Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. Today we’re going to address one of the critical issues that the entire globe is facing: the issue of grave poverty, a reality that threatens millions, in fact, over a billion of people throughout the globe.

Today we have with us David Beckmann, who is the president of a Christian advocacy organization, Bread for the World. He’s been president since 1991. He’s traveled to over seventy countries and has seen hunger in its many different faces. Now that we are in the midst of a global economic crisis, David is convinced that we need not only to continue our aid to developing countries, but to significantly reform it in order to end hunger once and for all.

David, great to have you with us today.

David Beckmann: Thanks for having me.

Lloyd: I understand that you have been assigned a title in the past of being a “missionary economist.” Those aren’t two words that I hear put together very often. Tell me what a “missionary economist” is and how did you get to be one.

Beckmann: I think I’m the only “missionary economist” in captivity. When I came out of seminary I’m a Lutheran although I go to an Episcopal church, I’m sort of a Lutheran-Episcopalian. But when I came out of seminary, the Lutheran Church was in some turmoil, and so we had more room for maneuver than we usually do, so I convinced the church to call me to be a “missionary economist,” to connect Christian faith and moral teaching to economic issues, especially poverty. And actually, that’s what I ended up doing.

I worked at the World Bank for a long time, under call from my church, trying to help the World Bank be more effective in reducing poverty. And then since ’91 I’ve been President of Bread for the World, and Bread of the World helps people of faith, Christian people especially, weigh in on issues, current issues in Congress that are important to hungry and poor people. I think God has a special concern about people who are really at the bottom of the pile—hungry, poor people. And in our great democracy all of us really can change history for the Lord, and that means, at heart, opening up opportunity for poor people.

Lloyd: You came by some of this passion pretty early on. You were in the Peace Corps right out of college?

Beckmann: Right. I spent time as a young man… well, actually I think some of the passion came… I moved from Nebraska, went to Yale in the ’60s. So you know, I was a kid there from student council in Lincoln High and all of a sudden, Whoa! There are some angry people here—you know, the Black Power movement, the Vietnam War. I think that kind of shocked me, and I ended up then spending a year traveling around the world and lived along… lived much of that year in Ghana. So those early experiences shaped me for the work I do now.

Lloyd: You’re doing a lot of focusing right now, I know, on the reform of foreign aid and making and persuading our government to make a major commitment at this particular point, which happens also to be the point when our economy is in disastrous shape. A lot of people would say you should bide your time and be patient and let the economy recover, but you’re convinced this is the moment to push forward. Tell us why that is and what are you most concerned to have happened?

Beckmann: Well, the… although you wouldn’t know it from the Washington Post, the people who have been most severely hurt by global economic turmoil are the poorest people in the world.

The number of hungry people in the world has gone from about 85o million, which is a number that’s remained constant over a couple of decades in fact. But that number has jumped over the last few years to almost one billion.

So these are people who are hungry in the most literal sense. They don’t get enough rice to keep their body going, and their kids die in large numbers. And so this global economic turmoil is affecting all of us, I’m sure it’s affected almost everybody here… but kids are dying in many of the developing countries because of the crisis.

And in fact, if we don’t deal with that aspect of the crisis, there’ll be a boomerang effect. If, in very poor countries, this really big setback, if that’s not addressed, it could lead to violence. We’ve already seen more than thirty countries have been plague by food riots.

And then on the positive side, there’s a lot of dynamism in the developing countries. A lot of the poorest people in the world have had some experience, thanks be to God, over the last few decades, of improving their lives. Their health is better, their kids are in school, their government’s better than it was twenty years ago and so that… if we could invest in the dynamism of developing countries, that can encourage our economic recovery too. Just… everything is connected to everything.

So in a time like this, we think one thing we have to do is make sure we’re using our foreign assistance effectively and get more those dollars to people who really need help. So we think we need more money for effective programs of foreign assistance but we think this is the year to push to fix foreign assistance so that the dollars that we’re spending in this area do the maximum good for poor and hungry people. If we do that this year, it’ll have an impact for the next twenty years. It’s a little bit more complicated than just asking for more money.

Lloyd: I was going to say, I’m struck by your language, let’s fix foreign assistance because it sounds like… from reading some of the materials from Bread for the World” that it isn’t simply a matter of significantly ramping up the dollars, though that’s a major part, but there’ve been some real flaws in the way that foreign aid and foreign hunger aid has been delivered in recent years and decades, I guess. Tell us something about where you think that kind of aid has wandered from the effective path, and what you think ought to be done to change it?

Beckmann: I think maybe the way to do that is to talk about a trip I just made. I was in… I got to go to Mozambique in Malawi in December. And I saw something in Mozambique that show we’re… that really encouraged me about the good impact of our assistance but also you could see there, in a very clear way, how our assistance programs could be more effective.

So, I got to go… actually my host in northern Mozambique was the Anglican Diocese of Northern Mozambique, and they helped us get to an area along Lake Niassa—that’s a hundred miles from the nearest road. We were really way out in the boonies, and really poor people. Everybody I met there had experiences of going without food for a long period of time.

Our first stop was a little place called Ntimbe, which is a settlement of forty mud brick houses in the middle of nowhere. But I was stunned. In Ntimbe, all the kids… virtually all the kids are in school, even the AIDS orphans. And that is because the U.S. and the other industrialized countries wrote off the debts of Mozambique.

And the trade off was that Mozambique would spend more that… spend that money on education and health. So there is a school now in Ntimbe, Mozambique. And in Ntimbe I met several people who are living with AIDS because of medication that’s financed by us. Most of the AIDS… the antiretrovirals in Africa are funded by the U.S. government. So here I was in the middle of nowhere, and there are people who were in death’s door, but they’re now farming and taking care of their kids, they’re living, contributing to their communities and it’s because of our assistance. So on the positive side, I saw in the middle of nowhere the things that Bread for the World members had worked on are really making a difference.

On the other hand, when I went to the capital, I went to… there’s a big building where U.S.… most of the U.S. assistance programs have their offices… First, in Mozambique there are three separate U.S. assistance programs: U.S. Agency for International Development, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the AIDS Initiative, and I talked to staff in all three.

And I was stunned that they don’t know what… they don’t know… they don’t work together… they don’t … At least, below the top level, they don’t know what each other’s doing. Ah, here where one of the poorest countries is the world, everyone… Each of these three U.S. agencies have its own procedures, they make the government of Mozambique jump through three sets of hoops. This is not… you know, they’re doing good work, but this is not optimal.

And then… In Mozambique, there’s a group of nineteen which is nineteen governments that are supporting the priorities of the government of Mozambique, which is a democratic government, it’s an effective government. The two governments that are not part of the group of nineteen are China and the U.S.A.

And the U.S.A. can’t be a part of it because our foreign assistance program is hobbled by literally hundreds of restrictions and earmarks that have accumulated over the years. So those people who are out in Maputo trying to administer our foreign assistance programs have already been told what every dollar has to go for before they ever get there. And they can’t be responsive to local needs or what local people think they ought to do.

So it was just clear in Mozambique that our foreign assistance is making a difference, we’ve got to put more dollars into effective foreign assistance—but in a time like this… in a time like this when dollar is scarce, this is an area where we can make some changes that would make our foreign assistance more effective. And it will not happen unless people who are moved by the love of God say this is important to us.

So in the middle of all the other things going on, fix foreign aid to make it more effective for the poorest people in the world.

Lloyd: One of the things that has surprised me as I’ve been preparing for this was looking a little bit at the roots of the global food crisis that unveiled in front of us over about the last twelve to eighteen months, certainly as fuel cost spiked.

There’s an article in Sojourners that’s talking about the ten factors that led to… that led to the global food crisis and they all had to do with policies really shaped, many of them within the United States itself.

For example, giving foreign aid for a fossil fuel intensive farming to run big farm machinery, thus taking away the capacity for people to do the local self sustaining work that they need to do. Bio-fuel production, rising meat and dairy consumption, and pouring things in that direction rather than essential grain to keep people going and the whole array of things that are shaped by a lot of commercial and agri-business interests that were pushing everything toward large-scale production, and thus depriving all peoples from their capacity to sustain themselves. Is that still going on now, is that being addressed, is that part of the reshaping of the program you’re talking about?

Beckmann: Well I… the high food prices—it’s… What’s killing people in poor countries… is that the prices for the basic grains—rice, wheat, corn, and sorghum—are still fifty… each of those prices is fifty to a hundred percent higher than what it was two years ago. And poor people in developing countries spend… a poor family in a developing country would spend two-thirds of its total income on rice, wheat, corn and sorghum. So a widow in Mauritania who used to eat two meals of sorghum soup, now… would now eat one meal of sorghum soup.

So that’s a big… now on top of that problem which really hit harder in the middle of last year, now the recession that started on our Wall Street is starting to hit Uganda, Mozambique, the poorest countries in the world. So you have the high food prices: that kills poor people; and then on top of that, low demand, low investment, all the things that we’re experiencing so, that problem is still there.

I think assistance especially for agriculture, for nutrition… effective assistance, that’s part of the solution. And then there are broader issues. I don’t know if we want to get into all that right now. But broadly, Bread for the World thinks that in the area of agriculture, the market would be kinder to poor people than government subsidies and that we need to reform our farm and trade policies in ways that would open up… it would be good for our economy… it’s really important for our economy. It would eliminate another big area of waste in the U.,S. economy and, with a liberalization of trade and agriculture would… the stock market would jump five hundred points. It would be great for us but it would be disproportionately good for the poorest people in the world.

So my exact solutions to the problem might be different from what you read in Sojourners, but the problem is there but the main thing is that we need to get our political leaders as they deal with the economic crisis to also pay attention to hungry and poor people in our country and all over the world. That’s the basic point, you know, we’re talking about this in church. So the basic point is not David’s ideas about this or that. The basic point is that, as people of faith we need to insist, that as we’re debating these issues we look at what’s happened to the least of these in our country and also on the other side of the world.

Lloyd: And the United States is maybe the largest donor of foreign aid in gross dollars, but significantly down the list in terms of percentage of GDP that it’s giving away.

Beckmann: We’re still at the bottom of the list in terms of… among the countries at roughly our level of income, we give two-tenths of one percent of our national income in official aid. It’s nutty, I think.

President Bush on this issue… this is an area where the Republicans and Democrats can really work together. I think all of us learned around 9/11 that it’s not smart to neglect misery in far-off places. So fifteen years ago Bread for the World is on Capitol Hill urging a little bit more money for Africa. You know, we were pretty much alone.

But that’s no longer the case. You know, President Bush has provided leadership on this area, President Obama thinks we should continue to increase foreign assistance. Now we get help from Bono and Brad Pitt.

When I started this work I didn’t think I would be hanging out with Bono and Brad Pitt but if you want to know about… if you want to ask questions about Bono, I know a little bit about Bono. Hey, I’ve met Angelina Jolie a couple of times. That was a highlight. Well, I’ve got to tell you I knew nothing about celebrities, but when Brad Pitt first joined the One Campaign, which is Bono’s advocacy organization, I was involved and helped him start that. When Brad Pitt started doing things for us, my assistant laughed at me because sort of you know, twelve or fifteen items down on my list of things to do, I put a note to myself: “Find out who Brad Pitt is.”

But these people have been a huge help. You know, in our society, these celebrities are gods. And they have… I think they’ve captured the fact that Americans understand we ought to be doing more for poor people around the world and so they’ve been able to advance their own careers. I’m not saying they’re cynical, but it’s been possible for celebrities to help articulate what all of us feel, is that our country ought to be, even now in the middle of this crisis, that we ought to be a leader in reducing hunger and poverty around the world; and these celebrities and the presidents of both parties now have been urging us in that direction.

I still think it’s the case that things don’t actually happen unless people of faith and conscience weigh in and push.

Lloyd: And yet, over the last two years, we find an additional hundred million people who have fallen into the ranks of the hungry. Why, amidst the real commitment from the Bush administration’s real concern, why do we seem to be losing ground?

Beckmann: Well, there are two things going on. One is, over the last two decades, the world has made stunning progress against hunger, poverty, and disease. So the number of… according to the World Bank, the number of people in extreme poverty has gone from 1.8 billion in 1990 to 1.4 billion in 2005. This… you know, as a preacher, I think this is God.

This is God moving in our history. There are twenty million more African kids in school now than were in school in year 2000.

This is God answering the prayers of millions of families.

So there is that tremendous dyna—also in our country, in ’60s, in the late ’90s when we tried to reduce poverty, we reduced poverty. So I think… I think it is feasible in our time to make dramatic progress against poverty and I think this is the great Exodus of our time. Makes what happened at the Red Sea look like small potatoes. So there is…

That’s, I think the long-term dynamic… the dynamic of hope that people of faith need to be part of. But then the immediate dynamic is that high food prices and the global recession have dealt a body blow to poor people all over the world. And as we’re dealing with the economic crisis, part of our response needs to help get them back on track. I think that’s…

I think the Lord is calling us in this crisis, calling us to a deeper faith and deeper generosity.

Lloyd: Let’s talk about how the Lord might be calling us. Describe some of the ways that people of faith can respond. I’m sure some are structural, supporting advocacy groups and writing letters, the kind of thing Bread for the World does, that, and some of the other ways, congregations, individuals that can be involve, if this is something that ought to rest on the hearts of every Christian, what are some ways we can respond?

Beckmann: Well I think we need to… first, I think the real risk in this economic contraction—the spiritual risk is spiritual contraction. That we shrink because we’re a little bit afraid… our assets are less, or maybe somebody in our family’s unemployed. And the antidote to that is the goodness and mercy of God. It is…

This is the time to remember the lilies of the field and also, as Christians or as people of faith, we get supernatural bread you know, which we experience God’s grace and mercy. And that goodness gives us vision and hope in the midst of a crisis to look beyond ourselves, to look to the future and to look to the needs of people who are really battered by the crisis. So this is…

This is a time when God is asking, inviting us to live in real, to live in faith not based on our 401K but to live on faith, and to be generous when we’re hurting a little bit.

And then the way that can play out of course in our own country, in our communities, in our own families—there are people who are hurting. And we’ve got to be generous and creative in our generosity in responding right here you know through things like the Episcopal Relief and Development or other mechanisms we can contribute… we can contribute charitably to help people who are hurting on the other side of the world.

But I think that often, the thing that we forget to do, that we neglect to do, that really has the biggest impact is to use the power that we have as U.S. citizens. And the kind of people who are at this forum, or who watch this on the web, are people who are connected, who are knowledgeable, who can really make a big difference as influencers of the policies of the most powerful government in the world. And so part of the way we need to respond is through policies.

So on this issue of foreign assistance reform, my guess is in this crowd there are people who have connections to people who work in the White House or the State Department or Congress and can say, “Gee, you know, I heard this forum on foreign assistance reform. Do you think this something that could actually happen starting this year? Sounds to me like this is something that’s important maybe it is especially more important from a moral point of view.”

Or you can go to Bread for the World’s website which is bread.org. We, I think Bread for the World is the best instrument that the churches… all the churches have developed to actually make a difference in Congress for hungry and poor people on a number of issues, so at bread.org you can connect to us.

And then… the point is, a broader point, that we can use our influence. Part of the gift of what God has given us include the influence we have as U.S. citizens and probably in this forum, educated-influential U.S. citizens. That is a huge gift. So how we think about our government’s policies, how we talk, whether we are active, on what issues we get active, to use our influence to actually move Congress, move the administration. These are matters of faith, and God is concerned not only about how we behave as individuals, but how we behave as a nation. Our Lord God is the Lord of nations not just you know… it’s not just about praying to God help me find my keys… I do that occasionally…

But God is the Lord of nations, and we are invited as people of faith to change history for the Lord.

Lloyd: So not just… well , just to put it this way: one important way of taking up our cross and following as a disciple is take up our pen and write, or take up our phone and call—

Beckmann: It’s good, I’m going to use that. That’s right. That’s absolutely right!

Lloyd: —but it is the organic extension of what our faith is all about.

Beckmann: That’s absolutely right.

Lloyd: Is this a moment when Bread for the World is doing major organizing about any particular topic?

Beckmann: Yes. In order to win you’ve got to focus… so we’re putting in… we’re focused. All over the country, we’re organizing Christian people to say, this is the year when we should make our foreign aid more effective. President Obama is in favor of it. Republicans and Democrats on the key committees in Congress know what ought to be done. This can be done in a bipartisan way, I mean, really who is against making foreign aid more effective?

But are they going to do it? Is anybody going to take the time to work it through in the middle of all these and we think more money for the best programs, that’s useful but this is the time when we’ve got to use our money well. And so we’re urging Christian people all over the country and then we also work with Jews and Muslims and secular groups to weigh in now with every member of Congress and say: “As you’re doing all the other things you’re doing, reform foreign aid.”

We’re also really active on child nutrition… this year Congress is going to rewrite the Child Nutrition Bill, so that’s WIC, school feeding, after school programs, school breakfast programs. You know as families suffer unemployments now to… where are we now, eight percent? I was just in North Carolina they’re at nine percent.

Kids in those… many of those families are going to go without food. And even intermittent hunger among small children does permanent damage to their minds and their development. So one thing we ought to do in the middle of this recession is make sure that the kids eat. And we can do that by… in the recovery bill that just passed Congress, there is a generous increase in funding for SNAP which is what’s called food… used to be called food stamps or food banks—that was a good thing to do.

But also the child nutrition programs are being rewritten this year, and it’s an opportunity to provide food for a lot of kids and, you know, that’s… we’re going to work on that one too. And just generally a lot of things are happening in public policy this year.

So Bread for the World is trying to help people who work with us—just think about all these issues that are… like the Recovery Bill or the… you know it’s going to work on education, health, energy—all these things have implications for hungry and poor people so we’re not really going to campaign around all those issues but we will give a perspective on just trying to look on each of those issues from the perspective of hungry, poor, vulnerable people. What’s in it for them?

And I think that’s… as God looks on our politics, I think that’s partly the question that God’s asking us.

Lloyd: I want to have some questions from the audience, if you’ll raise your hand, Deryl or someone will come around to pick them up. Deryl, have you got one for starters?

Davis: We’ve got something to start here. This first question is about the order in which we prioritize our efforts against hunger, should we first focus all our efforts on ending hunger here in the U.S. and then focus on ending hunger around the world?

Beckmann: No. I think you know I don’t think compassion stops at the border. So sure, we need to… you know you need to pay attention first to your own family, there maybe somebody in your own family or somebody in your own neighborhood who really needs help. And I think you know it’s right in front of you. You know our people are coming into this church asking for help, you have got to have some response to them.

So sure, we should focus on people in need right around us, but we’ve also got to pay attention to people in need all around the world. We live in a global world where our decisions, our economy has an impact all over the world. We have got to be responsive to hungry and poor people around the world too. And the fact that is, that… you know, we spend most of our energy, most of our money, most of our government resources on other things. So you don’t have to choose between helping hungry people in the U.S.A. and helping hungry people in Mozambique. With just a little bit of extra effort, we can do both.

Davis: Next question is: If one reason for the worldwide hunger problem now is the redirection of agriculture resources to things like biofuel exploration, do we have to make a choice between this kind of emphasis on environmental exploration and experimentation, and sending these grains overseas to countries that need them?

Beckmann: You also raised these issues and I tried to duck it then… This... mean this is somewhat technical and there’s nothing in the Bible about U.S. foreign policy. So, I’ll tell you what we think. But we’ve given a lot of thought to this and talked to church people in rural America, church people in rural Africa about how the global agriculture system is structured. So our view is that… that it’s really important to… we could have a…

Right now U.S. foreign policies direct a lot of money to wealthy landholders, some of whom live in Manhattan or northwest Washington or Miami Beach. A lot of them… Billions of dollars are going to wealthy landholders in the name of helping farmers. And we think there is scope for redirecting money from these protectionist subsidies that go disproportionately to affluent people.

Redirecting money to farmers in America who really need help, to rural… there’s a lot of poverty in rural America, but poor people in rural America don’t get much help from the Farm Bill.

So we think there’s scope for reforming our farm and agricultural policies in a way that it would be better for rural Georgia.

And by the way, those same changes would be a lot better for people in rural Ethiopia. Because the U.S., Europe and Japan all manipulate our farm policies to serve the interests of, especially, affluent landholders in our own countries. So we have protectionist policies… the subsidies…

I think there’s a possibility for using biofuels to deal with environmental issues. In my view, corn-based ethanol was up… investing huge amounts of government money in corn-based ethanol is not good environmentally, it’s not good economically so… And that’s a detail. The bigger point is that we are, our farm policies are so responsive to affluent people who own land in this country. That we are not doing what we ought to do for rural America and… this is a case where we can make a twofer, where we can shift policies in a way, you have to go up against well organized, highly influential interests, but we could make these policies better for rural America, and at the same time open up opportunity for poor farmers around the world.

We think… we commissioned a study—if Europe and North America would liberalize agriculture, that would open up about 2.5 billion dollars a year in earned income for African farmers. Earned income so they don’t have to come and beg for it, you don’t have to have a big bureaucracy. They can make money. If we would just eliminate the… if we would eliminate the barriers to… if we would have a free market system in agriculture—that would be great for farmers in Africa and in the other developing countries. So these are...(big applause)

It’s a little bit… It’s complicated, but the basic point is, we’re responsive to a rich interest, a very well heeled interest in this country in a way that it’s tough on for poor people in our country and in around the world. It’s a tough one to break.

Davis: I’m going to follow up with combining two questions we’ve had here among others, dealing with diplomacy and foreign aid. The first is, how can we practically decouple foreign aid from politics, when foreign countries that we give aid to know that there are certain expectations with that aid, and the second part is from a question who wants to start a network for world hunger eradication and asking… using food aid through diplomatic channels, how this one go about that?

Beckmann: The first point is a really good point. I figured that this crowd knows a lot about these issues already. I have to expect to see Secretary Clinton sort of in the back here. But I know a lot of people in this room know a lot about these issues and have thought something about them, so that first question is—how do we get more of our assistance focused on development and give it some distance from our own national interests, our diplomatic and our defense interests. Doing that is really important, because our aid works for poor people when it’s focused.

So, for example, the AIDS initiative has been focused, and it worked. Or President Bush set up the Millennium Challenge Corporation which is really focused on the development of poor countries with good governments. And it is working.

Where you get more ambiguous results is where our motives are mixed. And traditionally our motives have been very confused. So we put money in the U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, and the same dollar is supposed to be used to buy an Air Force base. The real motive is, we’ve got a strategic interest in this country. So we’re going to give money to that government because they’re doing something for us. So that… then also we have a “Buy America,” policy so make sure that you buy whatever you use there in that country from U.S. suppliers or the University of North Carolina. Make sure it benefits some interest in this country. And then, by the way, help poor people in that country.

Well, you get mixed motives and mixed results so it is really important that we create a strong, accountable development agency that is separate from our short-term diplomatic and defense interests.

We can use some foreign assistance to buy Air Force bases or whatever, but let’s not kid ourselves and think that’s also going to help poor people. We need an agency that is somewhat separate, that’s focused on development, so that we get results.

Now, if in fact we reduced poverty, that’s really good for U.S. interest. But we don’t get the job done very effectively if we try to serve our interest at the same time that we’re trying to reduce poverty. So this is a very… it’s a key point, because… we hope that in this reform of foreign assistance that they create a separate development agency and that’s… it’s not clear that the Obama administration is going to give development enough breathing space away from both the DoD and the State Department so that the development agency can do a good job. On the question of…

Lloyd: You’ve call for cabinet-level leader to coordinate all of that?

Beckmann: We’ve argued that… where we ought to eventually go is that cabinet level department of global development, that’s what the UK has done, it worked really well. I don’t think we have a chance to get that now so I’m not going to try that now. But what we do need is a separate stronger accountable unified development agency and they need to be able to make decisions on the basis of what’s good for Mozambique, the people of Mozambique, without being too twisted around by a “Buy America” policy or U.S. diplomatic purposes.

You put money then in a country where there’re a lot of poor people and you’ve got a good government trying to do the right thing—give them some money. If that development function is too much in the State Department, you end giving the money to the countries that are strategically important to the U.S. And those governments know that they’re… like the government of Egypt, they know that they’re going to get a chunk of aid, it doesn’t make any difference if they use it effectively or not. So the conditionality that drives it is a diplomatic conditionality and we need some money where the basic conditionality…

What we’re basically saying is, we’re coming to you with this money because you have a lot of poor people here, and you’re really doing a good job and we want to support you. Now if you’re not going to do a good job, we’re going to take our money elsewhere. That’s… you need some independence. You know, maybe ten years from now we can get the cabinet level agency because that… there’re really advantages to that but it’s not going to happen this year so we tried to win you know, we tried to do what you can do.

On the other issue of how to… somebody can talk to me separately about how to start a new global hunger advocacy organization. I hope most of you will go to bread.org and join this hunger advocacy organization.

Davis: Questions that follow up on your response there that have to do with accountability. This one is, there’s a perception that a lot of foreign aid ends up with corrupt leaders, how do we stop that and ensure where our foreign aid is going? And the other related question here is, what about multilateral institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund? Can we hold U.S. representatives at these institutions more accountable for where our aid goes?

Beckmann: These are great questions. On the issue of… Corruption is a big problem, but I think it’s less of a problem than it used to be, and there are ways to address it. The global information revolution has really helped.

So we know a lot more about how the money is being spent now. There’s a lot more exchange of information. So if I’ve got a meeting with the president of the World Bank, I can talk… By email, I can talk to, often, church groups or foreign groups in the country that we’re going to talk about, I can get their perspective on what the World Bank’s doing there.

So just that kind of easy sharing of information around the world has made our aid programs more accountable and… so I think…

I talked to the minister of agriculture in Uganda once about why it was when the current government, the Musuveni government first got started, it was a dictatorship. But it was a pretty good dictatorship. You know, they did good things for the people, and in those early years had good policies.

So I asked her, you know, how did that happen? And she said it was FM radio stations and cell phones. In Uganda, she said, there are fifty languages. There are fifty FM stations that broadcast in all the languages. And then, even in very remote areas and virtually every place in Africa now you can connect with a cell phone tower. There are two hundred million cell phones in Africa now. It’s going up by about sixty million cell phones a year. And trucks in rural Uganda even in places where people don’t have cell phones, there are these trucks that go out and they crank it up and you can call you know, you pay per call so maybe once every six months you make a call, but you go and pay that.

So she said, when she was minister, she would go on the radio and they would ask… alternate between talk show, this kind of thing, and music in the local language. She would go on the radio and say, “well the ministry of agriculture is doing this great program all over the country.” And then she gets calls from way out in the boonies you know saying… farmers saying, “Madame Minister, it’s not happening in that way here.” You know so that kind of information technology is making it harder to hide corruption.

On the multilateral issue, broadly, the multilateral agencies… If you just look at where the money goes, the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Interamerican Development Bank, the United Nations—their money goes to poor countries. The money that goes thru U.S. bilateral channels, in general, goes to middle income countries that are important to the U.S.A.

So one way to get improvement in quality, broadly, is to put more money through bilateral channels. And—I’m sorry… through multilateral channels. And then the accountability… I used to, before I worked at Bread for the World, I was at one point, the only person on the staff of the World Bank who was responsible for the bank’s relationships with non-governmental organizations around the world.

I think there are now 160 people on the bank’s staff who are trying to listen to church—religious groups, environmental groups, labor unions, farm groups; and that’s really important. Bread for the World itself has done a lot of advocacy to make the bank more transparent, more focused on poverty—that kind of ongoing advocacy vis-à-vis these big multilateral institutions is important, it’s a way to keep the powers that be honest.

And the work that we and others have done along those lines over the last twenty years has made, say, the World Bank a much better institution than it was when I worked there. It was a good institution then too, but it’s precisely organized efforts to hold them accountable at broad, at the macro level but also in the country, to help church groups in Ghana. Now they can go onto the World Bank’s website, see what the bank is saying in doing in Ghana. And so, the Catholic Church, the Protestants, the National Council of Churches in Ghana is able to have a dialogue with the World Bank about “why you doing that? This is our problem.” And they were also able to use the World Bank data to put pressure on their own government to deliver.

Lloyd: We need to wrap up. I want to close by coming back to the very particular, you have a large group of people here who are serious about their faith, and it’s Lent and we’re asking ourselves, what does it mean to follow Jesus on the way of the cross, three things that we should consider doing sooner rather than later, to begin addressing global poverty as part of our mission to follow Christ.

Beckmann: Sure. I think one is that, in this group, there are people who have personal relationships with people in Congress and the executive branch who will have a say on this. So if you are one of those influence-rich people, use your influence to ask whether it doesn’t make sense now to take steps so that we use our foreign aid more effectively and that we get more of those dollars to people who need help. You can help us get this campaign launched.

Lloyd: That’s one.

Beckmann: Two, go to bread.org and connect. We’ve got a big event in June that you’d love. Bill Moyers is coming. Or just connect with your organization so that you get some information about how you can, on an ongoing basis, use some of the influence that you have to change our government’s policies as they affect hungry and poor people in our country and around the world.

And three… actually, I think the third one is to feast on the goodness of God. So if you haven’t gone to church yet, are you going to have communion on your next service?

Lloyd: Yes.

Beckmann: You know, so when you eat that bread you know, enjoy God’s presence in your life. This is supernatural food, and we all need supernatural food in this economy. So feast on the goodness and mercy of God, the supernatural, the grace and forgiveness of God. And I think it’s that experience of God’s goodness that can nudge us a little bit to share that bread with the hungry.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation. I want to thank you. We’re really very blessed to have you with us.

Beckmann: Thank you.

Lloyd: I hope you’ll join us next week when we have Diana Butler Bass, one of the most creative people thinking about the future of the broader Christian church, who’s just written a book about A People’s History of Christianity on the way to thinking about what the future might be.

In the meantime feel free to linger for some coffee at the west end, the entrance of the cathedral and by all means join us at 11:15 for our service today. David may thanks for joining us.

Beckmann: Thank you.