Bread for the World seeks to end hunger

| Monday, April 07, 2008

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By Kayla Gahagan, Journal staff

There's good news and there's bad news.

The good news, according to Bread for the World, is that hundreds of the world's poorest countries are making great strides toward eliminating extreme poverty and hunger - it's the first time since 1981 that the number of people living on less than $1 a day is less than one billion people.

"This is really, really good news," Bread for the World staffer Tamela Walhof told a dozen community members gathered at Emmanuel Episcopal Church Sunday.

The bad news, she said, is that 980 million people worldwide are still living on less than $1 a day and the number of children dying each day of preventable causes is 28,000.

Walhof remembers when that number used to be 40,000.

"It's something we should be excited about and celebrate," she said.

But it's not enough, she added.

More work needs to be done to reach the 2015 Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which includes eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, ensuring primary education for every child, promoting gender equality, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health. Every country in the world joined into an agreement in 2000 to work toward the MDG.

Walhof said Bread for the World, which is a Christian organization, focuses on informing and urging decision makers, Congress in particular, to change policies and programs and conditions to end hunger in the U.S. and abroad.

It's a strategy that works, said Cathy Brechtelsbauer, a Bread for the World volunteer from Sioux Falls who attended the meeting. Debt cancellation for some poor countries in the last decade has made a huge difference, for example, she said, which was something they wrote to Congress about.

"That's how advocacy works," she said "... It gets their attention and sometimes even their votes."

Some countries, like Mexico and Brazil, are on track for the 2015 goals, Walhof said. The rate of measles in Africa fell more than 90 percent between 2000 and 2006. More than 3.3 million children were able to attend school after debt cancellation in Tanzania.

But others, like Bolivia, Peru, Sudan, and Pakistan are struggling to turn the tide, she said.

Brechtelsbauer said there's any easy way for people in the U.S. to help right now. Write a letter to Congress asking for an increase in poverty-focused development assistance by at least $5 billion next year and to pass the Global Poverty Act, which would make it U.S. policy to achieve the MDG goal of cutting in half the number of people living on less than $1 a day.

Seymour Flinn, a retired priest at the church, said he has been involved in Bread for the World three or four decades. The church has been involved for several years.

"It's a remarkably effective organization that does tremendous work in promoting programs and pressing the government," he said.

Christians have a role to play in the fight against poverty and hunger, he added. The Bible spends plenty of time talking about it, he said, but instead, lots of Christians get caught up in other issues.

"It's the moral question of our time," he said.

For more information on Bread for the World visit www.bread.org 

Contact Kayla Gahagan at 394-8410 or kayla.gahagan@rapidcityjournal.com