Some who attended the conference spent time lobbying legislators on Capitol Hill, where they urged that federal food assistance programs, especially food stamps, be protected from budget cuts. Hosted by the Diocese of Washington, the event formed part of the “One Table, Many Voices” conference, organized by the advocacy groups Bread for the World and Call to Renewal to highlight issues of domestic and international hunger and to call on President George Bush and Congress to commit themselves to eradicating poverty worldwide.

“We are living in a new generation that will no longer know the poverty that destroys millions of God’s people,” Bishop John Chane of Washington told the gathering in his welcome.

Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane of Cape Town spoke passionately about how “the plight of the hungry must not be left for heaven.” He said that 852 million people face hunger every day and that, even in a wealthy nation such as the United States, 36 million people are “food insecure,” almost 13 million of them children.

“Hunger in the U.S. has been on the rise for the last four years,” Ndungane said. “Yet with such need, proposals in the current budget debate to cut [federal government nutrition] programs and deprive hundreds of thousands of working families of food support, cannot be justified and must be opposed.”

Personal encounters with poverty

Ndungane described personal encounters of poverty and hardship from his homeland, South Africa, stressing that people would rather be given opportunities than handouts.“I have seen the face of poverty in the eyes of far too many men, women, children, the elderly, people with disability,” he said. “Their message was ‘Archbishop, take our voices to the corridors of power and say for us, “We do not want handouts; we have brains; we have hands; give us the capacity to eke out our own existence.’“

Speaking about this year as a kairos moment -- a Greek term denoting special turning points or opportunities -- Ndungane explained that with the run-up to the G-8 Summit in July and the U.N. Millennium meeting in September, “there is everything to play for” and a real opportunity to make a difference.

“Now is the kairos moment when we start making hunger history,” he said. “Now is the decisive point to which we will look back when we reach our goal of ‘hunger no more.’”

Drawing on different cultures and traditions, the convocation featured a feast of readings and musical offerings that included a Zulu freedom song, gospel choir performances, a hymn from South Africa’s Xhosa tribe and texts from Sikh, Hebrew, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist sacred writings.

A call to commitment came from several children, who asked international leaders to make the world a better place, posing the question: “What will you do to make a difference?” The Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, called the convocation an “unprecedented event.”

“This convocation is of God -- bigger than any one of us,” he said. “God has made it possible in our time to reduce hunger, and we need to get the job done.”

Debt relief critical

Alex Baumgarten, international policy analyst in the church’s Office of Government Relations, moderated a workshop on the G-8 Summit and the Millennium Development Goals, an eight-pronged declaration that seeks to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.

The office also hosted preconference workshops June 4 on current legislation, the Episcopal Church’s anti-hunger work at the local level and grassroots organizing.

All aspects of poverty are intertwined, Baumgarten explained. Disease and conflict, for example, increase the inhibition of economic growth, he said.

“The goals seek to focus both on traditional development concerns like institutions and governance, but also on the structural barriers that prevent development, like barriers to trade or the burden of debt repayments by impoverished countries,” Baumgarten said. “Developing nations spend a large proportion of their annual budgets paying back debt to wealthy international creditors, impeding their ability to deal with issues like poverty, disease and education.”

With 10 years left in the goals’ lifespan, Baumgarten said, “It’s a make-or-break moment. If we are going to meet these goals, a significant increase in resources from industrialized nations is needed.” According to statistics, 54 countries in the world are poorer now than they were in 1990, Baumgarten said. “Even with commitment to MDGs, we are still dramatically behind.”

Maureen Shea, director of the Office of Government Relations, called the conference an important call to action to fight hunger both at home and abroad. “We know there is enough food to feed all the world’s people,” she said. “This conference is about sustaining the political will to see that all are fed.”

The ONE campaign, another effort by Americans to fight extreme poverty as well as the global AIDS pandemic, has produced a video that invites viewers to visit http://www.one.org/ to learn more about the crisis and how to make a difference. The video features an all-star cast including Presiding Bishop Frank T. Griswold, Tom Hanks, Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, Al Pacino, Penelope Cruz, Benicio del Toro, Alfred Woodard, Rita Wilson and George Clooney.

Information about the “One Table, Many Voices” conference is available at http://www.onetableconference.org/.
For information about the church’s Office of Government Relations, see www.episcopalchurch.org/eppn.