Author: WHES

When I heard that the losing candidate in the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jean Pierre Bemba, had accepted defeat, I realised I would have to eat some words.
“It would be a miracle,” I reported several times for the BBC on visits to DR Congo during the first and second rounds of voting, “if these polls are pulled off successfully”.

October 25, 2006) World Food Day, commemorated on October 16, has become more of an exercise in expiation of sins than a renewal of a serious commitment to end hunger.

Throughout the world, the press decries the latest Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics: 852 million people lack adequate food, 13% of the world’s population is “food insecure.” Hunger and famine exist on every continent.

Forums are held to discuss the problem. Experts opine on proposals that have been debated for decades. But it’s unlikely that much real progress will result from the day’s soul-searching. The proposals fill pages of print but have been consistently ineffective in actually filling bellies.

The war on hunger declared after World War II has largely been abandoned. With the advent of the “market fixes all” philosophy of recent decades, the structural causes of hunger have been ignored in favor of free market philosophy, technological fixes, and charity-based interventions.

Global trade liberalization separates the food we eat from the land we inhabit, and the communities we live in. While international trade in food products is both inevitable and to some degree desirable, the drastic deregulation of a distorted market has led to a breakdown in communities, productive chains, and ecosystems.

In many countries, the guarantors of food supplies—small farmers—are being driven out of production by agricultural imports from the United States and other developed countries under free trade agreements.

Promotion of high-yield crops has increased the volume of food production in some regions, but has also created greater vulnerability and eroded agricultural biodiversity by supplanting native varieties that are often better adapted to local dietary needs and ecosystems.

In the midst of this crisis, the FAO’s slogan this year: “Investing in agriculture for food security—the whole world will profit” is off the mark.

No doubt the countryside requires more investment to produce food and feed its own inhabitants. The FAO points out that foreign aid to agriculture has fallen from $9 billion per year in the early 1980s to less than $5 billion in the late 1990s. Except in countries like Argentina, where large-scale soy production has exploded, most countries are seeing a decrease in investment, employment, and income generation in their rural sectors. The irony that 70% of the world’s hungry live in rural areas is proof that the world’s farmers need help—and fast.

But investment in agriculture, not surprisingly, tends to flow to sectors that generate profit. In developing countries, public funding for the rural sector has been decimated by structural adjustment programs, and both private and public investment is overwhelmingly oriented toward agri-business for export.

The profit motive will not solve hunger because that is not its purpose. In fact, it has done much to skew both production and distribution of the world’s food supply. Its capacity to provide a long-term solution is even more doubtful, since the high-yield models promoted by transnational seed, biotech, and agricultural trading companies (often the same conglomerates) decrease the ability of the soil to produce the food we need in the future. Monocropping, chemical use, and intensive natural resource use and contamination, produce food and profits while generating costs passed on to the next generation.

The profit ends up benefiting not “the whole world” but a very narrow group of large producers and traders. In both developed and developing countries, the model has led to a sharp divide between a small group of industrial farmers and millions of small farmers on the verge of economic collapse.

As they collapse, their land either goes out of food production or is gobbled up by large landowners. The rate of land reconcentration is turning the clock back on hard-won struggles for social justice throughout Latin America.

The threat posed by a free trade agricultural model can be seen in Mexico, the classic example of a developing nation plunged head-first into a market economy. There the price of corn paid the nearly 3 million corn farmers fell 50% between 1999 and 2004, as massive U.S. imports flooded the Mexican market. This in turn led to a massive conversion of farmers to migrants.

Did economic integration in agriculture enable the nation to import cheap food and solve hunger? Let’s look at the statistics. The price of tortillas to consumers rose 380% since NAFTA went into effect. Mexico recently reported that more than one million children under five, or 12.7%, are chronically malnourished. In the countryside, where food is grown, the percentage is nearly double.

At the same time, and often in the same regions, obesity has risen at a rate unparalleled anywhere else in the world. The percentage of obese or overweight adults increased from 35.5% in 1988 to 70% in 2006. Changes in diet due to importation of processed foods and immigration’s cultural impact are among the prime culprits.

The world as a whole now faces this dual crisis of malnutrition and obesity, which has resulted from economic polarization, cultural changes, and a decline in the quality of our food supply.

A concept of “food security” that posits that it doesn’t matter if food is imported or grown at home is highly compatible with globalization but it ignores both the plight and potential of small farmers. Without protecting their livelihoods, they will remain in poverty and constitute the ranks of the hungry. Without recognizing the contributions they make to society—not only in food production but also in ecosystem conservation, social cohesion, traditional knowledge, and cultural diversity—we stand to lose irredeemable public goods.

In contrast to the food security paradigm, many grassroots farmers’ organizations have adopted the term “food sovereignty” to describe the right of a people or nation to produce and consume its own food. They call for government and global policies that enable small farmers to continue to farm.

The FAO is not proposing that small farmers be driven from agriculture or that investment flow only to large competitive interests. However, its unfortunate slogan not only does nothing to correct this situation, it reinforces the concepts at the heart of the current crisis. An increase in investment without a serious critique of the current model of agriculture could actually exacerbate rather than resolve the problem. The results of the market-based, large-scale, hi-tech approach have not only been inadequate; they have been downright counterproductive in rural areas throughout the world.

There can be no solution to hunger that doesn’t have small farmers at its center. Peasant and indigenous farmers in developing countries cannot peacefully coexist with industrialized, monopolized agriculture without regulations and policies in their favor. Even though they sell for consumption in local markets they are forced to compete with imports while saddled with disadvantages that include their small scale, lack of capital, and U.S. farm subsidies.

Hunger is a disease whose “cure” is in prevention. Up to now, few proposals that would support small-scale agriculture have made headway with policymakers. It’s time for the FAO, other international agencies, and national governments to restore the emphasis where it should be—on the small farmers.

Laura Carlsen is director of the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org) in Mexico City, where she has been a writer and political analyst for more than two decades. The original of this article may be found at http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3641

The glacier has begun to creak. In the world’s most powerful dictatorship, we detect the merest hint of a thaw. I am not talking about China, or Uzbekistan, Burma or North Korea. This state runs no torture chambers or labour camps. No one is executed, though plenty starve to death as a result of its policies. The unhurried perestroika is taking place in Washington, in the offices of the International Monetary Fund.

(July 28, 2006) Several guilty parties were responsible for the recent collapse of the Doha round of trade negotiations, but none guiltier than the United States. U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab refused to make a serious offer on cutting domestic subsidies for U.S. farmers. Worse, at a late stage in the negotiations, she appeared determined to eliminate any protection for developing country farmers. The WTO’s December 2005 Hong Kong Declaration designated “special products” for exemption from tariff cuts, and Schwab singled out these provisions for attack.

Why the United States chose protection of its farming lobby over the survival of the multilateral trading system it had taken the lead in creating will long be a matter of debate. In the hotly contested congressional elections in November, the Midwestern farming states could determine whether or not the U.S. Congress will remain under Republican control, and Karl Rove was not willing to let anything get in the way of continuing GOP dominance.

U.S. intransigence may well go beyond electoral considerations. It reflects Washington’s unilateralist thrust since George W. Bush came to power in 2001. Like its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. refusal to substantially cut its agricultural subsidies reflects a strategy of making others, including traditional allies, bear the costs of necessary adjustments in the global economy. Last Monday’s unraveling of the Doha Round, in this view, was the death knell of multilateralism.

What is not a matter of debate is that the Doha Round was never meant to be a round to end poverty, as the Group of Eight leaders meeting in St. Petersburg depicted it. The idea that the Doha Round is a “development round” could not be farther from the truth.

At the very outset of the Doha negotiations in November 2001, the developed country governments rejected the demand of the majority of countries that the talks focus on the hard task of implementing past commitments and avoid initiating a new round of trade liberalization. From the very start, the aim of the developed countries was to push for greater market openings from the developing countries while making minimal concessions of their own. Invoking development was simply a cynical ploy to make the process less unpalatable. According to the Financial Times, these “poor tactics” backfired.

Lopsided Negotiations in Agriculture and Industry

The state of the agricultural negotiations before Monday’s unraveling reflected the imbalance of power in the positions of the developing and developed worlds. Even if the United States had conceded to the terms of WTO Director General’s compromise on cutting its domestic support, the United States would still keep a massive $20 billion worth of allowable subsidies. Even if the European Union (EU) had agreed to phase out its export subsidies, it would have maintained 55 billion euros in other forms of export support. In return for such minimal concessions, the United States, EU, and other developed countries wanted radically reduced tariffs for their agricultural exports in developing country markets.

The WTO negotiations, if concluded on such lopsided terms, would result in the slashing of poor countries’ farm tariffs while preventing them from maintaining food security. This is a recipe for massively expanded hunger and threatens to further impoverish hundreds of millions of the poor worldwide. A Philippine government negotiator at the WTO Agriculture Committee perhaps best summed up the consequences for the South: “Our agricultural sectors that are strategic to food security and rural employment have already been destabilized as our small producers are being slaughtered by the gross unfairness of the international trading environment. Even as I speak, our small producers are being slaughtered in our own markets, [and] even the more resilient and efficient are in distress.”

The developed countries want not only radically reduced agricultural tariffs from developing countries, but also maximum entry to southern markets for their industrial and other non-agricultural goods. In the NAMA (Non-Agricultural Market Access) negotiations, they have demanded that the industrializing economies of the South cut their non-agricultural tariffs by 60-70% while offering to cut theirs by only 20-30%. This absurdly inequitable proposal violates the GATT-WTO principle of less-than-full-reciprocity. The South African government reflected the frustrations of most of the global South about the Doha process when it stated that “Developing countries will not agree to destroy their domestic industry on the basis of unreasonable and irrational demands placed on them by the developed countries.”

The extinction of agriculture and deindustrialization is not the only price that developing countries are being asked to pay for a successful conclusion to the Doha Round. In addition, the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) negotiations in the WTO are pressuring the countries of the global South to allow foreign corporations more rights to buy and control their public services, at the expense of guaranteeing essential public services for the poor.

The Cost-Benefit Equation

It is no longer just the developing countries or global civil society that is warning that WTO-managed liberalization will be detrimental to the interests of the developing world. Even the most pro-liberalization agencies are now admitting that the benefits of the Doha Round to the poor have been greatly inflated. According to a 2005 study by the World Bank, developing countries would gain a mere $16 billion in ten years in a “likely Doha scenario” of reforms. That’s a miniscule 0.16% of developing-country gross domestic product, or less than a penny a day per capita. The poorest billion people are projected to increase incomes by a mere $2 per year. That’s why it is so heartbreaking to see “the poor” being invoked to sell the project of massive corporate expansion of the Doha agenda.

Though more realistic than its previous studies, the 2005 World Bank report is still inadequate, for it does not factor in many costs that the WTO regime imposes on developing countries. It fails to account, for instance, for the negative impact of corporate patent monopolies under the WTO’s “Trade-Related Intellectual Property” agreement, which forces the poor to pay vastly increased prices for access to life-saving medicines.

Indeed, the poor might not get even their annual $2. The Doha costs may be larger than the Doha gains. For example, a recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) study predicts that the losses in tariff income for developing countries under Doha could range between $32 billion and $63 billion annually. This loss in government revenues—the source of developing-country health care, education, water provision, and sanitation budgets—is two to four times the mere $16 billion in benefits projected by the World Bank.

Africa, the least developed region, will be one of the most prominent victims of a successfully concluded round. Summing up the findings of other recent research from the Carnegie Endowment, the European Commission, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Aileen Kwa of Focus on the Global South points out that “The majority in Africa will be faced with losses in both agriculture and industrial goods liberalization. Even if agricultural export markets were open to Africa, the majority of African farmers—subsistence farmers—will not be in a position to compete. In addition, they will lose through having to open their domestic markets in the negotiations. The poorest countries in Africa will be worst hit—many are LDC countries in Sub-Saharan or East Africa.”

Breaking out of the WTO Paradigm

The economic costs of a potential Doha conclusion clearly outweigh any projected benefits to the poor. Moreover, the loss of policy space for developing countries—to create jobs through industrialization, guarantee public services, and protect farmers and food security—would be tantamount to kicking away the ladder of development, to use the image of Cambridge University economist Ha Joon Chang, and preventing developing nations from using the very tools used by developed nations to climb out of poverty.

So clearly detrimental to development is free trade that a recent study of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) advised poor Asian countries to do what Japan and South Korea did so successfully: protect key industries with tariffs before exposing them to foreign competition. To promote development and reduce poverty, governments should be encouraged to increase spending on health care, education, access to water, and other essential services, not pressured to sell them off to foreign corporations for private profit.

Trade can be a medium of development. Unfortunately, the WTO framework subordinates development to corporate-driven free trade and marginalizes developing countries even further. It is time to cease entertaining illusions about the alleged beneficial effects on development of the Doha Round. The collapse of the Doha Round will be good for the poor. With the unraveling of the WTO talks, the task should shift to creating institutions other than the neoliberal WTO, alternative mechanisms that would make trade truly beneficial for the poor.

Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the Global South and professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. This article first appeared in Foreign Policy In Focus. The original article may be viewed at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3393. It was originally edited by John Feffer of the International Relations Center.

In the world of philanthropy, development and foreign aid, it’s not as easy as it sounds. So here are some humble bits of advice for the new Bill and Melinda Gates/Warren Buffett Axis of Altruism:1 The business world and the developing world are worlds apart. Your success in business may make you underestimate the challenges of helping the world’s poorest populations. Just remember, you’ve thrived in the United States, the world’s most dynamic capitalist economy, where people face clear market incentives to invest in your companies and to deliver your products to paying customers. Now, however, you are one of the biggest players — bigger than the generous foreign aid programs of Denmark and Finland combined — in the development business, which is one of the world’s most dysfunctional and bureaucratic industries, and one aimed at helping some of the most dysfunctional and bureaucratic economies.

(April 30, 2006) Foreign aid today perpetrates a cruel hoax on those who wish the world’s poor well. There is all the appearance of energetic action — a doubling of foreign aid to Africa promised at the G-8 summit last July, grand United Nations and World Bank plans to cut world poverty in half by 2015 and visionary statements about prosperity and democracy by George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Bono. The economist Jeffrey Sachs even announced the “end of poverty” altogether by 2025, which he says will be “much easier than it appears.”

No doubt such promises satisfy the urgent desires of altruistic people in rich countries that something be done to alleviate the grinding misery of the billions who live in poverty around the world. Alas, upon closer inspection, it turns out to be one big Potemkin village. These grandiose but unreal visions sadly crowd out better alternatives to give real help to real poor people.

The new proposals to end world poverty are, for one thing, not new. They are recycled ideas from earlier decades that have already failed. There was, for instance, the idea of the 1950s and 1960s that aid is necessary to finance a “Big Push” to allow poor countries to escape a “poverty trap” and climb the ladder toward prosperity.

This push has been underway for four decades now — and has resulted in the movement of $568 billion in foreign aid from the rich countries to Africa. The result: zero growth in per capita income, leaving Africa in the same abysmal straits in which it began. Meanwhile, a number of poor countries that got next to no aid had no trouble escaping the “poverty trap.”

Hence, it is a little surprising to see Sachs, who is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and an influential advisor to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, announcing once again that aid is necessary to finance a “Big Push” to allow poor countries to escape a “poverty trap” and climb the ladder toward prosperity.

Where did all the aid money go? The $2.3 trillion, that is, that has been sent to all the world’s poor countries over the last five decades. Well, for one thing, it was stuck (and remains stuck) in a “bureaucracy-to-bureaucracy” aid model in which money gets lost all along the way.

The way it works is that a large aid bureaucracy such as the World Bank (with its 10,000 employees) or the United Nations designs a complicated bureaucratic plan to try to solve all the problems of the poor at once (for example, the U.N. Millennium Project announced last year laid out 449 steps that had to be implemented to end world poverty). The aid money is then turned over to another bureaucracy in the poor country, which is asked to implement the complicated plan drawn up by out-of-country Westerners. (How complicated? Tanzania — and it’s not an unusual case — is required to issue 2,400 different reports annually to aid donors.)

In the best case, the bureaucracy in the poor country is desperately short of skilled administrators to implement complex top-down plans that are not feasible anyway — and report on their failure to do so. In the worst, but all too common, case — such as that of the corrupt dictator Paul Biya of Cameroon, who will get 55% of his government revenue from aid after the doubling of aid to Africa — the poor country’s bureaucrats are corrupt or unmotivated political appointees.

It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that aid money doesn’t reach the poor and instead goes to such dubious projects as the $5-billion Ajaokuta steel mill in Nigeria, which was begun in 1979 and has yet to produce a bar of steel (thanks to the corruption and incompetence of local bureaucrats).

Nor is it surprising that the poor of Cambodia have trouble benefiting from aid-financed education when corrupt schoolteachers “supplement their income by soliciting bribes from students, including the sale of examination questions and answers.” (The quote comes from the U.N. Millennium Project, which nevertheless concluded that corruption was not a significant hindrance to aid).

A new initiative by Sachs calls for aid-financed “Millennium Villages” (moving the Potemkin village out of the realm of metaphor into reality.) It envisions a whole package of quick fixes, ranging widely from fertilizer, grain storage, rainwater harvesting and windmills to Internet connections — which would, supposedly, alleviate poverty in a handful of specifically targeted rural villages around Africa.

This much-trumpeted idea once again shows the amazing recycling ability of the aid industry — because a similar package of fixes called “Integrated Rural Development” was already tried in the 1970s (minus the Internet connections). It failed.

Flying in foreign experts to create a miniature village utopia has little to do with the complex roots of poverty, such as corrupt, autocratic and ethnically polarized politics; absent institutions for efficient markets, and dysfunctional bureaucracy. Millennium Villages are to world poverty what Disney World is to urban blight.

Bureaucrats have never achieved the end of poverty and never will; poverty ends (and is already ending, such as in East and South Asia) by the efforts of individuals operating in free markets, and by the efforts of homegrown political and economic reformers.

What are the better alternatives? If the aid agencies passed up the glitzy but unrealistic campaign to end world poverty, perhaps they would spend more time devising specific, definable tasks that could actually help people and for which the public could hold them accountable.

Such tasks include getting 12-cent doses of malaria medicines to malaria victims; distributing 10-cent doses of oral rehydration therapy to reduce the 1.8 million infant deaths from dehydration due to diarrheal diseases last year; getting poor people clean water and bed nets to prevent diarrheal diseases and malaria; getting textbooks to schoolchildren, or encouraging gradual changes to business regulations to make it easier to start a business, enforce contracts and create jobs for the poor.

True, some of the grand plans include some of these tasks — but to say they have the same goals is like saying that Soviet central planning and American free markets both aimed to produce consumer goods. These tasks cannot be achieved as part of the bureaucratically unaccountable morass we have now, in which dozens of aid agencies are collectively responsible for trying to simultaneously implement 449 separate “interventions” designed in New York and Washington to achieve the overall “end of poverty.” That’s just nuts.

The end of poverty will come as a result of homegrown political and economic reforms (which are already happening in many poor countries), not through outside aid. The biggest hope for the world’s poor nations is not Bono, it is the citizens of poor nations themselves.

{Remarks — as prepared for delivery and courtesy of DATA — by Bono to the National Prayer Breakfast; Feb. 2, 2006).
BONO: Thank you.
Mr. President, First Lady, King Abdullah, Other heads of State, Members of Congress, distinguished guests …
Please join me in praying that I don’t say something we’ll all regret.
That was for the FCC.
If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I’m certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. It’s certainly not because I’m a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I’m here because I’ve got a messianic complex.
Yes, it’s true. And for anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a revelation.
Well, I’m the first to admit that there’s something unnatural… something unseemly… about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents, and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It was weird enough when Jesse Helms showed up at a U2 concert… but this is really weird, isn’t it?
You know, one of the things I love about this country is its separation of church and state. Although I have to say: in inviting me here, both church and state have been separated from something else completely: their mind. .
Mr. President, are you sure about this?
It’s very humbling and I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned—I’m Irish.
I’d like to talk about the laws of man, here in this city where those laws are written. And I’d like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws… but of course, they don’t always. And I presume that, in a sense, is why you’re here.
I presume the reason for this gathering is that all of us here—Muslims, Jews, Christians—all are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God.
I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too.
Yes, it’s odd, having a rock star here—but maybe it’s odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line. Where the line between church and state was… well, a little blurry, and hard to see.
I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.
For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…
I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV.
Even though I was a believer.
Perhaps because I was a believer.
I was cynical… not about God, but about God’s politics. (There you are, Jim.)
Then, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick—my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the Millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world’s poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord’s call—and were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic’s point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.
‘Jubilee’—why ‘Jubilee’?
What was this year of Jubilee, this year of our Lords favor?
I’d always read the Scriptures, even the obscure stuff. There it was in Leviticus (25:35)…
‘If your brother becomes poor,’ the Scriptures say, ‘and cannot maintain himself… you shall maintain him… You shall not lend him your money at interest, not give him your food for profit.’
It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. Jesus is a young man, he’s met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people are talking. The elders say, he’s a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn’t done much… yet. He hasn’t spoken in public before…
When he does, is first words are from Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,’ he says, ‘because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.’ And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour, the year of Jubilee. (Luke 4:18)
What he was really talking about was an era of grace—and we’re still in it.
So fast-forward 2,000 years. That same thought, grace, was made incarnate—in a movement of all kinds of people. It wasn’t a bless-me club… it wasn’t a holy huddle. These religious guys were willing to get out in the streets, get their boots dirty, wave the placards, follow their convictions with actions… making it really hard for people like me to keep their distance. It was amazing. I almost started to like these church people.
But then my cynicism got another helping hand.
It was what Colin Powell, a five-star general, called the greatest W.M.D. of them all: a tiny little virus called A.I.D.S. And the religious community, in large part, missed it. The one’s that didn’t miss it could only see it as divine retribution for bad behaviour. Even on children… Even fastest growing group of HIV infections were married, faithful women.
Aha, there they go again! I thought to myself Judgmentalism is back!
But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow but the church got busy on this the leprosy of our age.
Love was on the move.
Mercy was on the move.
God was on the move.
Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met, never would have cared to meet… Conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community, all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS… Soccer moms and quarterbacks… hip-hop stars and country stars… This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!
Popes were seen wearing sunglasses!
Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster!
Crazy stuff. Evidence of the spirit.
It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.
When churches started demonstrating on debt, governments listened—and acted. When churches starting organising, petitioning, and even—that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying… on AIDS and global health, governments listened—and acted.
I’m here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.
Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives.
Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.
I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill… I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff… maybe, maybe not… But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.
God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house… God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives… God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war… God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yolk from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places”
It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. [You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.] ‘As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.’ (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor.
Here’s some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the World’s poor. America would be taken up with its own problems of safety. And it’s true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.
In fact, you have doubled aid to Africa. You have tripled funding for global health. Mr. President, your emergency plan for AIDS relief and support for the Global Fund—you and Congress—have put 700,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided 8 million bed nets to protect children from malaria.
Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.
But here’s the bad news. From charity to justice, the good news is yet to come. There’s is much more to do. There’s a gigantic chasm between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response.
And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.
Let me repeat that: It’s not about charity, it’s about justice.
And that’s too bad.
Because you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.
But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice; it makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties, it doubts our concern, it questions our commitment.
6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drugstore. This is not about charity, this is about Justice and Equality.
Because there’s no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa and, if we’re honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn’t accept it. Look at what happened in South East Asia with the Tsunami. 150, 000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, “mother nature”. In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. A tsunami every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe.
It’s annoying but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.
You know, think of those Jewish sheep-herders going to meet the Pharaoh, mud on their shoes, and the Pharaoh says, “Equal?” A preposterous idea: rich and poor are equal? And they say, “Yeah, ‘equal,’ that’s what it says here in this book. We’re all made in the image of God.”
And eventually the Pharaoh says, “OK, I can accept that. I can accept the Jews—but not the blacks.”
“Not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way, man.”
So on we go with our journey of equality.
On we go in the pursuit of justice.
We hear that call in the ONE Campaign, a growing movement of more than two million Americans… left and right together… united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live.
We hear that call even more powerfully today, as we mourn the loss of Coretta Scott King—mother of a movement for equality, one that changed the world but is only just getting started. These issues are as alive as they ever were; they just change shape and cross the seas.
Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market… that’s a justice issue. Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents… That’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents… that’s a justice issue.
And while the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject.
That’s why I say there’s the law of the land… and then there is a higher standard. There’s the law of the land, and we can hire experts to write them so they benefit us, so the laws say it’s OK to protect our agriculture but it’s not OK for African farmers to do the same, to earn a living?
As the laws of man are written, that’s what they say.
God will not accept that.
Mine won’t, at least. Will yours?
[pause]
I close this morning on … very… thin… ice.
This is a dangerous idea I’ve put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God… vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity.
And this is a town—Washington—that knows something of division.
But the reason I am here, and the reason I keep coming back to Washington, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of what the Scriptures call the least of these.
This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor it is unique to any one faith.
Do to others as you would have them do to you.’ (Luke 6:30) Jesus says that.
‘Righteousness is this: that one should… give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives.’ The Koran says that. (2.177)
Thus sayeth the Lord: ‘Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring fourth, then your Lord will be your rear guard.’ The jewish scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again.
That is a powerful incentive: ‘The Lord will watch your back.’ Sounds like a good deal to me, right now.
A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord’s blessing. I was saying, you know, I have a new song, look after it… I have a family, please look after them… I have this crazy idea…
And this wise man said: stop.
He said, stop asking God to bless what you’re doing.
Get involved in what God is doing—because it’s already blessed.
Well, God, as I said, is with the poor. That, I believe, is what God is doing.
And that is what He’s calling us to do.
I was amazed when I first got to this country and I learned how much some churchgoers tithe. Up to ten percent of the family budget. Well, how does that compare the federal budget, the budget for the entire American family? How much of that goes to the poorest people in the world? Less than one percent.
Mr. President, Congress, people of faith, people of America:
I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing…. Which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional one percent of the federal budget tithed to the poor.
What is one percent?
One percent is not merely a number on a balance sheet.
One percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school, thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine, thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging waterholes to provide clean water.
One percent is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism towards Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records and away from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.
America gives less than one percent now. Were asking for an extra one percent to change the world. to transform millions of lives—but not just that and I say this to the military men now – to transform the way that they see us.
One percent is national security, enlightened economic self interest, and a better safer world rolled into one. Sounds to me that in this town of deals and compromises, one percent is the best bargain around.
These goals—clean water for all; school for every child; medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty—these are not just any goals; they are the Millennium Development goals, which this country supports. And they are more than that. They are the Beatitudes for a Globalised World.
Now, I’m very lucky. I don’t have to sit on any budget committees. And I certainly don’t have to sit where you do, Mr. President. I don’t have to make the tough choices.
But I can tell you this:
To give one percent more is right. It’s smart. And it’s blessed.
There is a continent—Africa—being consumed by flames.
I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did—or did not to—to put the fire out in Africa.
History, like God, is watching what we do.
Thank you. Thank you, America, and God bless you all.

FIVE YEARS AGO, the World Bank lent money and credibility to a risky experiment. Despite the depressing record of oil projects in poor countries — they tend to fuel corruption rather than boost development — the bank provided $190 million to kick-start the oil industry in one of the world’s most impoverished dictatorships, the landlocked African state of Chad. As a condition of its lending, the bank insisted that oil revenue be used for poverty reduction, and at first it mostly was. But now Chad’s government wants to relax the restrictions on how it spends its petrodollars. Unless Chad backs down, it will become harder for the World Bank to justify future oil projects in poor countries.

HUMANITARIAN crises are seldom just humanitarian: Almost always, the malnutrition and the misery have political causes. The brutal wars in Sudan and Congo account for those countries’ appalling civilian death tolls. Political repression explains the hunger in North Korea and Zimbabwe. Even the HIV pandemic reflects the failure of politicians to challenge gender inequality and sexual taboos.

(Washington, June 6, 2005) It is a great joy to be with you, on the eve of National Hunger Awareness Day. Thank you for your invitation. It is a privilege to be here among so many leaders from the different faith communities.

In the Book of the Revelation to John, at the end of the Christian Scriptures, there is a picture of heaven, in which there is a great multitude, too numerous to count. They come from every tribe and nation, every people, every culture, every language. And it is promised ‘never again will they hunger, never again will they thirst’ (Rev 7:16).

The promise of heaven is no more hunger. But the message of all our readings is that the plight of the hungry must not be left for heaven.It is to be our concern, as God’s instruments in his world. As the verses from Qur’an reminded us, virtually every religious and ethical tradition calls us to feed the hungry.

The shocking statistics demonstrate that hunger is far more widespread than we might at first imagine.

The American Scene

It is a profound irony that there is extensive hunger and poverty in this, the world’s richest nation. Despite this country’s enormous wealth, there are 36 million people in the United States who are food insecure. That is, 36 million people who, some or all of the time, do not know where their next meal is coming from. Of them, almost 13 million are children.

Hunger in the US has been on the rise for the last four years, according to federal government reports. Private food suppliers struggle to meet this increase in hungry people.

America’s Second Harvest, the Nation’s Food Bank Network, reports that in 2001, 23.3 million people turned to the agencies they serve – an increase of over 2 million since 1997. And forty percent of these were from families who work.

Latest federal figures show that in 2003, 12.5% of the US population was poor – up from 12.1% a year before. This means that in those twelve months, an additional 1.3 million people actually became poor.

We acknowledge that the federal government’s nutrition programs provide about 20 times more food assistance than charities. Yet with such need, proposals in the current budget debate to cut these programs, and deprive hundreds of thousands of working families of food support, cannot be justified – and must be opposed.

The Global Picture

The global picture is also shocking. For thirty years, global hunger was falling – but it is now rising again. Between 1999 and 2002 it increased by over 10 million people; now 852 million people face hunger every day.

How can hunger be so widespread, when there is such growth in the global economy? How can there be such vast need in a country like the United States?

The Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out that hunger is not caused by food shortages. Indeed, often it happens when food is abundant.

Hunger arises when people become economically alienated, unable adequately to participate in the buying and selling of labor, goods and services, so as to be able to access enough to eat.

This is why poverty and hunger are often found in rural areas.

People may live in the midst of acres of fertile food production, but if the nearest grocery store is 10, 20, even 30 miles away, then for those without access to affordable transport, they might as well be living in a barren desert.

On the international front there are other factors at play – some of which also challenge the policies of the US government. Trade policies are still geared far too much to the advantage of the rich, and make it far harder for poor countries and their populations to escape poverty.

Of this we can be sure: the poverty that brings hunger is evil.

In all its ramifications and consequences, it mars the image of God within humanity: it mars the image of God in the poor as it deprives them of opportunities for abundant life; and it mars the image of God within those of us who have more than enough, but who, through greed, complacency or even ignorance, fail to do the justice, to embrace the loving kindness, that our God asks of us.

Personal Reflections

I have seen too much of the effects of poverty and hunger in my life.

As a young man, I spent three years as a political prisoner on Robben Island – I will not begin to tell you how hungry we sometimes were there.

Yet it was in those conditions of inhumane brutality that I felt the call of God to be ordained in his Church.

And it was there that so many of today’s leaders found faith in a common humanity, united by a belief in justice and freedom for all South Africans, and the conviction that this could only be achieved through reconciliation.

Years later, I became Bishop of the very rural Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman. There I encountered poverty and hardship on levels I had never seen: women spending five hours a day fetching water, and wood for the fire; laboring beneath pylons that carried electricity to the opulent white homes, which alone had running water.

After becoming Archbishop, I was a commissioner for South African national poverty hearings. We listened to the voices of the poor, who told their stories with dignity. It was an emotionally and physically draining exercise – but hugely rewarding, in that those who told their stories recognized that there were people ready to listen to their plight, people who cared about them and their situation.

I saw the face of poverty in the eyes of far too many men, women, children, the elderly, people with disability. Their message was ‘Archbishop, take our voices to the corridors of power, and say for us, “We do not want hand-outs; we have brains; we have hands; give us the capacity to eke out our own existence.”‘

The peaceful transition to democracy in 1994 has been a cause for continued celebration and thanksgiving. But now we are facing a long hard struggle to overcome the economic gulfs of apartheid, which built on the inequalities of colonialism.

Yet our achievements are a basis of hope for humanity about the possibilities that exist under God for people to rise above narrow ideologies or personal agendas, and be united by a common desire to seek the good of everyone.

The Political Climate

The good of everyone is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Now over 50 years old, it clearly states that every human being has the right to enough to eat. Yet hunger has grown, and is growing again.

Over 40 years ago, Dr Martin Luther King Jr., in the lecture following his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, said: We have the resources to get rid of poverty. … There is no deficit in human resources. The deficit is in human will. Now, at the beginning of the third millennium, the resources are still there.

The political will – well, we are still working on that.

And that is why gatherings like today’s convocation are so very important.

And that is why gatherings like today’s convocation give me optimism.

Let me explain why.

The Jubilee 2000 campaign was the greatest global mobilization of public opinion – bringing together people of every faith community, from Non-Governmental Organizations, from civil society around the world.

We generated so much pressure on politicians, that the wheels started turning. A process began whereby the odious debt of the poorest countries of the world is being written off.

We still have some way to go. But we made a beginning, with tangible results. For example, there are now more children in schools, and more medicines in clinics, in Uganda and Ghana.

Politicians, as we know, respond to the opinions of their electorates. Politicians were left in no doubt that public opinion, domestic and international, demanded justice in relation to debt.

Now politicians need to be left in no doubt that public opinion, domestic and international, demands justice in relation to poverty and hunger.

This year public opinion is growing like never before.

It is coalitions like today’s that we need – coalitions that include everyone.

We have the Inter-Faith Anti-Hunger Coordinators – at whose initiative we come together. We have the hosts of today’s Convocation – Bread for the World, Call to Renewal, America’s Second Harvest, and Mazon. We have representatives, indeed leaders, from over 40 religious organizations. Every major faith group is here.

We have Christians of every type imaginable – if only Christian unity were this easy!

Perhaps we should learn the lesson that when we talk about doctrine and the abstract concepts of faith, we find far too many reasons to disagree. But when we put our faith into practice, look what we can achieve together!

As it says in Christian Scripture’s Letter of James – faith without works is dead!

And in our third reading we heard Jesus’ warning that we shall be judged not just on what we profess, but on how we live it out – clearly echoing the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures.

But today we are more than a coalition of faith groups, and with them, representatives from every walk of civil society.

We are also forging new alliances along fresh and different lines.

I am delighted that we are a coalition from the bottom up, and the top down!

What do I mean by that?

We need to fight hunger on every front – global justice, national policy making, and support for every individual who is in need.

Today we bring together those who are working on an international level – to make a difference in the poorest regions of the world: those who channel the riches from this richest nation in the world, in projects that don’t just give charity, but open up new possibilities to achieve self-sufficiency and live with dignity. We salute you.

And we bring together activists, those whose work is advocacy, who do the research, hone the arguments, publicize the information, raise the profile, lobby the politicians; raising a voice for the voiceless in the corridors of power. We salute you also.

And we bring together the vast Armies of Compassion, fighting on the front line.

There are thousands of unsung heroes who are making a difference on the ground in this country – running soup kitchens, lunch clubs, school meals, nutritional support, healthy snacks, meals on wheels.

The Salvation Army, America’s Second Harvest, the Society of St Vincent de Paul, and the Society of St Andrew are just some of those groups — there are too many of you to mention you all. We salute you, every one of you.

Coalitions like this will make a difference.

Tomorrow many of you will lobby your elected representatives in the Congress, to ‘Make Hunger History’ in the US. This is God’s work!

And this is the year that we have an unprecedented opportunity to make a difference not just in the US but across the world.

Five years ago, the international community agreed the Millennium Development Goals – the most comprehensive development commitment ever made. The aim is to halve global poverty, and with it halve global hunger, by 2015.

This year, one third of the way through, we are reviewing progress. At the current rate, we will fail to meet our targets. The Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, has called a meeting of world leaders in September as the last chance to get the MDGs back on track.

All eyes will be on them.

Poverty and hunger are also top of the agenda of the G8 summit in July, and a major factor in the Doha Round of world trade talks which is due to be completed by the end of the year. In all these meetings, the spotlight will be on President Bush – how far will the US support these initiatives?

This year, everywhere politicians turn, they will find poverty and hunger on the agenda. They cannot escape!

Coalitions like ours, like the ONE Campaign and the Micah Challenge, must keep the pressure on them. We must take every opportunity to keep lobbying across the board– locally, nationally, internationally.

At every level, we must speak loud and clear.

Achieving these goals is not cost free — but at the moment it is the world’s poorest who are paying the price. Surely the US can afford a little more!

Within the US, the Blueprint to End Hunger calculated that it would cost between a nickel and a dime per American per day to end domestic hunger completely.

What a tiny price to pay.

On an international level, as long ago as 1980, the Brandt Commission in its North South Report first called for 0.7% of the national income of developed countries to be given in development assistance.

They hoped the percentage would rise to 1% by 2000. They thought these were reasonable, achievable, goals. Alas, the proportion actually given fell from 0.35% in 1980 to 0.21% in 2000. Today, only four countries reach the 0.7% level.

In 2003, the US share was a mere 0.14% – the largest amount in dollars, but the smallest percentage of all the developing countries.

However, in the last two years the US has begun to increase its poverty-focused development assistance.

I am sure it is in response to pressure like yours. Keep it up – we know this wonderful country can do better!

So now, in the run-up to the July G8 Summit and the September UN Millennium meeting, there is everything to play for.

We must all put our weight behind this growing momentum for change – because now we have the chance to make a difference – for the hungry of this nation, and the hungry of the world.

The New Testament has two Greek words for time: chronos, the time that ticks steadily onwards; and kairos, those special moments when opportunities occur, actions happen, turning points are reached.

Time has been ticking on and hunger has been getting worse. But this year for us, and for the hungry of the world, is a kairos moment.

Now it is time to grasp the opportunity, press for actions to happen, and make sure there is a turning point.

Now is the kairos moment when we start making hunger history.

Now is the decisive point to which we will look back when we reach our goal of ‘hunger no more’.

Amen. So be it.