We are the first generation that has the ability to end hunger. The food, the tools, the transportation systems — we have all that it takes to end extreme poverty, the poverty that kills.
We just need to exercise the will to do it.
A major first step in ending world hunger is debt cancellation. Much of the impoverished world live in countries that suffer under odious and onerous debt — debt that the population never had say in, nor benefited from … debt which has been paid many times over through exorbitant interest rates … debt which international financiers attempt to turn into exploitation of natural resources and national utilities.
The time has come for debt cancellation in most of the Third World, especially in Africa and Latin America. We need to insist on the moral high ground and say no to profiteering one shady loans made to dictators who no longer are in power. It’s time that the debt service poor countries pay is turned into schools, medical care and infrastructure.
Leviticus proclaimed Jubilee every seven of seven years (a Sabbath of Sabbath’s) as a time when families of Israel would have their lands restored to them that had been lost through misfortune. In this way poverty would not be inherited. Debt cancellation will fulfill that same biblical principle — poverty should not be inheritable.
Lift your voice in support of debt cancellation. Help end one of the major causes of extreme poverty. Let ours be the generation that says, “We did not let any peoples starve to death during our stewardship of the human community.”
To learn more about Jubilee, go to www.jublieeusa.org.
Debt Cancellation is one mechanism toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals. To learn more about MDGs, please review this PowerPoint presentation.