Institute Notes: A Dialogue on Overcoming Hunger and Poverty

Grappling over Foreign Aid

The recent Lugar report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Embassies Grapple to Guide Foreign Aid, has received a fair amount of coverage beyond the usual international development blogosphere, among them a Washington Post story on November 22. The press coverage accurately reflects the key findings of the report, but doesn’t question the basic assumption underlying its findings and recommendations, principally that narrowly-defined national security concerns should continue to dominate in the allocation of foreign aid, and that the State Department is best suited to lead this process. I question both assumptions.

The Racial Wealth Gap

Henry Louis Gates writes thoughfully about race issues in the United States. A professor at Harvard, he is one of those rare academics who can speak to the public at large and still make a lot of sense. He frequently shows up on the op-ed page of the New York Times. A couple of weeks ago I spotted an article by him there and was interested to see what he had to say. Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth was timely for me, appearing just a day before the release of the Institute’s 2008 Hunger Report, Working Harder for Working Families. Gates's article concerns a subject we spend an entire chapter on in the 2008 Hunger Report: asset building.

I guess before I say anything more about Forty Acres, I should explain asset building, a new concept for most people involved with Bread for the World. Briefly, asset building policy is about helping poor families save and build wealth. Maybe you’re thinking already: Wealth, what does that have to do with poverty, right? Patience though. Assets are what make it possible for families to withstand debilitating financial shocks from sudden losses of income, like when losing a job or suffering a medical emergency. Assets come in a variety of forms, but we recognize them most commonly as a home, stocks and bonds, or a savings account -- anything generally that appreciates in value. Assets can be passed down from generation to generation, and that’s what makes them effective in undermining intergenerational poverty. Contrast assets with income. We use income to pay the rent and put food on the table and gas in the car. Income we use to get by, assets to get ahead. That may all sound very glib perhaps, but we take an entire chapter to flesh it out in the 2008 Hunger Report, so rather than recap the entire thing let me refer you directly to the chapter. Go here, please.

I intend to blog about most of what’s in the assets chapter of the 2008 Hunger Report during the coming months, but for now I want to refer to the Gates article because it helps to focus attention on a terribly important reason for boosting state and federal asset building policies -- the racial wealth gap.

Guns and Development

A recent Center for Global Development document, The Pentagon and Global Development: Making Sense of the DoD's Expanding Role, by Stewart Patrick and Kaysie Brown, provides an informative – and alarming – look at the Defense Department’s expanding role in the administration of U.S. foreign aid. As is now generally known, the Pentagon now accounts for over 20 percent of U.S. official development assistance (ODA) -- a total of $4.8 billion in 2005. DoD Directive 3000.5 (11/05) declares that the U.S. military would henceforth treat “Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction (SSTR) Operations” as a core mission. Together these raise concerns that U.S. foreign and development policies may become subordinated to a narrow, short-term security agenda as defined by the Department of Defense.

2008 Hunger Report Goes Live

The 2008 Bread for the World Institute Hunger Report: Working Harder for Working Families was launched earlier today, November 19. It is available for download on the Bread website by clicking here. This is the 18th Institute Hunger Report, and the fourth I’ve had the privilege of editing. This year’s report is largely about poverty in the United States and ways we can address it through better federal policies. The report provides Bread for the World and its thousands of members and supporters with much to think about in the years ahead as we formulate an agenda to fight domestic hunger.

It was a deliberate decision to focus our attention on poverty this time, rather than hunger, and I will try to explain why. Bread for the World members have been remarkably effective over the last several years in protecting and boosting the national nutrition programs. The Food Stamp Program, WIC and the school meals programs are all much stronger than they were a decade ago. We are now in the position of asking—and getting—improvements to these programs rather than throwing down the gauntlet to fight cuts. I’m not suggesting we can start to take it easy. The budget reconciliation battle of 2005 and the potential cuts to food stamps we fought to defeat shows you can never afford not to be vigilant. But while the nutrition programs still need their watchdogs, it seems like an opportune time to shift some of our attention to the root causes of hunger. There is still too much hunger in America, as USDA told us only last week, but the issue is not a lack of food, rather it stems from economic injustice.

Responding to Hunger - more than Food is Needed

Sunday's Washington Post contains an excellent Op./Ed. entitled "When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends." The piece was written by Mark Winne, a pioneer of the Community Food movement, and the former Director of the Hartford Food Bank. Winne acknowledges that the nation's system of charitable food banking is an important response to hunger, but he also observes that "in the end," one of the "most lasting effects" of the food bank movement, "has been to sidetrack efforts to eradicate hunger and its root cause, poverty."

In short, Winne focuses much of his attention on the way in which the food banking has become an industry unto itself (ala Janet Poppendike's Sweet Charity which Winne dutifully references).  This is an important critique, but no less important is Winne's other point -  while food banks have an important role to play in addressing the immediate sensation of hunger, addressing the underlying cause of hunger requires a more robust response. Winne argues, food banking is an emergency response to what is, for many families, a chronic problem.

In our new Hunger Report, Working Harder for Working Families, we take on this problem in great detail. Our report examines the barriers low-income families face in escaping poverty and seeks to identify the tools needed to move them into financial and economic stability. Food stamps are part of this response, but more is needed. We discuss the importance of providing families with cash assistance and tax credits that can be used to help low-income families meet their basic needs such as paying for child and health care and getting the education they need to obtain better paying jobs.

We conclude as our report as Winne concludes his editorial: "We know hunger's cause -- poverty. We know its solution -- end poverty." And as Winne says, "Let this Thanksgiving remind us of that task."

Energy, climate change, microcredit and China

Just a quick post to bring attention to some thought provoking Financial Times articles (yes, I am addicted to the FT, and it appears so are some of my colleagues!).

On energy and climate change, Martin Wolf writes:

The increase in China’s energy demand between 2002 and 2005 was equivalent to Japan’s current annual energy use.” This nugget of information, buried in the International Energy Agency’s latest World Energy Outlook, tells one almost all one needs to know about what is happening to the world’s energy economy...The rest of the world, then, wishes to enjoy the energy-intensive lifestyles that have, hitherto, been the privilege of less than a sixth of humanity. This desire does, however, have big consequences for the world’s economic, strategic and environmental future.

Will China’s soft loans to Africa replace IFI’s conditional loans?

China’s recent announcement of investments totaling $5.5 billion in the Standard Bank of South Africa signals a remarkable moment. This will be the largest foreign direct investment in Africa, and one of the largest foreign investments China has ever made. This week's Financial Times carried a comment, “A Role for New Actors in the Global Economy”, identifies China’s emerging role as a financier in risky markets, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The comment notes that,

the risks or challenges of investing in emerging markets have disappeared. Nor is it to diminish the importance of maintaining reciprocity of access to markets, and a sound regulatory and legal framework to provide confidence in the rule of law. It is to suggest that the next stage of globalisation will likely require the global economy to accommodate a greater diversity of market models if we are to take full advantage of the new flows, new actors and new partnerships that will drive global growth in the future.

Out of Africa -- Some Good News

According to the World Bank’s Africa Development Indicators 2007 (ADI), the economic outlook for Africa is improving, with overall growth comparable to global rates over the past ten years – some 5.4 percent per annum. In addition to macro economic indicators, the report also found progress in such indicators as telephone access (up by 326 percent), improved water (up 18 percent) and access to grid electricity (up 44 percent). These are from very low starting points to be sure, but taken together provide the first sustained good news out of Africa for a long time. According to the World Bank’s chief economist for Africa,

For the first time in almost 30 years we’ve seen a large number of African countries that have begun to show sustained economic growth at rates that are similar to those in the rest of the developing world and actually today exceed the rate of growth in most of the advanced economies.

Food Insecurity - Parsing the Numbers

New Food Security data for the United States was released today by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). For those interested in the topline data, food insecurity remained basically unchanged. In 2006 35.5 million individuals reported some level of food insecurity, up slightly from 35.1 million in 2005. The number of food insecure children also rose slightly to 12.6 million.

 

For wonks interested in digging a little more deeply into the data, the study contains some interesting, and mostly depressing, findings.

The "Other America" Revisited

Today, the US Department of Agriculture released its annual report on food security in the United States. I expected to see a small decline in food insecurity, but it turns out there was virtually no change, or what a statistician might call a “statistically insignificant” one. In 2006, 10.9 percent of households were food insecure—down from 11.0 percent in 2005. The number of food insecure people—people as opposed to households—actually went up by more than 300,000. When a data count starts at 35 million, I guess a statistician can get away with calling 300,000 more people insignificant, but I think this many more hungry people is significant news. Eric Munoz, a colleague in the Institute, provides some rich data analysis in a blog he posted also today. Rather than duplicate his effort, I am planning to use this space to describe a little of what I've seen of very low food security/hunger.