Exodus From Hunger (13 page)
Read Exodus From Hunger Online
Authors: David Beckmann
Tags: #Religion, #Christian Life, #Social Issues, #Christianity, #General
Because we stressed grassroots participation in our Jubilee bill, the World Bank now encourages all poor-country governments to involve civil society in developing poverty reduction strategies. Religious bodies, farmer organizations, and groups that focus on environmental or gender issues are invited to share their perspectives with government officials. Although these consultation processes vary in effectiveness, they have improved planning, strengthened democracy, and reduced corruption in some countries.
Tens of thousands of Christians across the United States urged their members of Congress to support the Jubilee legislation of 1999 and 2000. Several thousand people were just as active as Pat Pelham and Elaine Van Cleave. In all, we think Congress received about 250,000 letters in support of Jubilee. Bono made several trips back to Washington, national church leaders spoke out, and political leaders from both parties helped get the job done. Jubilee campaigners were also active in Europe and some of the countries that received debt relief.
Yet I am struck by the pivotal role Pat and Elaine played. It is hard to imagine how the debts of poor countries would have been reduced if Pat hadn’t been moved by her prayers to push for an unlikely change in U.S. politics. Millions of smiling African girls are proudly wearing school uniforms and learning to read today, partly because Pat Pelham and Elaine Van Cleave dared to believe we could get Congress to do the right thing.
During the first decade of this century—a time when U.S. politics was less focused on the needs of poor people than now—Bread for the World helped to more than double funding for the national nutrition programs and triple funding for effective programs of international development assistance.
In the wake of huge cuts to the food stamp program as part of welfare reform, the national organizations that focus on domestic hunger worked to repair some of the damage. These groups include food banks, church groups, and other advocacy organizations. The national nutrition programs expanded, partly because of improvements we won in Congress and partly in response to growing poverty.
Between 2000 and 2009 federal spending on food for poor people increased from $33 billion to $80 billion. The SNAP program alone expanded to reach 16 million more people. The nutrition programs moderated the increase in hunger over the course of the decade and helped millions of families cope when recession hit.
Bread for the World members also campaigned over the decade to increase funding for those foreign aid programs that are focused on promoting development and reducing poverty. We received surprising help from both President Bush and Bono—stories I’ll tell in the next chapter. But grassroots advocates also played an essential role. As Bono says, “Politicians are glad to appear with a celebrity, but they get scared when they also hear from preachers, soccer moms, and college students across the country.”
Congress tripled appropriations for poverty-focused development assistance over the decade—from $7.5 billion in 2000 to $22.0 billion in 2010. These figures come from Bread for the World’s own, well-established system of tracking funding for those foreign aid programs which, in our judgment, focus mainly on development and poverty reduction. The African countries that have achieved rapid economic growth and better government were supported by increasing aid from the United States and the other industrialized countries.
One of the grassroots heroes for increased development assistance was Connie Wick. I first heard her name in the White House.
President Bush was signing an Africa trade bill that Bread for the World had helped through Congress. I seized the chance to speak with him about funding for the Millennium Challenge Account, a new channel for aid to poor countries that he had proposed.
“Thank you for helping to pass this Africa bill,” I said. “We also need your help in getting Congress to approve the full amount you’ve requested for the Millennium Challenge Account.”
“How much are we short? A billion?” asked President Bush.
“A billion and a half,” I replied.
The president didn’t move away, so I continued, “You need to get a senator who will treat the Millennium Challenge Account like his own baby. Nobody in the Senate is really fighting for the funding.”
President Bush pointed across the room at Senator Richard Lugar. Lugar is a senior Republican member of the Senate and was then chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Bread for the World has rallied around Lugar’s leadership on many issues of importance to hungry people in this country and worldwide. The president walked over to talk with Lugar, pulling me along.
Senator Bill Frist, then majority leader, heard the president’s voice and joined us. The president put one hand on my shoulder and the other on Senator Lugar’s shoulder. He urged that the Senate provide the funding he had requested for the Millennium Challenge Account. When the president and Senator Frist stepped away, Senator Lugar stayed to talk a bit longer.
“I was just answering a letter from a constituent, Connie Wick,” said Lugar, “and she was saying—well, she was also urging us to fully fund the Millennium Challenge Account.”
When I got back to our office, I learned that Connie Wick was a Bread for the World member in her mid-eighties. She had for many years led the Bread group at the Robin Run Retirement Center in Indianapolis. She has since died, but the Robin Run group still meets monthly to write letters to Congress. They also invite candidates for public office to speak at the center.
Lugar knew and respected Connie Wick. I had watched the president of the United States working to influence the Senate majority leader and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And what was in Senator Lugar’s mind just then? He was trying to remember what Connie Wick thought about this issue.
Emboldened by success, Bread for the World has been taking on bigger, tougher issues. One of them is the Farm Bill, which is rewritten about every five years. Bread for the World decided, with some trepidation, to campaign for broad reform of the Farm Bill in 2007. The Farm Bill sets policies for important nutrition programs, and farm policies themselves are also important to hungry and poor people. Most of the farm subsidies go to affluent landowners, so the money could be redirected to do more for farm and rural people who really need help. Also, farm payments and protectionism in the industrialized countries have long frustrated agricultural development among poor rural people in Africa and other parts of the developing world.
At the Senate Agriculture Committee’s first hearing on the Farm Bill, I testified alongside the presidents of the Nation’s three main farm organizations: the Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union, and the National Farmers Organization. The farm groups were all pushing for increases in the big subsidies that go to five commodities: corn, wheat, soybeans, rice, and cotton. Chairman Tom Harkin graciously thanked me for “speaking truth to power.” Bread for the World and our church allies forged a coalition with environmental groups (because the commodity subsidies contribute to environmental damage) and taxpayer groups (because the subsidies are a waste of taxpayer dollars). Together, we mounted a serious challenge to the abusive features of the current system of farm subsidies.
When other church leaders and I went to see Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he was candid. “The commodity groups are one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington. They go to every fund-raiser. They have friends on both sides of the aisle.” The commodity groups spent $80 million in Washington in 2007 to defend the subsidies.
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The Corn Growers Association managed to win a major increase in subsidies and trade protection for corn ethanol in a separate piece of legislation. For decades, farm subsidies had depressed grain prices worldwide. Now the ethanol subsidies combined with other factors to provoke a sudden increase in the prices of basic grains and in world hunger.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was convinced that reducing farm subsidies would cost the Democrats needed rural seats in the 2008 election. Bread and its partners wanted to shift money within the Farm Bill from the commodity subsidies to better purposes. But she protected the subsidies and found money outside the Farm Bill for the other things we wanted to do—in effect, buying off most of the Democrats who might have voted for reform. Representative Jim McGovern, a great advocate for hungry people, negotiated a big increase for nutrition assistance. The final Farm Bill also increased funding for minority farmers, rural development, and conservation.
These improvements in the Farm Bill would not have been achieved without our campaign. But we failed to get Congress to shift to a fairer system of support for farmers.
As the Farm Bill was being finalized, grain prices were soaring and world hunger was sharply increasing. In the White House, the State Department, and wherever I could get a hearing, I called attention to this crisis. I was interviewed twice by Bill Moyers on public television, Bread for the World mounted a Web campaign, and many members contacted Congress once a week for several months to raise the alarm about the price-driven surge in world hunger.
Congress wasn’t interested in reversing the decision it had just made to promote the diversion of corn into ethanol or in modifying the Farm Bill to promote food production globally. But President Bush and Congress agreed on an emergency appropriation of $1.9 billion in food and agricultural assistance to countries where hunger had suddenly increased.
The organizations that protect subsidies to affluent farmers have proved too strong for us, at least for now. But looking back over Bread for the World’s nearly four decades of history, the main lesson is that grassroots people—people like you and me—can often sway Congress to make changes that help millions of hungry people.
People of faith and conscience can have an impact on the politics of hunger
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JOE MARTINGALE, A BALANCED LIFE
Joe Martingale grew up in Brooklyn, New York, one of nine children in a Catholic working-class family. His father was a longshoreman, and although they weren’t exactly poor, they “didn’t have anything extra.”
Joe benefited from a good education. He attended Catholic schools and, after four years in the navy, graduated from St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights. Joe earned his law degree at Columbia University.
He went on to have a successful career. He was a lawyer on Wall Street, then an executive for JC Penney, and ended up spending most of his working life as a healthcare consultant.
He was surrounded by ambitious New Yorkers. To most of the people he worked with, “Billable time was everything,” says Joe. “The pressure to have a lot of billable time and develop new business pushes people over the edge in how they run their lives.”
But Joe always knew there was more to life than the bottom line. He remembered the working-class people from his boyhood neighborhood, those who were sometimes barely keeping food on the table. He also remembered the lessons he learned about “what was important” from his mother and his Catholic education—namely, caring for others, especially hungry and poor people.
Joe and his wife, Mary, have consistently given away a large percentage of their income. Some years they have donated as much as 50 percent of their income, and never less than 25 percent, to Bread for the World and other organizations that help hungry and poor people. Joe insists that because he was lucky enough to earn a good salary, “the sacrifice was never great.”
Joe also dedicated as much of his time to serving hungry and poor people as he did to his high-paying, high-pressure career. Mary and Joe volunteered at an overnight shelter for homeless women run by a local Methodist church. He was inspired by how his fellow volunteers, who he describes as “salt-of-the-earth working people, veterans, marines,” kept the ministry running, although many of them were struggling to make ends meet themselves.
For more than twenty years, Joe and Mary spent several nights a month staffing the twelve-bed facility. He would serve a meal and sleep at the shelter, then rush home to shower and change, and hurry off to catch a plane for a business trip or get to a downtown meeting.
One night at the shelter, he watched an old woman struggle down the steep stairs to the church basement. She had been living on the streets for many years and, like the others at the shelter, came looking for a hot meal and a safe place to sleep for the night.
“She was eighty-nine years old,” Joe recounted with emotion in his voice. “I looked at her, and she reminded me of my own mother, who was of the same generation. I thought, ‘What is wrong with our country?’ I just couldn’t imagine that with all our wealth, this eighty-nine-year-old woman could be left to scramble for a bed at night.”
For Joe, the question “What is wrong with our country?” wasn’t just rhetorical. Since the early 1980s he had been part of Bread for the World, urging his members of Congress to address the needs of hungry and poor people in the United States and around the world.
He first heard of Bread from an article in the Catholic magazine published by the Maryknoll Fathers. Intrigued by the idea of getting at the root causes of hunger and poverty, Joe began his support with a regular check. Before long, he and Mary also joined a Bread for the World group in New York. By the time Joe attended his first Bread for the World Lobby Day and visited the offices of his members of Congress in Washington, DC, he was hooked.
Although his senators agreed in principle that caring for hungry and poor people was important, they often needed a little reminding to sign on to a particular piece of legislation that would help hungry people. Joe’s representative was a different story—he rarely supported bills that Bread for the World supported. Yet Joe visited his office faithfully year after year—often alone—urging support of measures that would help hungry families. Some years he was able to bring hundreds of letters of support from other constituents in the district, but Joe was never able to influence his representative’s position. In all the years that Joe visited this representative’s office, he was always seen by an aide and never got to meet with the man personally.
Now Joe has a new representative in the House who is usually more receptive. But he doesn’t see those frustrating hours he spent every year communicating with his previous representative’s office as wasted. Joe’s involvement in legislative advocacy isn’t just about winning. It is about being faithful.
Joe doesn’t wear his Christianity on his sleeve. But it has clearly shaped his values and how he lives. For Joe, advocating for hungry people carries great value: “Bread for the World allows you to become spiritual in a subtle way. It doesn’t always need to be expressed in an outward prayer. But it is a very satisfying experience to know what you are working on is a manifestation of the gospel. For me, involvement in Bread is almost selfish. I want to be on the ‘right side.’ And if you read the Bible, many of the lessons have to do with poor and hungry people.”
Joe has had a big impact among hungry and poor people—the thousands he reached through his many nights at the homeless shelter, and the millions he has touched by helping to pass antihunger legislation. Joe has also had an influence on others through hundreds of talks at churches in New York. Now nearing retirement, Joe realizes that he has also had an influence on many young associates he mentored in his professional life—always reminding them that while work and success are important, even more important is to find balance and a deeper meaning.