Hunger: Twenty Easy Questions, No Easy Answers

The following questions were submitted to Arthur Simon by the editors of CHRISTIANITY TODAY. They are an attempt to express some points that often trouble people who are confronted with information about worldwide hunger. Mr. Simon is the executive director of Bread for the World, an interdenominational citizens’ movement on poverty and hunger (235 East 49th Street, New York, N. Y. 10017). He has an S.T.M. from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, and was formerly a Lutheran (Missouri Synod) pastor in Manhattan. Among the books he has written are Bread for the World and The Politics of World Hunger.

1. What happened to the food crisis we read so much about last year?

Hunger usually has to reach extreme and massive proportions to make the front page or the evening news. Dramatic famines come and go. They were in the news for a while and are largely gone today, thanks to favorable weather in most poor countries. But dramatic famines are only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath, the situation has not changed for at least 400 million victims of acute malnutrition. They don’t make the front page. They simply suffer in quiet obscurity, get sick too often, and die too soon. So the crisis may appear to be gone, and in one sense it is—for a while. But the magnitude of the problem remains basically unchanged.

2. Food shortages sound like a relic of a time when man had little control over nature, something more understandable in, say, Old Testament times than in our technologically sophisticated age. Why does the world have this vast hunger problem now?

It’s a combination of factors. For one thing, the earth has more people to feed than ever before. Combine that with uneven distribution of resources and technology, and you have a lot of hungry people. Actually, world food production has increased faster than the population growth rate for the past couple of decades. But a disproportionate amount of those food production gains has occurred in the United States and in other rich nations.

3. Why don’t the poor stop having so many children and making the problem worse?

That sounds plausible, but it gets at the problem backwards. The rule of thumb is that where you have hungry people you also have large families. Let me illustrate. A peasant couple in, say, India has no social security except surviving sons. If adequate nourishment and basic health care are beyond reach, that couple needs many children to insure surviving sons. That’s not the only reason people have large families, to be sure, but it is an important one. China, Taiwan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and even Kerala, a poor state in India, have substantially lowered their population growth rates. Why? Because minimal but adequate nutrition, health care, basic education, and usually jobs are available to all or at least most of the people. In this context family planning works. But without these gains, people will continue to have many children, no matter how much birth control is pushed.

4. Most of us work hard for what we have. Couldn’t the hungry learn to feed themselves if they were willing to work hard, as we have done? Isn’t poverty a result of moral failure?

In part, yes. But primarily moral failure on the part of us who are not poor and who disregard the plight of those who are. Think of Amos and Isaiah—or Jesus’ parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It’s tempting, of course, to think of the poor as lazy, because that gets us off the hook. But hunger is debilitating and produces the symptoms of laziness. Moritz Thomsen was a farmer from the state of Washington who entered the Peace Corps and served in a rural village in Ecuador. He was outraged by the villagers’ laziness—until circumstances forced him to eat what they ate. Then he learned what it meant to be able to work only a few hours a day at half pace. As he said, “There are only so many miles to a gallon of bananas.”

5. Is there anything other than a spirit of generosity and compassion that should motivate the rich nations to help the poor ones? We haven’t helped to create their problems, have we?

In part we have. Some hunger and poverty today is a legacy of practices that were carried out over a long period of time when rich Western nations exploited overseas colonies, carting off their raw materials, for example, or pushing them to produce cash crops for sale abroad rather than developing crops for local consumption. And some of these practices continue. Or think of the relationship between slavery and poverty in our own country. But assessing blame is a difficult, and I think a largely unfruitful, enterprise. The point is, we could be doing more than we are—a great deal more. What should motivate us to do more? Enlightened self-interest, perhaps, because we would be investing in a world that would be better for all of us. But Christians can be prompted by God’s love and human need. And we in turn can help the nation to make some better choices.

6. Isn’t the U. S. government already the most generous one on earth? And when private giving is added to governmental aid, doesn’t the United States make an impressive showing?

We overrate our generosity. Most U. S. citizens think we play the role of Santa Claus in the world, but we don’t. Do you know what percentage of our total national income (Gross National Product, or GNP) goes for development assistance to poor countries? One-fourth of 1 per cent—and that’s by inflated government figures that count loans as though they were grants. Add private aid and it reaches maybe one-third of 1 per cent. That’s less than one-tenth the assistance we gave to Europe at the height of the Marshall Plan. In 1974 the United States ranked fourteenth among seventeen developed countries in the percentage of the GNP given as development assistance. But hunger isn’t just a question of aid. It has even more to do with trade, with monetary policies, with military spending—and with the need for internal reforms in the poor countries themselves.

7. Is there hunger in the United States? If so, doesn’t the government owe it to our own people to eliminate hunger here before trying to feed others?

Yes, there is hunger here. Nobody knows the exact number of hungry people, but it clearly runs into several million at the very least. It’s not an either/or situation. We can and should deal with both hunger here and hunger elsewhere.

8. Have any nations solved their hunger problem—and if so, how?

Hunger has been virtually eliminated in China and Japan. These countries have vastly different political and economic systems, but they have decided that their people are their chief national resource, and they put a high priority on planning so that people can work and feed themselves adequately. We could do the same much more easily than either of these countries.

9. We are told that we Americans are consuming more than our fair share, that we constitute only 6 per cent of the world’s population and use 35 per cent of its natural resources. But doesn’t a lot of that 35 per cent go back to other countries as manufactured goods?

The United States is closer to 5 per cent of the world’s population now. Okay, let’s say U. S. exports would cut that 35 per cent back a few points. That still leaves one-twentieth of the world with roughly one-third of the world’s resources.

10. Our economic system is based on the profit motive. Could it ever be profitable to help the poor countries through more beneficent trade patterns, or must we keep trying to do end runs around the profit motive?

If we gave poor countries trade preferences and lowered the barriers on imports from those countries, this would have a generally beneficial effect. It would reduce prices for consumers. But it would adversely affect some North American industries and workers, who would need and deserve adjustment assistance.

Where does that leave us with respect to the profit motive? I think that because human nature is selfish, the profit motive can be a useful incentive. But let’s also recognize that the profit motive nourishes greed, and greed has enormous destructive capacity. So for the same reason—sinful human nature—the profit motive has to be restrained and directed. For example, the profit motive will not lead private industry to clean up the environment. Society as a whole, through the mechanism of government, has to step in and say, “You’ve got to live up to certain standards for the common good.” I think this applies in other areas as well, including trade. That doesn’t mean doing “end runs” around the profit motive, but it does mean keeping the profit motive within bounds so that people and human needs come first. I’m for approaching social issues in a pragmatic way, not with ideological blinders.

11. Doesn’t a lot of the food and other supplies that both public and private agencies send to hungry countries fall into the hands of corrupt or negligent officials and never reach the needy?

Private agencies have a pretty good record. Government aid is more easily abused because, for one thing, it is done on a larger scale. We should work to eliminate such abuse. Abuse, however, is no reason to do nothing. Look at Europe after World War II. A lot of our aid to Europe ended up on the black market, yet that aid saved countless lives and helped to put millions of people back on their feet. So let’s not think that today’s poor countries have a corner on corruption. What about the U. S. grain companies currently under investigation—and some of their officials are under indictment—for having short-weighted grain and falsified the quality of grain that they shipped abroad for years, much of it to hunger-stricken countries?

12. If we try to help hungry countries by paying more for what they have to sell, isn’t it the well-fed who would profit—e.g., the owners of the banana plantations?

I think we should pay fair prices for what we import. That’s number one. Number two, what we can do to insure fairer wages and a more just distribution of income in poor countries is admittedly limited. But we can do some things. We could set a better example in our own country. We could increase our assistance and link it to certain reforms, such as land reform, tax reform, and rural development among impoverished farm families. Steps such as these would help—and they would, incidentally, undercut the appeal of Communism, which thrives on hunger and poverty.

13. We Americans think we’re paying a lot for our food now. How do we compare with people in other developed countries? And don’t we waste a lot?

The average U. S. citizen pays about 18 per cent of his or her income for food. That’s noticeably less than the average in Europe or Japan, about half the average in the Soviet Union, and only a small fraction of the average in poor countries. Waste? Visitors from poor countries and missionaries returning from those countries frequently say that one of the things that shocks them most is our garbage. We are a profligate people.

14. Will changes in our own consumption, such as eating less grain-fed meat, help, or are we just fooling ourselves to think so?

I think that we need to live more sparingly, to consume less and to share more. But eating less grain-fed meat will not by itself transfer any food to hungry people. It might simply mean more grain sold to feed Soviet livestock, or lower prices for U. S. farmers. If you eat less meat and give the money you save to your own denominational relief and development agency or to such groups as CROP or World Vision, that would help. Above all, deal with the public-policy side of the issue. Help insure that this country and others will attend to the necessary mechanisms, such as the establishment of a world food reserve program. Otherwise changes in eating habits may give us the illusion—and only the illusion—of helping.

15. Bread for the World has been supporting the right-to-food resolution, introduced in Congress last year, which asserts that “every person in this country and throughout the world has the right … to a nutritionally adequate diet—and that this right is henceforth to be recognized as a cornerstone of U.S. policy.…” What is this right based upon?

The right to food is based upon the right to life. The Declaration of Independence says “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life.…” Do we mean it? The right to life is stripped of meaning if it does not include the nourishment that is necessary to sustain life. Of course, the right to food should be linked with other rights and responsibilities, such as the right and responsibility to work for those who can and should work.

16. Is “the right to food” compatible with Scripture?

Yes. Biblically the right to food is based upon the extraordinary value that God places on human life. It is anchored in the revelation that we are stewards, not owners, of God’s earth and therefore accountable for the way in which we use its resources either to enhance or to diminish the lives of others. That’s where we start. Then you have to grasp the truly overwhelming case that the Bible makes against tolerating hunger. For example, the Old Testament law gave poor people the right to glean the fields after harvest. It gave them a tithe of the harvest—required every year from each landowner—and spelled out repeatedly the admonition: “You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in the land” (Deut. 15). The Hebrews sang of justice for the poor and hungry in their psalms. The prophets proclaimed it. So did Jesus and the apostles. The Bible doesn’t say in so many words, “People have the right to food,” any more than it says, “People have the right to breathe,” but the intention of God is abundantly clear.

17. If this resolution were enacted, would it mean that hungry nations have the right to demand that we, the well fed, feed them—that we give them the food that is “rightfully” theirs? If not, what positive results could we expect?

The resolution is not a food-handout proposal. It calls for self-help development so that hungry people can work their way out of hunger and become more food-productive. That’s how the forty religious leaders, from Billy Graham to Cardinal Cooke and including the heads of all major denominations, understood the resolution in their appeal to Congress for a favorable vote. They also said that passage of the resolution “might very well be recognized by future historians as a landmark in American history, the one single act that could cast a glow of new light over the bicentennial year and on into the future.” Why? Because it would set the stage for a far more comprehensive approach to hunger than anything we have seen to date. It would help us consider issues such as trade, assistance, military spending, and employment in the light of a clear commitment to reduce hunger. A lot of people in Congress, including Mark Hatfield, the chief Senate sponsor, are convinced that the resolution would provide real leverage.

18. Does our world have the ability to overcome hunger, or has the problem reached the point of no return? Can the land be made to produce enough food to feed all the world’s people?

The world has the capacity to overcome hunger. The question is primarily one of will. Redeemed people should be the first to summon the will, because despair or inaction reflects unbelief. Take the “triage” or “lifeboat” approach to hunger, for example. This approach suggests that we’ve done all we can about hunger, that it hasn’t worked, so there’s nothing left to do but protect our own privileges and let the multiplying population starve. This approach not only fails the test of realism—it’s an excellent way to insure higher birth rates—but more important, it is a morally bankrupt view, alien to the Gospel of Christ. Of course, the world cannot indefinitely sustain a multiplying population, so we have no time to lose in reducing hunger and in furthering other development gains that provide the necessary context for slowing population growth. But we don’t need to despair. We need to summon our own and the nation’s will to help reduce hunger.

19. Can you give us, as individual Christians, some guidelines on giving to fight hunger—not how much to give, but how to put our money to effective use?

The first and most important guideline is that the offering of our citizenship is far more important than the offering of our money. I don’t mean to diminish the crucial role of our church relief and development agencies. We should multiply our contributions for their work. It’s just that one vote of Congress can have the effect of wiping out all the hunger-appeal money that’s channeled through all our churches for an entire year. A recent vote reduced by $200 million an amount that Congress had previously authorized for development assistance. In church we gave to relieve hunger—but by our silence on public policy we locked people more deeply into hunger. No matter what else we do, if we neglect public policy we have a formula for failure. That’s why Bread for the World was formed to be a Christian citizens’ movement on public policy. We invite Christians to offer their citizenship to the Lord for the sake of hungry people. Our time, our personal effort, and the willingness to contact our own members of Congress regarding targeted issues such as the right-to-food resolution—this is needed far more than our money.

20. Hunger around the world is an overwhelming problem. What reason do we have for hope?

Christians root their hope not in human ideologies, in the latest U.N. projections, or in some social scientist’s analysis, but in the God who raised from death our Saviour, Jesus Christ. He calls us to celebrate life in his Kingdom. How do we celebrate the Kingdom? One way is to break bread at his table. Another is to break bread with the hungry. In the John 6 account of the feeding of the multitude, Jesus tells us that these two responses are deeply related to each other. In today’s complex world we break bread with the hungry primarily by working for justice so that they may be fed. This is a work close to the heart of God, and it is a sign of the Kingdom. We can’t always measure the results of this work, nor can we guarantee that the world will be less hungry a dozen years from now. But it is God’s work and it is never wasted. We have been born anew to a living hope, so we do that work with joy.

We must build on our Christian hope. Let me illustrate. I invite people to work against hunger by using their power as citizens to change government policies. There’s often resistance to that kind of response. We’re not used to it. But I believe that we can get many compassionate Christians to use their citizenship for the hungry provided two conditions are met. First, they need to be convinced that there is little chance of reducing hunger without public-policy changes—and that case is increasingly easy to make. Second, they need to sense that such a response is not alien to the Gospel but is an authentic expression of our life in Christ.

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