BOB ABERNETHY: One important lobby is the Christian group Bread for the World, which fights hunger here and abroad. Reverend David Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor, is president of Bread for the World. David welcome.

DAVID BECKMANN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Bring us up to date, how many hungry people are there in the United States?

BECKMANN: It’s now 1 in 7 Americans who lives in a household that runs out of food.

ABERNETHY: Runs out of food what? Each month or?

BECKMANN: The typical pattern is the last 2 or 3 days of the month, people run out of food. So the kids may not eat for the last couple days, the mom may not eat for 4 days, it’s 1 in 4 children under the age of 5 who lives in one of those households and that kind of moderate under nutrition does permanent damage to children.

ABERNETHY: Now the supercommittee in Congress failed this week to come up with any plan about the long term control of the deficit. What does that mean for you and the people who are trying to fight hunger? There was to be an across the board cut that was gonna kick in if there was this failure. Is it going to kick in and if so what does that mean for hungry people?

BECKMANN: Well, Bread for the World and other faith groups have been fighting for a circle of protection around funding for hungry and poor people because we can reduce deficit spending without making hungry people hungrier. And we were able to secure in the Budget Control Act that established the super committee and these automatic cuts a provision that will exempt some of the low income programs from cuts if those automatic cuts go into effect. So I would have liked to see the super committee reach a deal but the automatic cuts aren’t necessarily a disaster for poor people.

ABERNETHY: Because of the exemption?

BECKMANN: Yeah, and because people of faith pushed for it.

ABERNETHY: What about overseas? What’s going on there with American food aid?

BECKMANN: Well we were terrified earlier this year because the House of Representatives voted on a deep cut in food aid. Their cut would have thrown 14 million of the world’s most desperate people off food aid rations this year. So we really sounded an alarm about that, we talked to Mr. Boehner’s office, we talked to the President himself and in the final bill which passed this week they backed away from that really disastrous cut for hungry people.

ABERNETHY: A few weeks ago we heard that there were 7 billion people on Earth and the forecast was this would be going up to 9 billion by 2050. Can all those people be fed?

BECKMANN: Well I think we need to curtail population growth, but those people can be fed, and the key is an expansion of the productivity of poor farmers in poor countries. They can grow more to feed their own families, to raise their incomes. That’s where the food will come from for poor countries.

ABERNETHY: You mean rather than have it grown here and shipped someplace else?

BECKMANN: I think expanding demand for food will also be good for US agriculture but the bulk of the supply needs to come from the expansion of poor country, poor farmer agriculture.

ABERNETHY: And this week you came out with a proposal to change the system between the government and farmers in this country. What do you want to do?

BECKMANN: Well, we think it’s possible to develop a system that would be better for farmers especially small medium scale farms, fruit and vegetable growers, better for hungry people, better for a healthy food supply and that would cost the government less money. So this is an area where we want to support cuts but we don’t want the cuts to come from the nutrition assistance to poor people that’s included in the farm bill. On all these things basically we have to create the political will to overcome hunger. When we’ve had that political will to reduce poverty we’ve been able to do it in our country, and that’s what we need to mobilize now.

ABERNETHY: If all the federal aid for hunger, to prevent hunger, went away, could private charities pick up the slack?

BECKMANN: No, absolutely not. People think that but in fact all the food that we collect from all the churches and synagogues in the country, all the food banks, it’s important but it all amounts to 6% of the food that poor people get from the federal food programs. That’s food stamps, school lunches, WIC. So if Congress decides to cut the federal food programs by 6%, 12%, there’s no way that churches and charities can pick up the gap. We need to also get our government to do its part to end hunger.

ABERNETHY: David Beckmann of Bread for the World. Many thanks.

There’s been dramatic progress against hunger, poverty, and disease in the world. In 1970, probably about one-third of the people in developing countries were hungry, undernourished. That’s now down to about one-fifth. The big story, I think, is the religious story. I think God is moving in our time to reduce hunger, poverty, and disease, and part of that story is assistance from the rich countries.

Every day about 25,000 kids die needlessly in developing countries. But in 1970 that was about 55,000 kids a day. There has been a dramatic reduction in death among babies and small children, and that was largely driven by assistance. Back in the 1980s, UNICEF had the idea of just teaching poor parents simple things that they could do to keep their kids from dying, things like there’s a simple solution of sugar and salt you can use to keep kids from dehydrating when they have diarrhea. The US government got behind that, US advocacy groups like Bread for the World pushed it, so we got US government money, so all over the world we’ve got poor parents know how to keep their kids from dying. It’s a permanent change in how the world works.

Most of the progress made against hunger, poverty, and disease has been made by people in poor countries working hard to make their countries better, and then it’s poor people working really hard to make life better for themselves and their kids. Aid from the US is a factor. Most of the change, and it’s been a wonderful change, has been done by people in the poor countries. When aid is really focused on reducing poverty or promoting development, I think it has a pretty good record of success. I think the main problem of aid has been our mixed motives. Lots of times we think the same dollar is going to buy an air force base and help poor people over there and help the University of North Carolina. We go with mixed motives, and when you do that, it is poor people in remote areas in poor countries that don’t get very well served. Right now we are putting a lot of development money to aid in Afghanistan, but the primary motive is not to help people in Afghanistan get out of poverty. If we want to help people get out of poverty, there are a lot of other places where the circumstances are better, where poor countries are making progress. At the end of the day in Afghanistan, the purpose of that money is not to help poor people. The primary reason is to fight terrorism.

There are places like Afghanistan and Iraq where we are trying to win the hearts and minds of the people during the war, but the war is going on, and you can’t get civilians into those zones. So in those kinds of situations it makes sense for the military to give money for schools. But, frankly, I don’t think it’s going to do a whole lot for the long-term development of those countries until they get to a situation of peace. Where it doesn’t make sense for the military to get involved is troops going down to Central America and inoculating kids. [Defense] Secretary Gates has been very clear about this. He wants strong civilian agencies to be able to carry out our development assistance programs so that our military can focus on what they do. They don’t do a good job reducing poverty, and it’s a mistake to let as much of our money to be helping poor people to go through our military. It also keeps them from them doing their job well.

People like me who want more money to help reduce poverty in the world ought to be also doing our part to insist that the systems work well. They don’t work as well as they should. I think we need a stronger development agency, some voice in the US government, a strong voice that can speak up for poverty reduction, global development, and carry that out in an effective way. We don’t have that right now. There is a lack of coordination. When I was in Mozambique, there are three big US development agencies in the same building doing different things—the AIDS program, the ag[riculture] program, and they don’t even talk to each other very well. For various reasons, we over-earmark our aid so that when our people get to Mozambique they can’t be responsive to the local situation or what local people there are trying to do. They’ve already got their marching orders from Congress or the president or somebody, so we can’t be responsive to what local people are trying to do.

There are three big agencies that administer US development assistance. There are 60 offices of government that have foreign assistance programs. It’s a nutsy thing. There wasn’t much political commitment to development assistance. Our main agency, the US Agency for Development, was allowed to deteriorate. Then President Bush could see that reducing poverty was important to our security. He started an AIDS program. He started a new corporation as a channel for assistance, so we’ve come to the point where we just have a clutter of US agencies trying to do the job. These are good people. They try to do the job well, but it’s clear that we need one strong agency responsible for development, related to the State Department, and then we also need better coordination across the 60 offices of government. We need a strong development agency, better coordination, and we need to be better responsive to local needs and local people.

I think our foreign assistance is broken. It does some good, it does a lot of good, but we can get a lot more impact out of those tax dollars. It’s not just the aid; it’s the coordination of aid with trade and diplomatic policies. For example, in Bangladesh—we charge Bangladesh more in tariffs for the things they import into the US then we give them in aid, so we are taking with one hand what we give with the other.

One of the clearest lessons of 40 years of development aid is that you got to start by listening. You’ve got to start by asking people in the situation how do they see the problem, and what are they trying to do to get out of the problem? And chronically people come from far-off places, smart, well-educated people with bright ideas, and try to plant those ideas in very poor places, and they go back home. It’s the local people who know what will work and won’t work.

Congress tends to have its ideas. Individual members of Congress get their licks in. The administration has some things they want to do, various outside groups that lobby Congress more money for this, more money for that, so we end up with aid program where every dollar is earmarked twice. So you get to Uganda, and you want to do something with the Ugandans: We’ve got this problem here we want to solve. We don’t have money for that; it’s not on our checklist of 500 things that we can do.

We are excessively concerned about corruption. Corruption is a problem, and we have to be serious about it, but it’s a little bit less of a problem than it used to be because of cell phones and information technology. Most developing countries are democracies. People can speak up if money is spent on a bridge, and there is no bridge.

I visited a country US AIDS program. If you are going to get those medications out into rural areas, you have to use the ministry of health, and the official said we have US contractors embedded in their department of health, so instead of giving money to an African agency we want to build up and make stronger we give it to US contractors because we don’t really trust those Africans. If we can’t help them build up systems to help reduce corruption in their own organizations we are not going to have success. I think our food aid program is a good example where some reform is possible. Every dollar that we appropriate for food aid, more than 50 cents goes to transportation and administration. With the high price of oil now, to ship food from Iowa or Kansas to Ethiopia is a very expensive proposition. The best way often to get food in a place where you need food aid, a refugee camp, is to find food locally or in a nearby country. Buy the food from farmers there. But we end up shipping it almost all the time; we ship food produced here. I don’t think it makes much difference to US farmers anymore. It’s partly because there is a small group of shipping companies that they are US-flagged shipping companies, and the law says they get to ship that food. They aren’t efficient shipping companies, but they are very well positioned to lobby Congress, and they push that all that money that is supposed to help the poorest people in the world should go to food that they are going to ship. It’s a scandal. If they were just taking 20 percent I could live with it, but now it’s gone to more than 50 percent of the cost of food aid. Bread for the World is campaigning to get that system changed.

Rev. David Beckmann

Bread for the World has worked on trade policies toward Africa, toward Haiti to try open up opportunities for poor countries to export into the US. It’s good business for the US. Usually trade and investment tends to benefit better off people first. So if you really are trying to lift the least of these you often need some aid money to complement it. Really poor countries have in fact managed to achieve really rapid economic growth, partly through aid, partly through trade opportunities. In fact, places like India, China, Korea, Indonesia—these are places I want to put some of my 401(k) money.

The Bush administration started talking about 3 D’s, and the Obama administration has picked that up. The D’s are defense, diplomacy and development. Those are the three legs of our foreign policy. But the defense leg is real long, the diplomacy leg is kind of stubby, and the development leg is tiny, tiny. Both President Bush and President Obama were clear that development, helping people around the world make a better life for themselves—it’s the right thing to do but also in the long-term contributes to our diplomacy and our defense.

As a nation we are really great at responding to emergencies especially when they are on TV, and when the camera and lights go off we are not great. But Haiti is going to be very poor for 30 years, and so our efforts to support the Haitians in making a better life for themselves have to be steady. This has to be a long-term commitment. Two-thirds of Haiti’s exports are textiles, mainly t-shirts, so trade is a proven instrument there. But they can also produce rice. We’ve killed their rice industry. They had rice production. The IMF made them quit subsidizing their rice and open up their borders. The US rice production is heavily subsidized, so now you can go to Haiti, on this side of the road there is a field that used to be a rice field that is now barren. On this side of the road there is a little shack, they are selling US rice. Haiti could be a sugar producer, but our sugar is heavily protected, subsidized, tariffs, all kinds of protection. One thing we could do with Haiti is open up to trade. I also think, I know this is controversial, I think we have to open up to immigration. Our country and the rest of surrounding countries, we could absorb some people, and there are Haitians in this country who could bring their people into the country.

The amount of money that we are spending on programs helping to reduce poverty in developing countries has tripled between 2000 and 2010. The experience of 9/11 made us aware that we are interconnected with the world, and it’s not smart to neglect misery in far-off places. And then we had help from Bono and Brad Pitt. In fact, I’m very encouraged that the country is more committed to reducing poverty now, and if you talk to voters they want to do more. We have changed US politics for the better on this issue, and I expect further change for the better.

Not always, but often the US government has mixed motives in giving aid. Typically our primary motive is something that is going to help us. We want that country to let us have access to a military base or something like that. But then often we want to make sure that money is spent in the US on some industry that has access to Congress, and also we really do want to help those poor people. But when you are trying to do three things with the same dollar who loses? It’s always the poor people, and that often happens. When we were able to get programs that were really focused on reducing AIDS, reducing child deaths, we’ve had a lot of success. This dramatic progress that was made against hunger, poverty, and disease, to me it’s theological. This is God moving in our history. It makes the Exodus, what happened at the Red Sea, look like small potatoes. Right now we are in a recession. It’s kind of a setback, but if you take a longer view it’s clear that hundreds of millions of people are escaping from abject poverty. I think this is an experience of the good God in our own history, and I thank God we can be part of it.

Haitians need to solve the Haitian problem. Haiti is a complicated case, but it’s complicated partly because of a long history of foreign exploitation. Virtually all these people were brought over and served as slaves. A big slave rebellion in 1804, they became an independent country, and for 100 years a pariah nation. The US and Germany and France wouldn’t deal with them except to send in warships and extract debt payments. Even in the 20th century, our government and other rich parts of the world have repeatedly exploited Haiti, so there’s internal corruption, internal weaknesses, but there is also this long history of external exploitation. If that all is going to be healed, yes, we need aid coordination. Some agency is going to be set up to make sure we won’t trip over each other. That could be a good thing. But Haitians need to be in charge. Haitians need to be deciding their own destiny. They are going to have to solve the problem, or it won’t be solved.

I’m just weary that we focus on Haiti and Afghanistan, the two most difficult cases. If we don’t succeed in those countries—I hope we do—but if we don’t, I wouldn’t be surprised that we won’t see progress against poverty in the short-term. But there are still scores of other places in the world, very poor places, where the misery is just as severe, and people are moving forward and could use some help. Partly what I want is to use more of our assistance in places where you have a lot of poor people and some real chance to help them get out of it.

DEBORAH POTTER, guest anchor: Last week, the US government said more than 35 million Americans went without food at some point during 2006. This week, the non-profit group Bread for the World issued its own report recommending strategies for the US to combat hunger. Bob Abernethy sat down with David Beckmann, Bread for the World president and a Lutheran pastor, to discuss hunger in this country and what can be done about it.

BOB ABERNETHY: David, welcome.

Reverend DAVID BECKMANNN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Put some flesh and blood, if you would on the statistics: 35-and-a-half million people in this country who — what happens?

Rev. BECKMANN: Well, in our country it’s not hunger like Ethiopia. The typical pattern of hunger in our country is that the family runs out of food. They may have food assistance from the government, but food assistance runs out by the end of the third week of the month. It’s not enough. So the moms go without food. The kids go without food maybe the last few days of the month. So then the whole month they don’t buy good-for-you food. They don’t have quite enough food.

ABERNETHY: Is this all over? All kinds of people?

Rev. BECKMANN: It is all over the country. It’s especially children, especially little children. In our country, one in four children under the age of six lives in a household that runs out of food, and even moderate under-nutrition does real damage, because the nutrition goes to the vital organs and the brain half shuts down. So kids aren’t alert. They’re naughty. By the time they go to kindergarten they’re acting up. Letting so many kids go hungry does real damage to our whole nation.

ABERNETHY: You at Bread for the World, you’ve been fighting this, fighting hunger for a long time. But your emphasis has shifted or is shifting from emergency measures to trying to fight poverty itself?

Rev. BECKMANN: Well, both. We’re working this year on farm bill reform, which is a good way to both deal with food assistance for hungry families and helping some families get out of poverty. Much of the money in the farm bill goes to affluent families; some very wealthy landholders have money in the farm bill. So there’s an opportunity this year to shift some of those resources, first, to farm and rural families who really need help to make a living; and then also to strengthen food assistance to hungry families in our country.

ABERNETHY: And how does what’s going here compare to what’s going on around the world?

Rev. BECKMANN: Well, Bread for the World works on both hunger worldwide and in our country, and the irony is that the world is making progress against hunger and poverty. Countries as diverse as China and Uganda and Chile are making progress, while in the USA, at least in this decade, we’ve been going the other way. We have more hungry and poor people in the country than we did in the year 2000.

ABERNETHY: And working people are hungry?

Rev. BECKMANN: Absolutely. It’s increasing numbers of working people. Nowadays, you know, if you go into a McDonald’s and there’s a lady behind that cash register, if she’s got kids at home those kids aren’t eating all the time. I’m a preacher, so I believe that if you don’t work you shouldn’t eat. It’s in the Bible. But the corollary is if you do work you ought to be able to eat, and that’s not true in our country anymore.

ABERNETHY: David Beckmann of Bread for the World, many thanks.

Rev. BECKMANN: Thank you.