Exodus From Hunger (12 page)

T
he experience of Bread for the World over almost four decades demonstrates that people of faith can win political change for hungry and poor people. In Bread for the World’s early years, its members were sometimes the only organized grassroots voice speaking up for hungry people, but they won changes that significantly reduced hunger and poverty in the United States and worldwide. Over the last two decades—the part of this history I have lived—the scale of Bread for the World’s impact has grown. This experience makes me hopeful that people of faith and conscience can convince our nation now to make a bigger effort to overcome hunger and poverty.

Arthur Simon, the founder of Bread for the World, was the pastor of a small church in a poor neighborhood of Manhattan. In
The Rising of Bread for the World
(Paulist Press, 2009), Art recalls that he was always responding to the many troubles of poor individuals in his congregation and neighborhood. His congregation also contributed to world hunger appeals. But Art and his brother Paul Simon (later a U.S. senator) were also thinking together about the politics of world hunger, and Art had the idea of a Christian citizens’ movement against hunger.

Bread for the World quickly attracted a grassroots network of concerned people from diverse church bodies. They gathered in homes and churches to pray, study the issues, write letters to Congress, and reach out to their congregations and communities. The organization didn’t have much money and didn’t do much marketing. Each year, Bread asked congregations across the country to take up an offering—not of money, but of letters to Congress.

Bread’s network of activists and churches built a track record of legislative successes. Their biggest achievements in the 1970s and 1980s were the Women, Infants, and Children Supplemental Nutrition Program (WIC) and programs to reduce child deaths in developing countries.

Bread members campaigned throughout those early years to build strong bipartisan support and funding for WIC. The program now reaches 9 million mothers, infants, and children in this country who would otherwise lack adequate nutrition. WIC for pregnant women reduces the proportion of low-birth-weight babies by 25 percent. The General Accounting Office estimates that every dollar spent on WIC for pregnant women saves taxpayers at least $2.84 in Medicaid costs in the first two months after childbirth. WIC also demonstrably reduces nutrition-related illnesses among the little children in the program.
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During the recession of the early 1980s, the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) proposed a strategy to reduce child deaths in developing countries. Jim Grant, then head of UNICEF, talked about the possibility of a “child survival revolution.” Technological advances in vaccines had made it easier to inoculate children. UNICEF also proposed to teach poor parents simple strategies that could keep many children from dying. For example, a solution of sugar and salt in water can stop diarrhea from killing a child.

Bread for the World’s members across the country urged Congress to back the Child Survival Revolution, and Congress provided a growing stream of funding. Over the years, child survival programs have dramatically reduced child deaths. Half as many children die from diarrhea now. More than 100 million children in developing countries are immunized every year, and child inoculation campaigns helped eradicate smallpox from the face of the earth.
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From the outset, Bread for the World was a model of civility and worked in a bipartisan way. Bread and its members reached out to churches, and most congregations, thankfully, include Republicans and Democrats. Also, members of Congress from the two parties have often worked together for hungry people. When that happens they merge liberal and conservative concerns in ways that make policies effective and win broad political support.

I became president of Bread for the World in 1991. During the 1990s, one of Bread’s campaigns helped shift U.S. policy in the Horn of Africa. During the Cold War, the United Nations had supported dictators in the region, vying with the Soviet Union for bases on the Red Sea. The Bread for the World legislation mandated U.S. support for peace, development, and democracy and allowed a quick start to U.S. aid after a change of government in Ethiopia.

Another Bread campaign stopped the decline in U.S. funding for agricultural development in Africa. We increased funding for WIC, Head Start, and Job Corps. We were not able to increase international development assistance in the 1990s, but we did help achieve needed reforms at the World Bank.

We tried and failed to stop the welfare reform bill of 1996. Welfare reform did some good, but that one bill also slashed $60 billion over five years from programs to help poor people. Fortunately, we managed to maintain the rules that make SNAP responsive to need. If need increases, the program expands automatically without requiring further action from Congress. That has made SNAP a lifeline for millions of families during this recent time of high unemployment. When the massive oil spill of 2010 depressed the economy in U.S. communities along the Gulf of Mexico, SNAP expanded quickly to help families in need.

The Jubilee campaign to cancel the debts of some of the world’s poorest countries was a turning point in the politics of world hunger. Many of the world’s poorest countries were saddled with unpayable debts. Some of them sent more money to rich countries to pay back old debts than they spent on the health and education of their people.

In 1998 Pope John Paul II and Archbishop Desmond Tutu both suggested that the millennium year, 2000, be celebrated by canceling the debts of poor countries. They referred to the book of Leviticus in the Bible, which called for a jubilee every fifty years. In that jubilee year, all debts would be forgiven and the land returned to its original owners. The idea had power, and British activists began to organize the international Jubilee campaign.

In the United States, Jim McDonald from Bread for the World chaired the legislative coalition, working closely with staff from church bodies. Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians—and Oxfam America, an international development charity—were core partners.

The U.S. groups adapted to U.S. political realities. In other international campaigns—the campaign to ban land mines, for example—U.S. groups followed their European colleagues too closely. In the end, nearly all the nations of the world signed a treaty to ban land mines, but the United States did not sign, which undercut the treaty’s effectiveness.

In the Jubilee campaign, Bread for the World and the church bodies who worked with us did not agree with our international partners to push for unconditional debt cancellation for all low-income countries. We wanted a mechanism that would achieve a jubilee for poor people in low-income countries, not just debt reduction for their governments. We also knew we couldn’t possibly convince the U.S. Congress to approve unconditional debt cancellation. Discussions in my office contributed to the eventual solution—debt reduction for countries with credible poverty reduction strategies.

The Clinton administration wasn’t initially interested, and we had no supporters in Congress. But church people in Birmingham, Alabama, recruited an unlikely champion: Representative Spencer Bachus.

Pat Pelham was a young mother in Birmingham. She was moved during her morning prayers to do something for people in Africa. Her husband’s job and two small children put going to Africa out of the question. A minister at her church, Independent Presbyterian, suggested she get their church involved in Bread for the World. Pat and her friend Elaine Van Cleave came to a meeting with me at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. Father Martin Muller had invited me to speak.

Pat and Elaine organized a hunger committee at Independent Presbyterian. They invited their member of Congress, Spencer Bachus, to an evening event. I sat on his left, and a church member who chairs the local Republican Party sat on his right.

Several years later, at the beginning of 1999, Bachus was appointed chair of the international subcommittee of the House Financial Services Committee. If Congress was going to approve debt relief for poor countries, it would have to start in Bachus’s subcommittee.

I called Pat right away. Our Lady of Sorrows asked people to sign a petition the next Sunday. Pat, Elaine, and two friends from their church flew to Washington at their own expense to bring the petition and talk with Representative Bachus.

Elaine explained why they had come. “I don’t know much about economics or international finance,” she began. “But I do know that tens of thousands of children die every day from hunger and other preventable causes. As a mother, that really bothers me. Most of the time, I think there is nothing we can do about it. But it would help a lot if you would sponsor this Jubilee legislation.”

Bachus became Congress’s most effective advocate for debt relief for the world’s poorest countries.

The Jubilee campaign was strong in Europe, so the Clinton administration was also under pressure from other governments in the G8, the club of the world’s eight most powerful economies. But Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told me twice that the support of Spencer Bachus, a conservative Republican, convinced him to urge President Clinton to support poor-country debt cancellation.

Bachus is a Southern Baptist. He believes in heaven and hell. At one hearing on poor-country debt, Bachus said, “If we don’t write off some of this debt, poor people in these countries will be suffering for the rest of their lives—and we’ll be suffering a lot longer than that.”

He held up a statement from Pope John Paul II and said, “I haven’t read much by Catholics before, but I don’t know how any Christian could read what the pope is saying here and not agree that we need to do something about the debt of these countries.”

Representative Jim Leach, a moderate Republican from Iowa, also provided crucial leadership. He chaired the entire Financial Services Committee. Bread for the World staff couldn’t get in to see him. His staff insisted that the chairman was preoccupied with more important legislation.

But Tom Booker and other Bread for the World members got an appointment with Leach back home in Iowa City. Their appointment was late in the day, and Leach was running late. So Leach invited Tom to ride with him to the airport. Tom was not at all sure of himself, but he explained the idea of Jubilee.

When staff from Bread for the World and two church bodies finally got in to see Leach in Washington a month later, Leach immediately offered to sponsor the legislation. Leach’s staffer was sitting next to me and literally almost fell off his chair in surprise.

The Financial Services Committee passed the debt-relief bill two weeks before the G8 Summit in the summer of 1999. The proposal that President Clinton brought to the Summit became the international debt relief initiative. By September the U.S. Treasury had won international agreement on reforms at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Bank and IMF were instructed to focus the benefits of debt relief on the reduction of poverty and to encourage democratic processes to help develop poverty reduction strategies in these countries.

Congress as a whole still had to approve and fund U.S. participation in international debt relief. Bachus lobbied his conservative colleagues, and Pat and Elaine kept up their grassroots work back in Birmingham. They engaged other churches in writing letters to Bachus, organized an event at the local Baptist university to honor him, and convinced the
Birmingham News
to praise his leadership on this issue.

“I really hadn’t thought much about places like Africa before,” Bachus says frankly. But he had come to see the world differently because of church people back home.

In November 1999, Bono—lead singer of U2—made his first lobbying visit to Washington. Bono’s advisors on Africa issues, Jamie Drummond and Bobby Shriver, convinced him that the international Jubilee campaign couldn’t succeed without support from the U.S. Congress.

Bobby Shriver had a relationship with Representative John Kasich, chair of the House Budget Committee. Kasich hosted Bono’s first visit to Congress and arranged for him to meet other key Republicans, including Senator Jesse Helms, the arch-conservative chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Bread for the World organized a press event for Bono and U.S. church leaders outside St. Peter’s Catholic Church, just south of the Capitol.

Big policy changes typically require many steps, and we needed to keep pushing throughout the year 2000. The campaign gained broad support. But Senator Phil Gramm, chair of the Senate Banking Committee, was still dead set against the idea, and there was no way around him.

In November 2000, Representative John Kasich helped organize an unusual meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. President Clinton led the meeting. Key Republicans and Democrats from Congress were there. Five religious leaders were also around the table. We talked about how to win final passage for debt-relief funding. I closed the meeting with a prayer.

I then scooted around the table to talk with President Clinton. I caught up with him as he was speaking to Rev. Pat Robertson, a leader among politically active Christian conservatives. Robertson hadn’t been involved in Jubilee, but that meeting convinced him to speak in favor of debt relief for poor countries on his
700 Club
television program. He told his viewers in Texas to contact Senator Gramm, and that was the unexpected help we needed. The debt-relief bill passed.

The White House invited me to introduce President Clinton at the signing ceremony. The president looked at Spencer Bachus and said, “Without your leadership, we wouldn’t be here today.” I used my two minutes to talk about the essential involvement of grassroots people and churches across the country. I specifically mentioned Pat Pelham, Elaine Van Cleave, and Father Martin Muller.

The Jubilee Campaign of 1999–2000 started a process that has reduced the debt obligations of thirty relatively well-governed poor countries by $78 billion. They are paying $3 billion less in debt service every year, and the increase in their annual funding for basic health and education has been more than that.
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Debt relief was the initial source of funding for the dramatic expansion of school enrollment in Africa.