With a new president entering the White House, and the start of a new Congress, 2009 will be a time of rapid changes and new policies. This is also a time of great economic difficulty, especially for hungry and poor people in our country and around the world. 
Poor people in many of the world’s poorest countries have been especially hard hit. They typically spend most of their income on basic staples—rice, corn, wheat, or sorghum—and those prices have more than doubled over the last three years.
So the widow in Mauritania who used to eat two meals of sorghum a day now eats one meal of sorghum soup. Like many other poor countries, Mauritania has also been hurt by high oil prices and the slowdown of the global economy.
During the Obama presidential campaign, he promised to end child hunger in America and cut U.S. poverty in half by 2015. Senator Obama was the lead sponsor of the Global Poverty Act, which would commit the United States to the Millennium Development Goal of cutting world poverty and hunger in half by 2015. The Global Poverty Act calls for our government to develop a plan to more effectively support the world’s efforts to reduce poverty.
Those of us who share these goals will need to be advocating to make them priorities among all the competing pressures on President Obama and Congress. Global Development: Charting a New Course, Bread for the World Institute’s 2009 annual report, outlines reforms of U.S. foreign assistance that would make it more effective in reducing poverty.
In a time of economic troubles, it becomes even more urgent to use our aid dollars well and to direct more of our aid to programs to help people climb out of hungry poverty.
The report also urges our nation’s leaders to set official goals to reduce hunger and poverty in the United States and then move our nation forward toward these goals. Urgent social needs are just as pressing—and just as explosive—as the needs of hardpressed financial institutions and companies. We can address the economic crisis and the needs of poor people at the same time. One of the best ways to stimulate the economy is food assistance to families who are struggling to put food on the table. And one of the investments with the highest economic return is quality education for all children. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people in scores of countries have climbed out of poverty in recent decades. They and hundreds of millions more are intensely committed to a better life for their children.
The hope and hard work of poor people in the developing world are a source of dynamism for the world economy as a whole. Continued progress against poverty will also make for a more peaceful world. But high food prices and economic turmoil are a major setback for many of the world’s poorest people.
The United States and other advanced countries can, at relatively small cost, help poor countries weather the economic storm. If the United States would only focus more of its foreign assistance on the kind of development that reduces poverty, that would be a huge help.
At this time in history, all the people of the world are bound together. We have little choice but to forge a path out of this together.
Rev. David Beckmann
President, Bread for the World and Bread for the World Institute
