Greed Keeps Third World Hungry : East-West Lust for Power, Possessions Diverts Resources

Pope John Paul II’s new encyclical, “The Social Concern of the Church,” calls for both East and West to abandon their globally extended ideological war and focus instead on helping poverty-stricken people throughout the world.

The appeal is urgently needed.

Worldwide, almost 1 billion people live in absolute poverty. They do not have enough food, clean water or the most essential health services. In our own country an additional 32 million people, most of whom cannot afford a nutritionally adequate diet, fall below a less severely defined poverty line.

In November, 1974, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger proposed, and the United Nations World Food Conference assembly in Rome resolved, “that within a decade no child shall go to bed hungry.” Tonight more, not fewer, children will go to bed hungry. UNICEF reports that every day at least 40,000 young children die from malnutrition and disease--the equivalent every three days of the deaths from the atomic explosion at Hiroshima. Three and one-half million deaths (40,000 children times 88 days) could be prevented by immunization at a yearly cost less than the price of five modern fighter planes.

These grim snapshots should haunt us because they are unnecessary. As Kissinger noted in his 1974 address, for the first time in history humankind has the technical capability of ending hunger. It is now a matter of political will. Nevertheless, during this decade the total numbers of poor and hungry people, both in this country and abroad, have sharply increased. Per-capita income in Latin America has fallen by about 20% since 1980. Per-capita food production in Africa has been dropping for more than two decades. And although most Asian countries show economic growth, that region still contains 500 million of the world’s poorest people.

Despite all this the United States contributes only one-fourth of 1% of its gross national product in official development aid to poor countries. This places us year after year at or near the bottom of the 17 Western donor nations, when aid is measured as a percentage of GNP.

We don’t give enough aid, and what we do give is often poorly targeted. Much of it is assigned according to political considerations. Most of it operates on the trickle-down theory, with too little reaching the very poor. Not enough of it directly benefits small-scale farmers, landless laborers or their urban counterparts. Little aid reaches women, although they usually need it the most and make the best use of it as food producers or entrepreneurs. Those for whom aid is supposedly intended frequently do not participate in designing or implementing projects.

But aid, even more and better aid, is not enough. Effective self-help development cries for an expansion of employment and trade opportunities and better international financial mechanisms. These interlock and directly affect all of us.

Take the $1.2-trillion debt burden of the less developed countries as a starting point. Because of that debt, for four consecutive years the poor debtor nations have sent more money to the rich nations in interest payments than they have received in new loans--a net transfer from the poor to the rich of $29 billion in 1987 alone, according to the World Bank.

Their bad luck does not mean our good luck, however. We are no more immune to global debt problems than we are to the spread of AIDS or drugs. Debt-spawned recession in the Third World reduces consumer spending there, which diminishes U.S. exports each year by billions of dollars and causes a massive hemorrhage of income and jobs here. It also stirs more social and political turmoil abroad, which adversely affects us in a variety of ways. Not only moral obligation but also sound judgment should prompt us to behave more like a human family, seeking good for one another.

John Paul II is right. The lust for excessive possessions and power, which drives both sides in the East-West conflict, saps the entire world of energy that should assist people who are locked in hunger and poverty. U.S. defense outlays, which have increased from $131 billion to $277 billion since 1980, far exceed the total annual income of the poorest billion people on Earth. The $950 billion being spent globally this year for military purposes reflects a tragic diversion of resources. Shifting even 5% of it to development would be a dramatic initiative against hunger.

Less than two months after he became President, Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Is it not plausible that the best path toward a secure and peaceful future for ourselves and our children is to reduce the theft from those who hunger?