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Minute for Mission
Global
Food Crisis
The term “global food crisis” describes a complex problem with many
roots but one bitter fruit: in many countries, local agriculture no longer produces
enough affordable food to feed its people. Preventing and confronting the suffering
this crisis causes is a central ministry for One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS).
As scores of former colonies declared their independence after World War
II, one of the concerns many had for these new nations was the possibility of
widespread food shortages, even famine. At the time, American agriculture seemed
to offer the promise that could help these countries stave off such disasters.
More recently, though, it seems that our efforts to lead developing nations down
the same path have often done more harm than good. Increasingly, those countries
have abandoned what was disparagingly referred to as subsistence agriculture — growing food
for local consumption — and begun growing commodities for the world market.
After converting to this single-crop agriculture, those countries have
found themselves exhausting their land and their farmers to grow crops for which
they receive less and less money, while imported food prices keep increasing,
especially with high oil prices. Thus, hunger and poverty continue to increase
around the world.
Among of the ministries of the church most engaged in justice and compassion,
the three OGHS programs have long been a part of a dialogue with our brothers
and sisters around the world to identify and implement the kinds of agriculture
that can help the world’s people to feed themselves. The following are
among the basic priorities of the “Another Food System is Possible” movement:
- Stabilize
prices for farmers and consumers globally;
- Rebalance power within the food system so that large corporations
do not dictate policy;
- Make agriculture environmentally sustainable; and
- Guarantee the right to healthy food by building local and regional food
systems and fostering social, ecological, and economic justice.
To further explore these principles or the churchwide fast, visit the global
food crisis Web site.
The three OGHS programs focus on these goals in their projects addressing
the global food crisis. All three of the projects listed in the insert share
an important focus: developing and strengthening local food systems, allowing
for greater control at the grassroots. While these projects are just a tiny part
of all the work the OGHS programs do focusing on the global food crisis, they
give you an idea of how your gifts help communities develop and maintain the
ability to feed themselves.
The theme of this year’s offering is “Where is your treasure?” When
Jesus raises the question in the Sermon on the Mount, he warns against investing
ourselves too heavily in financial treasure. Although it was certainly not intended
as a blueprint for agricultural planning, I think in a way it works: Don’t
let yourself get tied up in the profit-and-loss world of growing commodities
for the market. Among your treasures are this abundant creation, your own community,
and your ability to love one another. By turning the fruits of this creation
to feeding one another, you stay centered in all three.
But the question is really aimed at all of us. The treasure of maintaining
a vital connection with God’s love is at the heart of it. Like the abundant
creation that
can support all God’s people, it reaches out to us whether we attend to
it or not. Yet only when we turn ourselves to sharing it with others does its
full richness fill our lives. By giving to One Great Hour of Sharing, we help
communities develop and strengthen their own local food systems so that all may
have enough to eat.
By sharing our resources through OGHS, we can change lives. Is there a
greater treasure?
Food
Security
This insert briefly tells the story of one young boy in Cameroon and how the
grain banks in his village of Mambaria have changed his life. Let’s look
at a family from another community in a little more depth. A mother of six, Monique
Baïtal has felt her burden lifted. Three of her children are already married,
but she still needs to provide for the three youngest, who are fifteen, thirteen,
and ten years old. Each year, to bridge the lean months before the upcoming harvest,
she used to stretch the last flour in her household for the children to have
a thin porridge as their only meal a day. Sometimes there wasn’t even enough
for that, so they just bore with it. But this has changed ever since a communal
grain bank was started in her village of Gouloua. When her household is running
out of food, she now borrows a bag of millet from the grain bank and pays it
back from the next harvest. Monique explains that nowadays, even when food is
scarce and expensive on the markets, her children eat three times a day rather
than going to sleep on an empty stomach.
The grain bank has made life better for her family in still
other ways. The year before it was started, her two youngest children had to
stay home from school for the lack of money. They had started but were sent home
when she couldn’t
come up with the money for registration and other expenses, and her eldest had
started school late for the same reason. At that time Monique had had to sell
two of her goats and some chickens to buy food for the family. This year, thanks
to the grain bank, the family’s livestock was spared and all three children
were able to go to school from the beginning of the school year. There are even
resources left to take care of the family’s health care expenses, if the
need arises.
At harvest time, Monique strictly adheres to the grain bank’s rules that
call for members to pay back their loan to the communal grain bank from the very
first yield. “We all decided this together to be sure we won’t lose
our food supply. That’s why I’ve already taken my loan repayment
to the granary. It doesn’t matter, there’s still enough to harvest.”
Not only has this grain bank helped her community resist
the market forces that diminish the value of their crop when they sell it and
increase it when they buy it back; not only has it enabled families to escape
the spiral downward into poverty and hunger and allowed them to begin accumulating
a cushion against hard times; not only has it given the family enough resources
to educate their children so that they may have more choices as they grow into
adulthood: the communal grain bank has also shown the people of Gouloua that
by working together, they can move from being victims to having a measure of
control over their own lives. As Matthias or Monique or any number of people
from the surrounding communities will tell you, that’s what hope looks like; that’s how lives are
changed.
Sharing resources so lives may be changed is what One Great
Hour of Sharing is about. Even in these tight economic times, the resources we
think nothing of using for casual pleasure — a latte, a movie, a dinner out with friends — can
make a significant difference in the lives of many people. I would invite you
to think about taking a fast from satisfying just a few of those desires this
Lent. It can help us reorder our own lives in transforming ways, and the resources
we share as a result can change lives around the world. Take a moment to write
down www.pcusa.org/foodcrisis, where you can go to learn more about the global
food crisis. Take a look this afternoon.
Immediate Response, Long-term Rebuilding
The first thing many Presbyterians think of when they hear the words “One
Great Hour of Sharing” is Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, or PDA. Not
too surprising when you think about it: most of the ministries your gifts to
the offering make possible don’t break into the headlines too often, but
disasters always capture our attention. And PDA has built a solid reputation
over the decades for a number of things. Its extensive network of partners across
the country and around the world can quickly develop a needs assessment and decide
the quickest way to deliver needs immediately. Sometimes PDA is a major player
at that point, but often it lets other agencies take the lead and simply provides
consulting and financial support. One of its strengths is assessing what needs
others are not meeting and finding ways to fill in the gaps. While this role
seldom grabs the headlines, it means a tremendous amount to the people struggling
to get through the first days after a disaster strikes.
That’s when another of PDA’s strengths begins to appear: planning
for long-term needs. For a survivor of a disaster, one of the most dispiriting
sights must be the TV crews packing up. “Once they forget about us,” the
suspicion runs, “we’ll be on our own.” For agencies whose lifeblood
comes from following the headlines, it’s not an unfair suspicion. But people
know that PDA will be there for the long term. They know, moreover, that when
the rebuilding process needs volunteers, PDA will help connect those who want
to work with the places that need work, frequently housing them in Volunteer
Villages where volunteers can work without putting additional strain on limited
local resources.
What few people know is that PDA’s work is only a
part of the ministry that Presbyterian One Great Hour of Sharing gifts support
in response to disasters. Both the Presbyterian Hunger Program and Self-Development
of People work with communities that have been affected by disasters, helping
them reestablish their livelihoods, their water supplies, and their communities
themselves, as the back of the insert shows they did after the tsunami. But just
as important is their work to mitigate the impact of disasters before they happen.
That may involve education and creative land-use projects to help people avoid
the deforestation that allows a hurricane to wash away the land that can feed
them; it may mean helping poorer communities whose land is flood-prone find safer
places to live.
All of these ministries are part of the ways your gifts
help One Great Hour of Sharing respond to the needs of God’s people, helping them avoid the worst
effects of disasters and recover and rebuild after disasters do strike. Many
of us have lived through hard times due to a flood, hurricane, fire, tornado,
or earthquake. We know that as we sit in the dark, one of the things that keeps
the light of our hope alive is the knowledge that we are not alone — others
are working to help us put the hardship behind us. Because we want whoever has
been affected by disasters during the next year to have that confidence, let
us give generously this one time a year that we have the chance to support One
Great Hour of Sharing.
Access
to Clean Water
[Note to presenter: This
minute for mission references bulletin inserts your congregation may or may not
already have seen. If you choose to use this insert and minute for mission before
those titled Food Security and Access to Clean Water, you may want to adapt some
of the language in the second paragraph.]
 Ready access to clean water is one of the most central challenges families
and communities must resolve before they can develop to their full potential.
For that reason, each of the One Great Hour of Sharing programs addresses the
issue in many of their projects. In some cases, like the one we read about in
the insert, it is the central problem around which communities begin to organize.
Until it is addressed, the time it takes to bring clean water to a community
and the health costs of contaminated water are simply too high for a community
to make much progress. In other cases the challenge may simply be a precondition
for achieving other goals.
As an example, let’s look at three stories we talk about in this year’s
bulletin inserts. Today’s story focuses on the central role clean water
plays in the health and sustainability of the Dominican Republic’s batey
communities. In the story about disaster relief after the tsunami, one of the
greatest challenges in the early days after the waters had receded was to get
enough clean water to people in remote areas to sustain life until reliable sources
of clean water could be reestablished. Until those sources, contaminated first
by the seawater and then by the bodies of the disaster’s immediate victims,
could be made safe again, survival depended on how quickly clean water could
be made available. Northern Cameroon, where the grain bank project story takes
place, is struggling against desertification as the Sahara seems to be moving
southward. To add to the obvious impact of this climatic shift on availability
of water, the construction of an oil pipeline made useless many of the wells
on which the region’s people depended for water. So insisting that the
companies responsible quickly remediate the damage as promised has been an important
part of the Joining Hands Against Hunger ministry there as well.
If you ask the women of the Batey Relief Alliance and the Movement of Haitian-Dominican
Women where their treasure is, most will no doubt show you their children. Some
will point to the wells and water system that allow children to grow up healthy
and free them from hauling the water from miles away, so they can now spend their
time in school, preparing for a future with more options than their mothers have
had. Probably few of these women will think of the ability to love as itself
a treasure — as mothers, they take it for granted. But make no mistake, the
God-given power to put the needs of those we love before our own is at least
as central a treasure as the water they’ve been struggling for. Without
that, our souls remain as parched or sickened as the bodies of those who have
gone without water or finally drunk from contaminated puddles. The power to love
others is a treasure we too must nurture and water, lest it shrivel away. One
important way Presbyterians have nurtured that love for the past sixty years
is by giving to One Great Hour of Sharing. Today, as you share God’s love
for all of us in Jesus Christ, as you share that love by extending it to others
through your offering gifts, may its living waters wash through you, refreshing
and replenishing that deepest of treasures, your soul.
Where
Is Your Treasure?
It seems to me
that in the part of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus warns against attachment
to the corruptible treasure of this world, he is really hearkening back to the
first several commandments — beware of worshiping false gods
and beware of ascribing God’s name to your own designs and priorities.
Human beings are prone to believing what we want to hear. If a given product,
-ism, candidate, or path promises to make our lives easier without much sacrifice
on our part, we’re likely to get on board.
Christ warns us that focusing on what makes us more comfortable is a shortcut
to being trapped by it: wealth, fame, and security all attach us to the worldly
goods that ultimately crumble because they are based in the notion that we can — indeed
we must! — provide for all our own needs. The recognition that God’s
love has provided an abundant creation with enough for everyone and that our
joyful part of that creation is to help ensure that none are excluded from that
abundance can ultimately free us. It allows us to cease struggling to get all
we can for ourselves and instead to recognize that part of the treasure that
God gave humans is the ability to love one another, and to exercise that love.
Recognizing that our treasure is whatever leads us to fuller life of gratitude
to God and of openness to the needs and gifts of others, then our treasures could
be almost anything: the beautiful, ripe peppers in a community garden; the bucket
of clean water we get at the well that allows our children to go to school instead
of hauling water from miles away; the chance to help others rebuild their community.
So long as we recognize that none of these are treasures in themselves, but rather
because they allow us to participate more fully and gratefully with all of God’s
creation, we can celebrate them as treasures.
For sixty years, One Great Hour of Sharing (OGHS) has been a treasure for
Presbyterians. Since 1949, it has given us opportunities to ensure that our gifts
can help others live fuller lives. Whether they go to families who suddenly lose
everything in war or natural disaster, or to communities that have been struggling
for years against hunger and poverty, our gifts to OGHS can help our brothers
and sisters change their lives. And to the extent that they bring us a step closer
to placing our reliance on God rather than only on ourselves, they can change
our own. Today, I want to invite you to celebrate this sixtieth anniversary of
One Great Hour of Sharing by doubling what you have normally given to this offering. |
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