RON SIDER
A Tsunami Every Week News about the ghastly devastation caused by the Asian tsunami rolled in day after day as I was finishing the revisions for the fifth edition of my Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger—20,000 dead…then 50,000,100,000,175,000. The final count could easily reach 200,000 lives suddenly snuffed out by the raging ocean. People of the world rightly recoiled in horror and then swiftly launched a massive global effort to save those the sea had spared. Such an enormous death toll is truly awful. But far more than that number of people die unnecessarily every week— this week, next week, and every week— because of poverty the rich world chooses largely to ignore. Every day 30,000 children die of starvation and diseases we know how to prevent—210,000 dead (counting only the children) every week. That means that more than 52 times as many children die unnecessarily from poverty every year as those who perished in the year-end tsunami. According to the World Bank, 1.2 billion people struggle to survive on just one dollar a day.Another 1.6 billion live on less than two dollars a day.That kind of poverty means inadequate food, lack of clean water and sanitation, inadequate or no medical care, and therefore unnecessary disease, brain damage, and illiteracy. In 2004 the World Bank reported that 1 billion people lack access to safe water and 2.5 billion have no access to improved sanitation, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 6,000 children die every day from these two causes alone. The WHO reports that 13 million people die each year from diseases like diarrhea, malaria, and tuberculosis that we know how to
prevent or cure. According to the WHO, it would only take about $3 billion more invested each year in preventive care in poorer nations to save 5 million people. Can Americans, who spend $30-$50 billion each year on weight-loss diets, not give one-tenth of that to save 5 million people a year? AIDS is one of the most deadly killers of the poor. In rich nations, most people with AIDS receive expensive drugs that can enable them to live largely normal lives. But in Africa, where half of the world’s 48 million AIDS victims live, only three to four percent of those who need these life-saving drugs receive them.Why? Because even though the price of these drugs in Africa has dropped enormously in the last two to three years, most people still cannot afford them. A careful study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated that just $27 billion (far less than the rich world spends on golf each year) spent over eight years would prevent 30 million poor people from getting infected with HIV/AIDS. According to the United Nations, 20 percent of those living in the richest nations are at least 74 times as rich as 20 percent of those living in the poorest nations. In fact, the richest 25 million Americans enjoy as much income as the poorest 2 billion people in the world. Part of the tragedy is that American citizens think we are far more generous than we are.A 2001 poll by the University of Maryland discovered that most Americans believe that the United States spends 24 percent of the annual federal budget on foreign aid! In reality, it is only a tiny fraction of that. In fact, as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, we are dead last (0.14 percent) among all industrialized nations in official development assistance. (Thankfully, the large amount of American private relief and development funds improves that figure a little, but only a little.) PRISM 2005
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What can be done? We can make changes in our personal lifestyles, our churches, and our public policy. Each of us can, in the words of a Catholic saint, “begin to live more simply so that others may simply live.” Less money spent on new clothes, new cars, large houses, and expensive vacations can mean life rather than death if we share those resources through effective Christian development organizations. If we used just 1 percent of global Christian income for microloans, we could raise the income of the poorest 1 billion people in the world by 50 percent—within one year! Our churches need to preach on more texts like Proverbs 19:17—“He who is kind to the poor lends to the Lord”— and then reallocate church budgets so they are consistent with the hundreds of biblical texts that talk about God’s concern for the poor. Finally, we need to change public policy: forgiving much more of the debt of the most heavily indebted countries; increasing economic foreign aid to combat poverty,AIDS, and other preventable diseases; and making international trade more fair. The huge amount of farm subsidies in rich nations is another thing that must change. Just one example: Farmers in Africa can produce cotton for about onethird the cost of producing cotton in the United States. But in a recent year, the U.S. government gave out $3.9 billion in subsidies to 25,000 American cotton farmers—more than the entire GDP for the African country of Burkina Faso, where more than 2 million people depend on cotton for their livelihood It would take only a small percent of our incredible wealth to dramatically reduce poverty in our world. As you (rightly) support the victims of the Asian tsunami, remember that a quiet, largely hidden tsunami kills well over 200,000 people every week. And that will continue year after year after year unless you and I decide to change it. ■