'Missionary economist' wants letters pressing for policies that help the poor
The Tennessean
Nashville, Tennessee
April 12, 2008
by Bob Smietana
Every time he climbs the steps of Capitol Hill, David Beckmann thinks of Moses.
"When Moses went to see Pharaoh, he didn't run a food can and blanket drive," said Beckmann, head of the Christian advocacy group Bread for the World. "He had a political agenda."
Beckmann was in Nashville this week speaking to students and Christian business leaders at Belmont University about the importance of creating public policies that effectively help poor people.
The graduate of the London School of Economics is also a Lutheran minister who was ordained as a "missionary economist."
He spent 15 years at the World Bank, with field experience in Bangladesh, Ghana, Bolivia and Ecuador, before joining Bread for the World in 1993. He says that charity and government assistance are needed to fight poverty in the U.S. and overseas.
Churches sometimes underestimate the scope of government programs, he said.
The federal government spends "more than 20 times as much as all the churches and synagogues" combined on fighting hunger, he said.
Bread for the World works with local congregations, including mainline, Catholic and evangelical groups, getting church members to write letters to elected officials. The group is hosting an organizational meeting in Nashville on Thursday night at the Cathedral of the Incarnation.
The group also invites volunteers to Capitol Hill to lobby members of Congress on hunger and poverty bills. Bread supports the Global Poverty Act, which would make fighting poverty a foreign policy priority, and trying to reform the farm bill.
Cause for optimism
According to America's Second Harvest, the number of people receiving food stamps has grown by 1.3 million people over the past year.
"We know that 90 percent of food stamps are used up by the end of the week, so that even in good times, people on food stamps don't have enough money to feed their kids for the month," Beckmann said. "It's even worse now."
Still, there is cause for optimism, especially when it comes to global poverty. The number of people living on less than a dollar a day has dropped dramatically. That means that "hundreds of million of people have been lifted out of poverty," Beckmann said.
Much of the progress in reducing global poverty has come from development in places like China and India. But U.S. funded programs, especially in Africa, also deserve some of the credit.
Since 2000, U.S. funding for poverty-related programs has more than doubled. And much of that funding has paid off, said Beckmann.
"People don't know that there has been progress on poverty," he said. "You can see it in Africa. There are 20 million more African kids in school today than there were in 2000, mostly because of U.S. funding. And 1.4 million people have access to AIDS medication, as opposed to the year 2000, when almost no one did. We ought to provide more funding for these programs."
While charities can provide direct relief, such as food and water during famines or disaster, they can't build the kind of infrastructure needed to lift poor countries out of poverty, said Beckmann.
"Churches can't build roads," he said. "They can't build water treatments systems."
But Americans of all faiths can use their privileges as citizens to pressure lawmakers to make fighting poverty a priority. And it can start with the small step of picking up a pen and writing a letter.
"If you've got only a mustard seed of faith and you act on the faith," Beckmann said, "God uses our mustard seed of faith to change the world."
