Exodus From Hunger (18 page)

U.S. assistance should be more responsive to local situations and priorities. Our aid programs are now riddled with a host of competing objectives and earmarks, each of them responsive to some interest in the United States. Members of Congress lobby for earmarks for universities or businesses in their home districts, and charities lobby to get money for the sectors in which they work. Grassroots campaigns mobilize around particular diseases or causes. Congress and the president need to agree on a handful of priority goals, and detailed programs should be worked out on the ground in consultation with the host government and local communities.

Periodically, Congress “reauthorizes” programs in each area of government. The domestic child nutrition programs are normally reauthorized every five years, for example. At that time, Congress rethinks these programs and sets policies for the next five years. But our foreign aid programs have not gone through a comprehensive reauthorization for decades. The Foreign Assistance Act of 1961—passed during the Kennedy administration—is still in effect.

Although President Obama and Secretary Clinton agree with most of these ideas about how to make foreign assistance more effective, their administration didn’t initially want to use their limited political capital on foreign aid reform. When they came to power, they faced a host of other challenges. So Bread for the World’s members and churches, together with our coalition partners, rallied around legislation in Congress that started the process. In response, the White House and State Department launched major processes to rethink foreign aid. They also began to implement these ideas as they launched their Feed the Future initiative, for example, and in response to the earthquake in Haiti.

But what’s really needed is a comprehensive, bipartisan reauthorization of the Foreign Assistance Act. In that process the president and Congress would agree on the leading purposes of U.S. foreign assistance and revamp institutions and programs to serve those purposes.

U.S. food and farm policies still cry out for broad reform. We spend billions of dollars on protectionist subsidies to affluent landowners. Those subsidies bypass the needs of farm and rural families who really need help. They stimulate agricultural production that is environmentally damaging, subsidized corn ethanol is an inefficient source of energy, and our farm policies often harm poor farmers and hungry people in poor countries. Americans and, increasingly, the rest of the world are struggling with an obesity epidemic. At the same time, hunger is widespread and has recently increased in our country and around the world.

To keep up with growing demand, global agricultural production needs to increase by about 50 percent by 2050.
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Yet agriculture is less dynamic and responsive than it could be, because nearly all the world’s countries maintain high tariffs and subsidies to protect their farms from agricultural imports.

The system is as bad as it is partly because the agriculture committees in the House and Senate are heavily influenced by interests that benefit from it. When the Farm Bill is reauthorized again, we will have another opportunity to push for reform. If the reform of U.S. farm policies is coupled with international leadership to reduce agricultural protectionism around the world, virtually all U.S. farmers stand to gain.

The Farm Bill includes the U.S. food aid programs, and they also need reform. The current rules stipulate that nearly all food aid has to travel on ships registered in the United States. This benefits a handful of shipping companies that are well organized in lobbying the agriculture committees. More than half of our food-aid dollars now fund transportation and administration. Allowing for the purchase of food closer to where it is needed would, in many cases, mean more and faster help to hungry people. It’s hard to manage imported food aid in ways that don’t depress the market for local farmers in poor countries, while buying food locally would boost the market for local farmers.

Bread for the World plans to focus over the next few years on these four issues: ending child hunger in America, supporting and shaping the U.S. world hunger initiative, more and better development assistance, and Farm Bill reform. Success on these four issues would indeed change history for hungry people.

But our political leaders will be focused mainly on other issues that affect the country as a whole and seem more important to the media and most voters. The high-profile issues of the next few years will include the economy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, health and education, energy, trade, and immigration. These issues affect the whole country, but advocates should call attention to how they affect poor people in particular. Each of these issues is multifaceted and controversial, so you probably won’t agree with everything I say in this section. But I hope you will agree on the main point—that we and our political leaders need to keep poor and hungry people in mind as we deal with big issues like these.

The economy is a top national priority for lots of reasons, but a strong economy is urgently important to poor people. No country has achieved dramatic progress against poverty without sustained economic growth, and no feasible expansion of government antipoverty programs would do as much to help poor people as would a strong economy.

Stimulus spending by the government makes sense as long as demand is slack and many workers are unemployed. We cannot maintain today’s level of deficit spending indefinitely; that would lead to financial crisis and widespread hardship, also among poor people. But as we balance different economic goals, macroeconomic policies that reduce unemployment are more important to poor people than any other government action.

Economic growth will also raise tax revenues and thus reduce deficit spending. But good fiscal management will also require higher tax rates for high- and middle-income people. Despite loud complaints about the oppressive tax burden, taxes are lower in the United States than in the other economically advanced countries, and the total tax burden on Americans is lower now than at any time since the 1950s.
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On the spending side, we devote one-fifth of the federal budget to each of three items—defense, Social Security, and health care—and we will need to cut expenses in these three big-ticket areas. We can reduce military spending and still be secure. We will also need to trim Social Security and Medicare benefits for upper- and middle-income people.

Few politicians dare to talk about raising taxes—or about cutting military expenses, Social Security, and Medicare—but as voters we must encourage them to provide serious strategies to reduce deficit spending.

Some politicians will use the deficit as an argument for cutting assistance to needy people. Yet all the programs of assistance for people facing hardship amount to only 14 percent of government spending. This includes tax credits for low-income workers; unemployment and disability insurance; and food stamps, school meals, and housing assistance.
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We should insist on efficiency and results from these programs, but they can and should be protected from cuts.

Bread for the World argued for delay when the United States was considering the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bread for the World always focuses on hunger; we don’t pretend to speak with authority on issues of war and peace. But as an antihunger organization, we could see that the war would command massive resources and attention that might otherwise be devoted to reducing poverty. We knew that the war would also cause great hardship among people in Iraq. In retrospect, the financial and human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have outweighed any benefits in terms of U.S. security or the well-being of people in these two countries. As our nation tries to find its way to an orderly, relatively positive end to these two wars, we should be keenly aware of all the good we could be doing with the $190 billion we are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan each year.

Health-care reform will continue to be a high-profile political issue. The 46 million people who now lack health insurance are mainly just above the poverty line and thus can’t qualify for Medicaid, and health insurance will help many of these people stay out of poverty. A high priority going forward must be to reduce the gross inefficiencies in our health-care system—to improve our health, reduce the government’s deficit spending, and make our economy more efficient.

Our educational system can also be improved, especially for young people from low-income families, and this may be a high-profile issue on which Republicans and Democrats can work together. Head Start, improved schools in low-income communities, and expanded community colleges are especially important to poor people.

As the president and Congress debate policies for energy independence and to combat global warming, we must again flag the interests of poor people. Poor people in this country can benefit from “green jobs” (the jobs needed to weatherize energy-inefficient buildings, for example), but they would be hit hard by higher prices for gas and home heating. Poor countries need assistance to help finance their environmental protection efforts and to cope with the negative impacts of global warming. Malawi needs to restore tree cover lost to firewood, for example, and Bangladesh will need to invest in flood protection and resettlement. So if the United States adopts a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, some of the revenue should go to programs that address these impacts among poor people here and abroad.

Trade is a hard sell to working people in this country, especially right now. But trade fosters economic efficiencies and growth. We need that. If the job market improves, and health-care reform delivers real benefits to working people, voters may be ready to consider mutually beneficial trade negotiations. A new multilateral trade agreement would be powerful tonic for the global economy, and it would likely focus on agriculture, which is especially important to many poor rural people in developing countries. Assistance to workers in this country who are adversely affected by trade would need to be part of the deal.

Immigration is yet another controversial issue that will require action, and it is certainly important to hungry and poor people. In fact, international migration is a powerful part of the movement to end hunger and poverty. Most migrants into the United States are able to improve their economic well-being, and the money they send to their families reduces poverty in their home communities.

We need to regularize the legal situation of undocumented immigrants in this country and, at the same time, rationalize the enforcement of immigration laws. We can also slow migration by supporting economic development in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, and investment in jobs, health, and education for working Americans will make immigration less threatening. A renewed effort to curtail drug abuse in the United States, including both law enforcement and stronger drug treatment programs, would help get drug-related violence in Mexico under control. Providing opportunity for Mexican youth would also diminish the lure of the drug trade.

All these high-profile issues are complex, and people of goodwill have various opinions about them. But as we wrestle with questions that affect the nation as a whole, advocates should urge solutions that help—or at least don’t hurt—poor people.

If we can achieve progress on the four issues highlighted in this chapter and get attention to hunger and poverty in the big political debates of the next few years, it will have a huge impact for hungry and poor people.

But every point in this agenda will require major effort. People like us who care about hunger and poverty will need to push ferociously for change. This is not a time for advocacy as usual. This moment calls for smart strategy, sacrificial effort, and prayer.

Electoral politics are really important. We need to elect candidates who will support action to reduce hunger and poverty. They need our votes, volunteer time, and campaign contributions. Neither of the two major political parties is dominant, so each national election significantly changes the direction of the nation.

Bread for the World’s network is campaigning on the issues highlighted in this chapter, and we are asking Bread’s network of activists and churches to intensify their efforts. Bread for the World does more outright lobbying for poor people than any other organization in the country.