says capitalism had the opposite effect.

Chinese naval soldiers stand guard on China's first aircraft carrier, Liaoning, as it travels toward a military base in Hainan province, in this undated picture made available on Nov. 30, 2013. Tensions in the South China Sea have grown over territorial disputes between China, the Philippines, Japan and others. Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption Reuters/China Stringer Network/Landov

"It resulted in a rich, authoritarian regime, which is not what we were looking for in the first place, and which is more of a problem to deal with," he says.

China has poured some of its riches into naval power and is now tangling with Japan and the Philippines, close American allies, over disputed islands. China claims most of the vast South China Sea as its own, despite the protests of various neighbors.

Mann says American policymakers thought China would follow the path of other East Asian dictatorships, such as Taiwan and South Korea, which democratized in the 1980s. Those countries, however, relied on the U.S. for their defense, which Washington used as political leverage.

"The United States pushed Taiwan over a decade," says Mann. "None of that is going to happen in China. It has an entirely different relationship with the United States."

Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, says that instead of democratizing China, economic growth helped the party strengthen its grip on power.

"The U.S. has gravely underestimated the capabilities, the determination, the resourcefulness of the Chinese Communist Part. Better economic performance gives them greater political legitimacy, and [then] they don't have to do political reform," says Pei. It also "allows them more resources to use repression to defend one-party rule."

Since coming to power in 2012, President Xi has cracked down on Internet speech and jailed all sorts of critics. Last month, an 81-year-old writer known by the pen name Tie Liu was charged with "creating a disturbance." Among his apparent offenses: publishing the accounts of some of the political victims of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, knows China's political failings, but says the party has made improvements for which it doesn't receive credit. Those include term limits for top leaders, who — though not popularly elected — pay close attention to public opinion.

"America somehow is impatient," says Shen, who says Americans seem to think the only form of democracy is the one-person, one-vote Western model. America "is too idealistic and is too chauvinistic."

Trends That Undermine Communist Power

How long can the Communist Party stay in power? Pei expects it to run out of gas in 10 to 15 years.

"The people who work for this system have no fundamental loyalty to the system," says Pei. Indeed, the conventional wisdom among Chinese themselves is that most people who have joined the party in the past decade primarily did so to enrich themselves through connections and graft.

"All they want to do is benefit personally from their relationship with the system," Pei continues. "So, over the long run, the system will go bankrupt."

Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, says the party has another trend running against it. Young Chinese have dramatically different expectations than their parents.

"Let's look at the young people in Shanghai, Beijing," he says. "They are more similar to their peers in Taipei, in Tokyo, in Washington, in New York. That's a very powerful force.

"They have similar lifestyles, they have similar kind of inspiration, and sooner or later they will also want to have freedom."

Li says that's natural. When that might happen, though, is anyone's guess.

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