Make Poverty History? (1 of 3)

These next three posts come from a request to write a post over at Peacemaker Revolution, where I had to be brief. I had no such limitations on my own blog, but I divided my thoughts up into 3 posts to make it a little easier to follow.

Jesus statement, “The poor will always be with you,” has been understood as a near-universal truth throughout human history. Poverty and hunger have defined life for the vast majority of the inhabitants of our planet for as long as human beings have walked the earth.

Spurred on by a remarkable combination of improved global infrastructure, creative thinking, advanced problem solving, and marketing appeal by Bono, there has been a recent departure from this view. Suddenly, those who strive to “Make Poverty History” aren’t ignored or dismissed as pie-in-the sky dreamers or idealists. Economists and policymakers are making pragmatic and well-executed plans to eliminate global hunger.

And, in many ways, this approach has done great things. Programs in many Latin American countries, and especially China & India, have grown healthy middle classes, and development plans have successfully fed the hungry, created jobs, and improved the quality of life for millions of our world’s poor. As the world begins to focus its energies on these major humanitarian crises, they are achieving results. Has Jesus’ observation been proven wrong?

One of the major issues that this program faces is a very simple one: exactly what is “poverty?” It’s a question with no easy answer, but certainly it goes beyond a simple materialistic definition of “lacking” some basic good. Jon Sobrino says: “We indeed believe that the generic term ‘poverty,’ with all its historical fluidity, has no substitute that expresses the negation and oppression of humanity, the shortage, the disdain, and that many millions of human beings do not have a voice or name.”

And that issue is far deeper than simple issues of hunger – that kind of poverty deals with long histories of prejudices, conflict, and exclusion.