The wrath of the global food crisis falls heaviest on the poorest of the poor who struggle daily just to stay alive. Our loving God compels us to respond to their cries.

By Benjamin K. Homan
President and CEO of Food for the Hungry and chairman of the Alliance for Food Aid

Psalm 40:17.  Yet I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me.
You are my help and my deliverer; O my God, do not delay. 

The global food crisis is real.  I have seen it with my own eyes in urban centers and forgotten villages around the world.  And the global food crisis is not simply about soaring prices and a shortage of food.  It includes that, of course.  But the global food crisis has a human face.  Countless faces, actually, and if you stare into them, you cannot remain silent or inactive.  If you hear their voices, they are not unlike an echo of the words of David in the Psalms.  They cry out for help, for intervention.  The voices are urgent.

 

And God has given His people eyes to see and ears to hear.  And it is also God who calls His people to take action: to care and to respond. And that is what Food for the Hungry is doing.

But first, you must look into the faces.  And, we’ll start with two, the faces of two mothers, toughened by decades of living in one of the worst slums of Manila in the Philippines.  To look at these women, you cannot help but see a deep fear etched across their brows and stretched tight and thin over their cheekbones.

“We have never seen it this bad; we are worried.”  It is as if their leathery skin quivers with each word.

These mothers live at the epicenter of the world’s food crisis.  In an urban jungle like Manila, a city with the highest population density in the world, people have no place to plant crops or cultivate a garden.  Their food must be purchased, not grown.  They are at the mercy of escalating food costs, trapped in a deadly spiral of global events that they cannot control.

Instead, they can only twist and reel from food prices that may mean life or death – for them and for their families.  Even if they can scrape together enough money for some of their food ration, it may mean not enough money is left for rent, for schooling or even medicine.  The high price of food can be like a death warrant.

The grim choices presented by the food crisis emboldened these two mothers to speak with me.  Small in stature and with a gaunt appearance that made them appear almost like walking skeletons, one of the mothers walked with a limp and held an umbrella that she used as a cane.  These were strong women who were unafraid to describe the terrible options that lay in front of them.  Stick-like arms hung from their tiny shoulders as they told of the consequences of the food crisis and sky-rocketing prices for rice and other food.

“We live by the river.  Some of us and some of the children live under the bridge.”

“Our diet is now rice alone; we cannot afford to put anything on top of the rice. Most of the fathers cannot find work.”

Their slight frames suggested also that these women had already sacrificed their own well-being for the sake of their families.

I stared into their faces and saw determination to survive.  It will be a fight on so many different fronts.  There will be a battle to keep the children in school instead of roaming the streets to search for scraps of food.  There will be the temptation to simply feed children diluted coffee or tea, artificially stimulating them with caffeine instead of real nutrition.

“The families are tense.  Parents argue because of the cruel choices created by the lack of money to buy food.”

“We cannot buy fruit or vegetables or meat any more; the children are not eating enough.  Even the rice has turned bad.  We cannot afford good rice.”

“We are worried.  The people may turn to violence.  Prices for everything have risen.  Even people trained to make crafts can no longer afford to buy supplies to do their livelihoods.  Things are very bad. We do not know what will happen next.”

The fear was palpable.  The uncertainty is real.  The food crisis is not only global, it is local – and it has a face.  It is a face that cries out, and it is a face that Food for the Hungry is privileged, in the name of our Savior, to assist with care and dignity.  Here is how.  Food for the Hungry has…

1) Assessed the situation in our fields around the world.  This is information gathered from field and community workers and volunteers whose “boots are on the ground” in the places most affected.  The picture is not good.  Pressure is felt everywhere, made even more stark by high fuel prices.

2) Focused our first emergency response to the food crisis on urban, peri-urban areas and small towns where the need is greatest because of people’s inability to grow food themselves.  These families and children completely rely on market purchases for their household needs – and the unbelievable increase in food prices in the last year has significantly diminished their ability to buy basic staples, leading to intensified malnutrition, especially among children.

3) Prioritized assistance to places where we have existing staff, and the capacity to verify that assistance will reach people in need (for example, in the communities where many of our sponsored children live).  In fact, where we can, we are making sure children have enough to eat – and enough energy to stay with their education – by providing them solid lunches given in many schools.  It has a double impact: food for the day AND an incentive for education.

4) Raised our ministry alert status to “yellow,” recognizing that in some communities where we serve, rioting and food-related violence has already happened or simmers close beneath the surface.  We also have asked friends like you to consider helping with a “little or a lot extra” financial help.  We can make it stretch so far…

5) Committed ourselves to continue to speak out for more international assistance and intervention.  Not long ago, I met privately with the U.S. government's Secretary of Agriculture urging strong and bold action in sharing America’s resources and the bounty of the American farmer.  I followed the honorable secretary to the podium at the International Food Aid Conference a few months ago and urged generous assistance be made available at every level in order to save lives.  Also, in my role as the chairman of the Alliance for Food Aid, I will continue to speak out on behalf of the world’s poor.

During World War I, people around the world turned their face toward the suffering of Europe.  War had disrupted the planting of food.  Harvest season would come and go – and with nothing to offer families and children.  In the United States, President Woodrow Wilson launched a bi-partisan effort to provide for starving people, many of them in Belgium.  He reached across political boundaries and invited a man named Herbert Hoover to coordinate a response.  Hoover assessed the situation and came to the conclusion that there was just not enough food around – unless people made personal sacrifices.  He asked the American people to respond: “Meatless Mondays” and “Wheatless Wednesdays” became the practice of ordinary families from coast to coast.  The response was overwhelming.  Through personal sacrifice in the lunchrooms and on the supper tables, millions of families helped create a food surplus that sent tons of food to people who otherwise would have died a slow and painful death due to starvation.

The global food crisis is just what it sounds like.  It is GLOBAL.  It is a CRISIS.  And it hits people at their most basic level of need: FOOD.

When I consider the faces of the people that I have met and I reflect on how they care just as much for their children as I do for my own, I cannot help but respond.  The crisis may seem and feel invisible, but their cries are real.  Their faces are not invented.  They are people, just like you and me, endowed with value and worth – and it is my privilege to honor and worship God by expressing His love to them.

Just as we are reminded in Isaiah 58:7 (“Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?”), I pray that may God grant us His grace as we extend His care – and as we give food for the hungry.