G-20 spares a thought for the non-G 2 billion

By David Sarasohn on April 3, 2009
© The Oregonian

World economic summits keep getting bigger, but not necessarily better. Rising from G-7 to G-8 and now to G-20 may have improved their Bingo chances, but the highlights tend to be when everybody gets together for the class picture --especially since most people always expect the Italian and Japanese leaders to be different the next time.

But this week in London, it looks like something useful --in fact, most useful --happened: People are going to get something to eat.

No, not at the formal banquets, although the brilliant British decision to put celebrity chef Jamie Oliver in charge was a powerful claim to world leadership. What happened was that in the middle of arguments about stimulus and tariffs, the group actually did something for the people who had the world collapse on them the hardest.

"Finally, we are protecting those who don't always have a voice at the G-20, but who have suffered greatly in this crisis," President Barack Obama said Thursday in his determinedly cheerful recounting of how he thought things worked out.

". . . In the coming days, I intend to work with Congress to provide $448 million in immediate assistance to vulnerable populations from Africa to Latin America and to double support for food safety to over $1 billion that we are giving people the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty."

The meeting didn't meet the U.S. demand for a massive international stimulus package --maybe we just wanted to see if it's possible to count to a trillion in Euros --or the European demand for tight international financial regulations --although Inspector Clouseau could investigate this mess at least as well as Congress. But the G-20 did triple loan money for the International Monetary Fund to $750 billion, as well as more money for the World Bank.

"In London, Washington and Paris, people talk of bonuses or no bonuses," Robert Zoellick, the World Bank president, told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. "In parts of Africa, South Asia and Latin America, the struggle is for food or no food."

Even if the leaders of the world's most developed countries couldn't agree on much else, at least they found some agreement on that.

"There's the sense that the global economic crisis is more than a crisis of banks and computers," said Jim McDonald, vice president of the hunger advocacy group Bread for the World, on Thursday. "The people who are being affected the most are poor people in poor countries.

"Taking the broader view is understanding that there's a moral dimension to this."

And also understanding that people on the point of starvation make lousy customers.

It's an understanding that we're hearing about some more as we deal with the economy. "Secretary of State Clinton has also been talking a lot about the issue of hunger," adds McDonald. "She's actually been very strong about this."

Back in Washington this week, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed the Global Food Security Act, creating a global food coordinator in the White House, and the Senate restored $4 billion in foreign aid that the president had requested but that hadn't made it through the House.

Now, says Rep. David Wu, just off the House Foreign Affairs Committee, "I think its House chances are excellent," either in this budget round or later on in a supplemental.

"Food is the most fundamental of all. Without food and clean water, you don't get to Square 2."

The square where you can start worrying about how much you pay your bond traders.

It's going to be a long and painful way out of this mess, and for a lot of it the United States is not going to agree with the French and the Germans and especially not the Chinese. (Coming next: G-32.) But while we're arguing, it's actually some kind of progress to put a place at the table for people who don't have, well, a place at a table.

Not only is it the economically and morally sound way to proceed on these occasions.

It might even make Jamie Oliver's slow-roasted shoulder of Welsh lamb, first-of-the-season asparagus and wild St. George mushrooms taste better.

That's something even Americans and Germans could agree on.