{"id":75,"date":"2010-09-29T11:45:04","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T11:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/flunkingsainthood\/2010\/09\/qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann.html"},"modified":"2010-09-29T11:45:04","modified_gmt":"2010-09-29T11:45:04","slug":"qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/flunkingsainthood\/2010\/09\/qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann.html","title":{"rendered":"Wiping Out Hunger in Our Generation: A Q&amp;A with Bread for the World&#8217;s David Beckmann"},"content":{"rendered":"<form><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"6a010536b8214c970c0133f4ab0588970b-120wi.jpg\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/83\/import\/6a010536b8214c970c0133f4ab0588970b-120wi.jpg\" class=\"mt-image-left\" style=\"float: left;margin: 0pt 20px 20px 0pt\" height=\"186\" width=\"120\" \/><\/form>\n<p>Do you feel as overwhelmed as I do by statistics on world hunger? When I read about more than a billion people in dire poverty, it&#8217;s hard to muster any optimism that things will change. Children are starving. People are dying of preventable diseases. <\/p>\n<p>Yet those realities, while alarming, don&#8217;t do justice to the great strides that have been made in the last thirty years to combat world hunger and poverty. This month I got to interview David Beckmann, the 20-odd year president of Bread for the World and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bread.org\/what-we-do\/victories\/wfp\/\">the 2010 recipient of the World Food Prize<\/a> (which is like the Nobel Prize for nutrition and hunger problem-solving). Beckmann&#8217;s new book <i><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thethoughtfulchristian.com\/Products\/0664236847\/exodus-from-hunger.aspx\">Exodus from Hunger: We Are Called to Change the Politics of Hunger<\/a><\/i> is out on October 20, right when he&#8217;ll be receiving the World Food Prize alongside the president of Heifer International. <\/p>\n<p>You can listen to <a href=\"http:\/\/wjkradio.wjkbooks.com\/2010\/09\/wjk-radio-20-david-beckmann-calls-us-to-change-the-politics-of-hunger.html\">WJK Radio&#8217;s podcast interview with Beckmann<\/a> here. I found him to be intelligent, informed, and persuasive&#8211;enough so that I then went online and renewed my lapsed membership to Bread for the World, which lobbies for improved legislation on domestic and world hunger. While he is strongly supportive of soup kitchens and faith-based initiatives to <i>alleviate<\/i> hunger, he wants those local and regional programs to work alongside government-sponsored programs to <i>eliminate<\/i> hunger here and abroad. &#8220;We cannot food-bank our way to ending hunger,&#8221; he contends.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\nSome encouraging stats on the success of various programs in the last few decades:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In 1980, 1.9 billion people lived in extreme poverty ($1.25 per day). In 2009, that had been reduced to 1.4 billion.<\/li>\n<li>In<br \/>\n1960, 55,000 children died every day from preventable diseases and<br \/>\nmalnutrition. Today, it is 26,000.&nbsp; &#8220;The ongoing carnage is terrible,&#8221;<br \/>\nsays Beckmann, &#8220;but the improvement even more remarkable.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>1.6 billion people have gained access to safe drinking water since 2001.<\/li>\n<li>Enrollment in primary school among the world&#8217;s poorest people increased from 80 percent in 1991 to 88 percent in 2006.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yes,<br \/>\nwe have miles to go. But as Beckmann points out, &#8220;if the pace of<br \/>\nprogress against extreme poverty that was maintained between 1990 and<br \/>\n2005 can be achieved for the decade between 2005 and 2015, the world<br \/>\nwill [have] cut extreme poverty in half between 1990 and 2015.&#8221; <br \/>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Do you feel as overwhelmed as I do by statistics on world hunger? When I read about more than a billion people in dire poverty, it&#8217;s hard to muster any optimism that things will change. Children are starving. People are dying of preventable diseases. Yet those realities, while alarming, don&#8217;t do justice to the great&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":226,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Wiping Out Hunger in Our Generation: A Q&amp;A with Bread for the World&#039;s David Beckmann - Flunking Sainthood<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/flunkingsainthood\/2010\/09\/qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Wiping Out Hunger in Our Generation: A Q&amp;A with Bread for the World&#039;s David Beckmann - Flunking Sainthood\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Do you feel as overwhelmed as I do by statistics on world hunger? When I read about more than a billion people in dire poverty, it&#8217;s hard to muster any optimism that things will change. Children are starving. People are dying of preventable diseases. Yet those realities, while alarming, don&#8217;t do justice to the great&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/flunkingsainthood\/2010\/09\/qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Flunking Sainthood\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2010-09-29T11:45:04+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/flunkingsainthood\/files\/import\/6a010536b8214c970c0133f4ab0588970b-120wi.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jana Riess\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Wiping Out Hunger in Our Generation: A Q&amp;A with Bread for the World's David Beckmann - Flunking Sainthood","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/flunkingsainthood\/2010\/09\/qa-with-bread-for-the-worlds-david-beckmann.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Wiping Out Hunger in Our Generation: A Q&amp;A with Bread for the World's David Beckmann - Flunking Sainthood","og_description":"Do you feel as overwhelmed as I do by statistics on world hunger? When I read about more than a billion people in dire poverty, it&#8217;s hard to muster any optimism that things will change. Children are starving. People are dying of preventable diseases. 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