Ending Hunger in America
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Speaker: Dr. David Beckmann
Dr. David Beckmann
President, Bread for the World
I’m David Beckmann from Bread for the World. I want to start where Eric left off. The binding constraint on progress against hunger in the U.S. or around the world is weak political will. We need to build political will.
I was struck this morning that the speakers who talked about various aspects of hunger in the world, there was a lot of agreement among them about what needs to be done. But we’re not going to do those things unless we can build political will in many countries, and certainly not if we don’t have stronger political support from the government of the United States.
As Eric just said, as we look at hunger in America, all the national hunger organizations are also keenly aware that we need stronger political will in this country to deal with hunger in our own country. The Millennium Declaration to End Hunger in America is principally a call on the U.S. government to provide leadership in reducing hunger in our own country.
For decades now there have been conferences on world hunger that conclude, yes, we know how to end world hunger, we have the technology, we have the resources. All we need is the political will. It’s even more obvious in the case of America. It is just really clear that we do not need to let millions of children in this rich country go hungry. None of the industrialized countries puts up with widespread hunger. We as a nation are in some sense making a choice.
Now, our political leaders, of course, none of them want to let kids go hungry. But as choices are made in Congress between things that could help to reduce hunger in our country and around the world, and all the other demands on our political leaders, lots of times the things that could reduce hunger gets short-shrift.
It is happening right now. This year Congress is reauthorizing the child nutrition programs in this country. So we have an opportunity right now to make school lunches more nutritious, to take actions right now that would allow a lot more community groups and communities across the country to feed low-income kids during the summertime.
The federal government is pouring money into various purposes. But the President and our congressional leaders have told us we cannot have one more dollar for child nutrition programs. President Bush has made important promises to increase development and health assistance. The Millennium Challenge account that Per Pinstrup-Andersen mentioned and the new AIDS initiative would together more than double all the development assistance that has anything to do with poverty, by the year 2006.
Congress has already in principle agreed with the President on both those initiatives, but we’re into the appropriation period now, and they’re going to make a significant increase in development assistance but nothing like the promises that the President has repeatedly made in the State of the Union message and his trip to Africa and all the rest.
Now, if we’re going to build political will to overcome hunger, to me it makes sense that compassion knows no borders. Some people in this country are especially gripped by the severe hunger that afflicts many people in Africa, South Asia, other parts of the developing world. But probably more people are even more scandalized by the hunger and food insecurity that plagues something like one in five American children.
Bob Forney is right that we are not going to get the U.S. government to do its part to help Africans to overcome hunger if we can’t get the U.S. government to do its part to overcome hunger in Iowa.
Bread for the World organizes in churches across the country. We try to mobilize people around public policy issues that are important to hungry people in this country and around the world. And our experience is that we bring a lot of people onto international development issues by first starting, by showing how they can influence what Congress is doing on programs and initiatives that affect hunger in their own communities.
Now, very simply, it seems to me that the way to organize political will is to organize people and money around ideas. You are a very unusual group of people. You know a lot, you are committed to reducing world hunger. So I would appeal especially to you to just reflect on how you might connect in new ways to organizations that represent, that mobilize public commitment to overcome hunger in our country and around the world.
If you live in this country, the four organizations represented by the four of us are all good ways in. Bob Forney’s America’s Second Harvest is this huge network of a million volunteers. They feed 23 million Americans every year, and under Bob’s leadership they have become a really strong advocacy voice to get our government to do its part to reduce hunger.
MAZON is the Jewish Response to Hunger in this country. Under Eric’s leadership, MAZON has a strong advocacy, public policy message in its educational outreach to the Jewish community, also in its grant programs. So if you’re Jewish for sure, and maybe if you’re not, you could connect with MAZON.
Bread for the World is a national Christian citizens’ movement against hunger, very broadly interdenominational. We organize individuals and churches to lobby Congress on issues like the child nutrition programs and development assistance.
RESULTS – Barbara Wallace heads RESULTS – and they’re a very similar organization that organizes on a parallel basis. So I invite you, when you go to lunch there will be a table there right at the edge of the escalators before you go into the lunchroom, where you can pick up information on Bread for the World and RESULTS.
If you come from other countries, you’re probably already plugged into various ways to build political, but I think, one must think more about – how do you not just be an expert on the issue (as important as that is), but how do you also move your nation, move parts of your nation to deliver what we know already can be done for hungry people?
One of the things that make me somewhat hopeful is that all of our institutions are organizing beyond ourselves. So under Eric’s leadership, all the national anti-hunger networks have joined our minds together in the Millennium Declaration to End Hunger in America. So we have one program, we’re all on one track.
And under Bob Forney’s leadership, we have forged an Alliance to End Hunger, which is an instrument that we’re using to reach out to other important institutions in American life to get them to help us do what we know is possible to end hunger in America and around the world. So that Alliance to End Hunger includes effective assistance organizations, like the Foods Resources Bank or Share Our Strength. It includes corporations like SODAXO USA, labor unions, civil rights organizations like the NAACP, church bodies like the Lutherans, the Catholics, a wide array, Peter McPherson’s partnership to cut hunger in Africa – as part of this Alliance to End Hunger.
Together we’re trying to build political will through, for example, the polls that both Bob and Eric referred to. And tomorrow, just before Senator Kerry speaks, you’ll get data on what we’ve learned about how American voters think about hunger and how, in fact, they want political leaders to do their part to overcome hunger in our country and around the world.
So my points are really three: That the key to accelerating progress against hunger in our country and around the world is building political will. If we want to do that, it makes sense for us to work together, to work for hungry people in our own communities as well as in far-off places. And it’s not enough to wish for the end of hunger or even to study the end of hunger – we need to organize ourselves and push.