LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1973, Page 321

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SOCIAL MINISTRY 319

but also that they be helped and befriended in every bodily
need. We believe that both the realm of grace and the
realm of temporal affairs belong to God, who cares deeply
that we communicate His love in both arenas. Our Savior
Himself fed the hungry, and in His verbal portrait of the Last
Judgment said that in feeding or not feeding hungry people,
“ye have done it unto Me.” Because faith without works is
dead, a living faith prompts such works of love. This love,
like God’s love from which it springs, knows no boundaries,
but simply responds to those in need, Hunger. therefore,
calls for a response from us commensurate to the need.

3. It is right for us to share. The earth is the Lord’s and
its abundance is meant for all. This says something special
to Christians who live in the world’s richest country. The
United States, with 6% of the world’s population. receives
more than twice aS much income as the 66% of mankind that
lives in the poor nations. It matters to our Lord how this
country uses its enormous material wealth and the leverage
that goes with it. “If a man is rich and sees his brother
in need, yet closes his heart against his brother. how can
he claim that he has love for God in his heart?” (1 John
3:17) Clearly it is right for us and for our nation to share.

4. One vital way of sharing is through world relief. Our
gifts. for example, to Synod’s program for World Relief
offer an excellent avenue for getting food and other essen-
tials to people who are in dire circumstances. We cannot
stress too often the importance of this work or of the ways
in which it brings about a multiplying of loaves and fishes
today.

5. At the same time this commission wants to emphasize
above all else our need to deal more comprehensively with
the underlying causes of hunger. In today’s complex world,
effective concern for our neighbor cannot usually be satis-
fied by bandaging his wounds and leaving a coin with the
innkeeper. It must deal with the conditions that cause his
hurt. In the case of world hunger, our most generous gifts
through private relief agencies do not begin to reach the
magnitude of scale required to make even modest overall
gains against world hunger, so acute is the crisis. Indeed,
if they stand alone, our contributions may actually prevent
us from dealing with the causes of hunger by giving us the
illusion that we are fully meeting our responsibility and
have no other means of assisting the hungry.

6. What are the causes of hunger? They are manifold
and they are deeply imbedded in the social and economic
structures of the poor nations themselves, as well as in the
imbalances that exist between rich and poor nations. Con-
sider these examples:

Food Production: There are no miracle technologies that
offer a panacea. Most increases must come from higher crop
yields on land already under cultivation. Despite the “green
revolution,” food production has barely inched ahead of
population increases in the poor countries over the past
decade, and in 1971 (the last year for which statistics are
available) per capita food production dropped almost 1 per~
cent in those countries. Further, the gains that do occur tend
to benefit an affluent few and leave the great masses of poor
people as bad or even worse off than before. In theory im-
proved methods of food production place the world within
reach of eliminating hunger. In practice. however. extreme
poverty prevents that from happening. As our own country
illustrates, where people are impoverished, hunger can even
exist right along side of a food surplus problem. The lag
in food production, and its uneven distribution, therefore,
points back to poverty.

Population: The world’s population is soaring at an un-
precedented rate. Between now and the turn of the century
poor countries as a group will double their present popula-
tions. They will then constitute not two thirds, but more
than three fourths of the human race. Although U.S. pop-
ulation increases are small by comparison, we face the spe-
cial responsibility of consuming over 20 times more per
person of the earth’s resources than do the poor countries.
Population increases in poor countries have been prompted
mainly by the introduction from the West of public health
and medicine, which drastically curtails the death rate —
but in advance of the_kind of economic growth that can
support the increases. Poverty and hunger grow in the wake
of these rapid increases, which make imperative the spread

of education and medical services for family planning. At
the same time, this fact stands out: so far, once the spira
of a soaring population has been set in motion, no country
has brought it into manageable proportions without the
benefit of sizable economic and social gains spread sufficiently
among the common people to provide security. Until such
gains take place, parents will have many children, hoping
that enough sons will survive to care for them in old age.
Consequently it is useless to imagine that an answer to the
population explosion can be found apart from a drastic re-
duction of poverty.

Military spending: The annual cost of the arms race eX-
ceeds $200 billion, more than the total income of the poorer
half of the world.

As the problems of food production. population increases,
and military spending illustrate, people are hungry because
they are desperately poor.

7. If hunger arises from extreme poverty, then the funda-
mental answer to hunger is the kind of economic and social
development that will enable the poor of the world to feed,
house and clothe themselves adequately. But few underde-
veloped countries are able to repeat the experience of the
industrialized West in this matter. They do not have the
unprecedented advantages that awaited our predecessors:
frontiers for expanding populations and a huge breadbasket
of natural resources ready to be farmed and mined and
processed. On the contrary, their expanding populations
pour into urban centers far in advance of job opportunities,
and at a time when industries are adapting to capital-in-
tensive rather than labor-intensive technologies. In short,
poor countries are getting there too late. Further, most of
the poor countries were once vassal-states of the West, and
the West exploited their resources for its own industrial
revolution. A fair accounting of stewardship would include
a frank recognition that rich western countries acquired
their preponderance of wealth partly at the expense of the
poor countries. Those countries still find themselves locked
into unequal economic arrangements with the rich nations,
who hold overwhelming advantages.

8. For these reasons we have to acknowledge a jarge
responsibility on the part of well-to-do nations, especially
our own, for enabling the poor countries to have an honest
chance to work their way out of hunger. If we do not,
then in the words of Lester B. Pearson, chairman of the
Commission on International Development, “we are really
abandoning them to permanent helplessness and poverty.”
We can see this responsibility more acutely when we realize,
for example. that India with almost one sixth of the world’s
population has an annual national budget smaller than that
of New York City. Clearly the injustice of hunger calls for
partnership in development.

9. The question of how the United States can assist rather
than resist development in the poor countries necessarily
leads to economic and political issues that are open to debate.
But the church cannot use that as an excuse for avoiding
these issues. Avoiding them is also taking a stand — for the
status quo, for the increase of hunger. While this commis-
sion is not prepared to make detailed judgments, certain ap-
proaches seem relatively clear and merit special considera-
tion:

A. We see no reason why this nation cannot eliminate
hunger almost at once within its borders. Every person
below the poverty line should be guaranteed the means to
an adequate diet, either through direct food assistance Or,
better, through guaranteed employment and guaranteed ade-
quate incomes.

B. Fairer trade practices should be enacted with under-
developed countries. By restricting access to our markets,
trade barriers make it difficult for those countries to develop
manufacturing industries. Trade preferences for poor nations
have been agreed on in principle by both rich and poor
countries, but not enacted by the United States. The open-
ing of markets to poor countries will require adjustments
in some of our own industries, and the burden of this ad-
justment should be shared by the entire country.

C. Economic assistance to poor countries should be dras-
tically increased. The past 7 years it steadily shrank, and
now, by honest accounting, amounts to roughly one tenth