Francis and the Hungry

"We should all remember, however, that throwing food away is like stealing from the tables of the the poor, the hungry!" Pope Francis on World Environment Day 2013

Francis' comment will remind Americans of my generation of our mothers telling us to think of all those starving children in China and eat our green beans. The Pope has a point, but it isn't that we should clean our plates. It's that we have too much on them in the first place. Once prepared and served it's too late for any excess to help the poor. 

We've always had more food than we've needed in this country, at least in my lifetime, and never done enough to see that it gets to the hungry. We've done outlandish things with it. I remember news reels from the 1950s reporting on a government program to buy up surplus wheat and bury it in the ice in Antarctica for storage. How's that for thinking of starving children in China!

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1300&dat=19551224&id=7VMRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=d5UDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2856,3596578

The program was suggested by no less a personage than Antarctic explorer Admiral Byrd. The thought was it was better than letting the food rot in the holds of the old mothball fleet, and could be used to feed a larger population 25 year later. I don't know but it's a good bet the stuff is still there and there are well paid bureaucrats in Washington who's jobs are to keep an eye on it.

Six decades on the great food boondoggle is ethanol, the diversion of roughly 40% of the American corn crop to a low grade gasoline supplement. The ethanol mandate has long since lost any economic, national security, or environmental rationale, but not its rent seekers. The list of negatives is long and at the top is the distortion of world grain markets. Most Americans don't notice the increase in the cost of corn syrup sweeteners or animal feed, but for the world's poor children an increase in the price of food staples can and often does mean malnutrition.

I'm not sure how much we can or should do to convince Burger King to reduce the size of a serving, or how much it would really help the poor if we did. But the impact of the ethanol madness is real, its cost is enormous, it is entirely political in its implementation, we can stop it, and we should, post haste.

It is encouraging that Francis is addressing these kinds of issues early in his papacy. It has been his habit to not only lecture his audiences on moral imperatives, but to propose practical steps toward archiving them. As principal author of the final document from the Aparecida Conference of Latin American and Caribbean Catholic Bishops he concluded several sections with recommended actions that lay men and women, clergy, the church, government officials, professionals, and business men and women can and should take to address the needs of the poor and excluded.

He is pro business, but let's make sure it works for the common good. He is pro trade, but protect the interest of the poor and the small farmer. He will be a powerful voice for parental authority in the education of children. He calls us all to be out working in the world, and rejects the notion that we should turn inward, focusing only on the sacraments and personal salvation. He wants to liberate the disenfranchised, but rejects the strident, revolutionary secularism of Liberation Theology. He thinks charity works best when it leads to people helping themselves.

And we can start by feeding the hungry. This is shaping up to be an interesting papacy.