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Advocating to Build the New Creation By: Alex Baumgarten An Address by Alexander D. Baumgarten in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, San Francisco 27 October, 2007 Thank you very much to Steve for his wise words, and to all of you for the honor of sharing this time with you and out other distinguished presenters this morning. In particular, Archbishop Njongo is a hero to me, as well as a friend, and one of the truly glorious soldiers of Christ who knows that the Kingdom of God in the world must be built brick by brick. As a preface, I’d like to quote another hero and friend in the Anglican Communion, Father Gideon Byamugisha, an HIV-positive priest in the Church of Uganda. Gideon frequently challenges us to look forward into the future and imagine a world that has not summoned the moral and political will to eradicate extreme poverty and deadly disease. He speaks of those who will be “survivors” twenty-five years hence. “The greatest and most obvious gaps that survivors will wonder about, and be angry about” he says, are the missed opportunities, the lack of political will and the lack of total commitment by those of us in leadership positions to use all that we knew and all that we had to fight [povertyand disease.] They will surely ask “What went wrong?”“What prevented us from transforming the knowledge and the resources we had, into focused will and targeted action?”“Who were the world leaders at that time?” To Gideon, I think – and to me as well – the answer to that last question, “who were the leaders?” is two-fold. First, the leaders very clearly are the elected leaders of our government and the other world governments that agreed to the Millennium Development Goals. Secondly, though, the leaders are you and me, the citizens of those governments, upon whose shoulders the burden ultimately rests for building the moral and political will to hold our governments to account for their promises. Steve very sagely has laid out for us the picture of foreign aid that’s focused on fighting poverty. My task will now be to guide you through the other two great “hubs”of the MDGs: debt cancellation for poor countries and trade that serves the entire human family freely and fairly. And then I would like to spend a few minutes discussing why people of faith – more than any other citizens of this or any other country – are, in my view, ideally positioned to help lead the groundswell of advocacy necessary to achieve the MDGs. But, first things first, Steve gave us a very compelling look at foreign aid. The President’s initiative to fight HIV/AIDS is a great example. What if I told you, though, that the countries that receive that $6 billion a year in assistance to fight AIDS spend more than $9 billion each year repaying old debts to the IMF, World Bank, and rich-country governments? Or that Africa spends more each year repaying debts than it receives in foreign aid from the entire rich world? Or that Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere – barely an hour from our own nation’s shores – spends more each year on debt repayments than on health, education, clean water, and childhood vaccinations, combined? Is there any point at all to foreign aid – 0.7%, 7%, or even 70% -- if poor countries are forced to bleed out more than they receive each year? The answer very clearly is no, and that is why debt cancellation is so fundamental to achieving the MDGs. In most cases, the debt burden of poor countries didn’t originate fairly in the first place. For generations, the World Bank, IMF, and rich countries lent money indiscriminitely to corrupt regimes like the Duvalier family in Haiti or the Idi Amin government in Uganda, none of whom had any intention of using the money for the well-being of their people. Similarly, during the Cold War, a large percentage of the lending was carried out for strategic purposes despite full knowledge by the lenders that the poor-country recipients had no ability – then or in the future – to repay those loans without paralyzing their own health and education infrastructures. As a consequence of this deep injustice, beginning in the mid 1990s, people all over the world began campaigning for debt cancellation under the banner of Jubilee 2000. People of faith led the way, none more so than Archbishop Njongo and Pope John Paul II, both of whom made debt relief central pieces of their public ministries. And what happened? By building the moral will, Jubilee 2000 campaigners got world leaders to act and implement a historic – though modest – debt-relief initiative. As a result 2.2 million Ugandans got clean drinking water; childhood vaccination increased 80% in Mozambique; and primary-school enrollment jumped between 60 and 80% in countries like Tanzania and Benin. A very good start. Today, though, more than 65 additional countries need complete and immediate debt cancellation if they are to meet the MDGs by 2015. In order to respond to this need, a bipartisan group of lawmakers in both houses of Congress has introduced the Jubilee Act for Responsible Lending and Debt Cancellation. California’s Maxine Waters has been the architect and fire behind that legislation in the House. It would bring relief to these countries, ensure that the funds are used to fight poverty, and transform the way we do business in the future so that poor countries do not enter a whole new round of borrowing that cripples their livelihood. Last week in Washington, a Prayer Breakfast attended by members of Congress and faith leaders from the U.S. and the global south sent the message that the time to pass the Jubilee Act is now. It’s beginning to move; the House Financial Services Committee plans to hold a hearing in early November, and the Committee Chairman, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, has committed his own leadership in getting it passed. We need all of your voices, and I hope that you will leave here today and write to, email, or call your members of congress asking them to pass this vital legislation. There’s an even more fundamental issue than either debt relief or foreign aid, however, and that’s trade. Unlike debt cancellation and foreign aid – which fundamentally involve rich countries supporting poor countries financially – a fair trading system would allow poor countries to empower themselves and build sustainable futures on their own terms. Bootstraps and all! What could be more American? Unfortunately, the trade system is a mess. Rich countries control the process, and as a result, world trade rules – and the practices of rich-country governments – make it very difficult for poor countries to compete. We don’t have time today to cover all of the facets of this extremely important issue, so I’d like to walk with you through one very important facet currently being debated in the United States Senate: agricultural policy. Every five years, Congress rewrites something called the farm bill, a behemoth piece of legislation that dates to the Great Depression and controls nearly every aspect of agricultural and food policy in our nation. There’s a lot of good there, but also some profound bad. The system of commodity subsidies – cash payments to U.S. farmers – is at the top of the list of the bad. Originally created for a very noble purpose – to support small and medium-sized family farmers in times of economic hardship – today we have a system that indiscriminately lavishes payments on wealthy U.S. farmers and undermines agriculture and trade, in a very deadly way, in countries around the world. I’ll give you an example. Cotton. King Cotton. More than any of the other big subsidy crops – rice, soybeans, corn, and wheat – the U.S. cotton subsidy is responsible for propelling poverty in Africa in the most violent sort of way. There are 20 million cotton farmers in Africa whose families, communities, and nations rely on cotton production for their livelihood. 20 million. The United States has just 25,000 cotton farmers, 10 percent of whom – just 2500 – receive 90% of our 7 billion per-year cotton subsidy. By subsidizing those wealthy cotton farmers, our nation encourages them to over-produce their crops and flood world markets with cotton sold at artificially how prices. Poor countries in Africa, and the farmers who are the fire at the center of their economies can’t compete in this system. Poverty grows. What if the U.S. were to eliminate its cotton subsidy just to those richest 10% of cotton producers? Trade experts estimate that this small step alone – eliminating a subsidy for the 2500 richest cotton farmers in the United States – would allow the 20 million cotton farmers in Africa to bring more than $100 billion a year into their national economies. 100 billion. Africa receives less than a fifth of that in foreign aid each year. An agricultural system in the U.S. that refuses to correct this monstrous injustice is a moral blight on the identity of a country whose leaders love to talk about their Judeo-Christian values and whose founders thought it self-evident that all men are created equal. Now, fixing our broken subsidy system is not asking lawmakers to choose between farmers in the U.S. and farmers in Africa. Reform of the farm bill to allow small- and medium-sized farmers in America – those who really need it -- to once again be the primary recipients of our subsidy system – would root out the vast bulk of the distorting effect of our agricultural policies on the trading ability of poor countries. Why isn’t it happening? Simply put, the lobbyists for commodity groups have a lot of money and a lot of clout with the small band of U.S. Senators and Congressmen who write the farm bill. Faith groups – the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church, Bread for the World – have spent all of 2007 working to change the farm bill for the good of both American farmers and farmers in poor countries. We got our clocks cleaned in the House of Representatives in July, but we have a shot in the Senate, where the farm bill is going to the floor in two weeks. What can you do? Pick up the phone. Get every one of your friends and fellow parishioners to do the same. There is likely to be a slate of amendments designed to fix our broken subsidy system. The chief among them is an ambitious attempt by Senators Dick Lugar of Indiana and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey to fix our broken subsidy system from the ground up. It has bipartisan support, but we have a long way to go in putting together the 60 votes it will need to prevail on the Senate floor. Pick up the phone. Tell your lawmakers to support Lugar-Lautenberg – also known as the FRESH Act – and all other amendments designed to bring justice, fairness, and equity to our agricultural system. Unless our nation takes that step, our commitment to the MDGs, to ending deadly poverty in our own lifetimes, will remain deeply incomplete. I’ve done a lot of talking this morning, but before I conclude, I’d like to say a few words about why people of faith – and specifically Christians, who draw their mandate from the transforming and life-giving Gospel of Jesus Christ – are uniquely positioned to lead the movement for the MDGs. What, from our uniquely Christian experience, can we share with governments and others who ultimately must make the MDGs happen? First, I believe, we can challenge the assumptions of a world economic system that sees people as economic entities, and as a consequence, sees poverty and disease in terms of statistics. Such a system, while perfectly capable of eradicating poverty, has very little motive to do so because poverty is a necessary part of how the economic equation balances. More poisonous still is that such a system – even when it does build the will to fight poverty – nearly always does so with the assumption that the poor are victims and that we, the rich, are riding in on white horses to save with our charity so that we can pacify our consciences and return home. The Gospel of Jesus Christ has no patience for such an approach. The Gospel of Jesus Christ tells us that the poor have faces, but more importantly, they have something to contribute. They may be poor in terms of economics, but they may be quite rich – in ways our minds can scarcely imagine – in other ways. That’s why the life of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ show, again and again, a favoritism for those the world calls poor. Poverty impoverishes not just the poor, but the rich as well. That is a very vital piece of building the global will to achieve the MDGs, as it was the vital piece of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, but it’s largely missing. When Congress believes that poverty in Africa or Haiti hurts our own nation, hurts the stability of the world, hurts little boys and girls being born today in San Francisco and Sioux Falls – not just Nairobi and Port au Prince -- that’s when real progress will begin. Our voices and the voices of other Christians are so desperately needed on this point. Perhaps even more importantly, though, Christians approach the fight against global poverty with a mandate that tells us that we cannot stop when 50% of the hungry are fed, as the MDGs urge, or when our nation has other costly spending priorities – as it does now, or when a particular global-development strategy doesn’t bear fruit. Winning the fight against poverty is not about making promises, it’s about keeping them. Poverty is the towering phenomenon it is today largely because of broken promises, abandoned plans, and un-ambitious strategies. Right now, there is palpable fear among so many in the developing world that the MDGs will become yet another good idea with no follow-through, or that even in the event that the Goals are met, rich countries will pat themselves on the backs, go home, and move on to the next big idea, while 50% of the poor are still poor. Why do Christians know that we need to be in it for the long haul? Because a world that has eradicated poverty and disease – a world where all people are able to live in parity and relationship with one another – is not just a noble idea, it is the very picture of the Kingdom of God – God’s ultimate plan for the universe – that is revealed to us by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the New Creation of which St. Paul speaks. God has built the New Creation through Jesus Christ. It is our responsibility, as the Body of Christ in the world, to make the world revelatory of the New Creation. This morning before I came here, I read Morning Prayer from the Church’s Divine Office. On Saturdays in the Episcopal Church’s Daily Office – as on Sunday’s in the Roman Catholic Church’s Liturgy of the Hours – we are invited to read the canticle called Benedicite, the Song of the Three Young Men in the Fiery Furnace. It’s my favorite canticle in the Bible. “Glorify the Lord, all you works of the Lord,” it begins, “praise him and highly exalt him forever.” It goes on for 10 more verses plus the doxology, inviting praise from all of the various aspects of God’s creation, from the angels and stars to the rain and the dew to the waters and streams to the people of God and the souls of the righteous. Verse upon verse ends with the same refrain: “Praise him and highly exalt him forever.” What this ancient picture presents is a prophetic vision of a creation in perfect unity and harmony with itself and with the One who made it: Creation as it looked when God conceived it, and Creation as it looks in God’s final vision, when all is made new in the person of Christ. This is a picture of a world that has eradicated global poverty and achieved the MDGs. And it’s the picture of the world that lies at the heart of the Church’s mission of making the Kingdom of God, the New Creation, evident and manifest in the life of our own world. Our joyful work, as the baptized people of God is to help build this picture of the world: a place where poverty and suffering no longer hold sway, and the only need or want that pervades the world is the desire to sing the Maker’s praise. All people and all things together: humans, livestock, tiny beings, the primal elements; all of them proclaiming – not necessarily with voice but by simple virtue of their existence – the greatness of God and the goodness of Creation. That’s why people of faith led the Jubilee 2000 Campaign and are leading the current push for debt cancellation to achieve the MDGs. That’s why people of faith are leading the movement to reform the farm bill. And that’s why the goal of ending extreme poverty and disease in our own lifetimes only has a prayer if people of faith are at the forefront of it all. Thank you and may God bless you richly in your work.

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