Global poverty persistent, but it can be overcome

Developed nations called on to trade, give aid, forgive debt

By MARK PATTISON
Catholic News Service
Washington

Poverty, both domestic and global, has shown itself to be persistent, but successes have been made in ridding the world of some of its worst scourges and there is much yet to be accomplished, said speakers at a Catholic conference in Washington.

“The reality of global poverty is getting closer” to individuals’ lives, said Lesley-Anne Knight, secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis, but “its sheer persistence means it can all too easily slip from our conscience.”

Still, Knight said, targeted efforts have made inroads: Ghana is implementing a school nutrition program with locally grown foods. Burundi has established free medical care for mothers and children. And in Mozambique, insecticide-treated mosquito netting has halved the rate of malaria.

Knight made her comments Feb. 25 at the annual Catholic Social Ministry Gathering in Washington, attended by 700 Catholics from across the nation and co-sponsored by 20 Catholic organizations.

Ice cream bill

On the other hand, Knight said, the cost of providing a basic education to those children who still lack it would come to about $10 billion a year, or what Americans spend on ice cream annually.

Nutrition-based health care, she added, would run about $13 billion a year, about two-thirds of what Americans and Europeans spend each year on pet food. Child nutrition, according to Knight, would cost $12 billion a year, the equivalent of U.S. and European annual expenditures on perfume.

The Catholic Campaign Against Global Poverty, which is being spearheaded by many Caritas agencies, focuses not only on aid, but on trade and debt.

“Trade rules are stacked in favour of rich countries and multinational companies,” Knight declared, and against the citizens in developing countries, “most of whom make their living from agriculture.”

Meanwhile, African nations are seen as failures, she said, if they do not live up to their end of the Millennium Development Goals, a series of eight objectives, to be reached by 2015, ranging from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education.

Developed nations’ failure

“It is not a failure for that nation. It is a failure for all the developed countries,” Knight said, and urged greater debt relief for poor countries.

Norman Francis, president of Xavier University of New Orleans, said poverty should not still persist in the United States. “It is immoral for the United States, for its place in the world, to have the extent of poverty it has,” he said. “Everybody knows education is the key to eradicating poverty.”

John Carr, the U.S. bishops’ secretary for social development and world peace, said Catholics are a mixed lot politically, caring for both human life as well as human dignity, and caring for the earth as well as “the wretched of the earth.”

He added Catholics have to press lawmakers to recognize the connections Catholics have made on the political issues of the day, although it may not be an easy thing to do. “There are worse things you can do than to stand up for what you believe in and lose.”

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