WCC: We Need More Poor People

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t fully grasp the nature of the current international financial crisis, nor do I have a cure for it (thus putting me in essentially the same boat as everyone else). But I can recognize bad ideas when I see them, and the World Council of Churches has been sponsoring some whoppers. At the recent World Social Forum in Brazil, the WCC held a panel discussion that included notions such as these:

In Belém, some 20 civil society organizations and networks concerned with economic justice issues were able to agree on a number of concrete proposals to reform the current global financial system. Complex as the system is, the proposed alternatives are also varied and, sometimes, of a quite technical nature.

However, the basics are clear: “We call for the United Nations, reformed and democratized, to be put at the centre of the reform of the financial system,” says Marta Ruiz of the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad), who acted as spokesperson for the financial crisis caucus in Belém.

The United Nations? An organization institutionally incapable of cleaning its own house should be put in charge of world finances? This is the organization that, in the name of “reform,” disbanded the Human Rights Commission and replaced it with the Human Rights Council, which considers Israel the worst human rights offender on the planet and just yesterday gave China (!) a pat on the back for the state of its human rights efforts, mostly because of the backing of dictatorships and failed states from the part of the world the WCC is allegedly most concerned about. That United Nations?

The crisis is not just financial but systemic, the activists in Belém agreed, and it encompasses multiple crises affecting the environment, social and political structures, food and energy supplies. Owing to this complexity, the solutions cannot be only of a financial nature.

“Behind the financial crisis is the ecological one,” says Bertille Darragon, a French ecological activist. “We need to abandon the model of unlimited economic growth and start thinking in terms of ‘de-growth’ décroissance – that is, to decrease the consumption of resources and energy, beginning with the very rich but including the middle classes both in the North and the South.”

So in order to placate the (frequently bogus) concerns of an elitist collection of Western environmentalists, we need to shut off the energy supply to the people who drive the world’s economy, and who in the process have made possible a better standard of living for hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia, Latin America, and even parts of Africa. The answer to the world financial crisis is to throw countless people back into the poverty from whence the came, so that we can all be poor together.

“A change in our life-style is needed,” agrees Wilfried Steen, a Protestant pastor who is executive director of the German Church Development Service (EED). “We Germans have a level of consumption that would require 1.3 planets to be sustainable. That needs to change. From a theological viewpoint every human being has a place in God’s creation, so all have the same right to live and to consume.”

Germany needs 1.3 planets (Mars? Venus? Neptune?) to sustain its current levels of consumption? What does that even mean? And how do you reconcile saying a thing like that with the Ninth Commandment?

An alternative development model needs to be “people-led, driven by local demand and based upon regional integration,” says Percy Makombe, from the economic justice network of the Fellowship of Christian Councils in Southern Africa (FOCCISA).

In Makombe’s view, African countries should “de-link” themselves from the global financial and trade systems, rejecting bilateral and free trade agreements and even repudiating any further aid from developed countries.

“We rely heavily on foreign aid,” says Makombe. “But as it is channelled through international financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, in order to receive that aid we are forced to open up our markets and put at risk our food sovereignty, and so the whole process ends up siphoning wealth out of Africa.”

I agree that Africa is way too dependent on foreign aid, and that that dependency has stifled its economic development. But the idea that Africa should basically pull out of the world’s economy is a formula for catastrophe. And to hear a representative of an “economic justice network” from southern Africa talk about “regional integration” and “food sovereignty,” when the actions of Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe, with the aquiescence of his South African neighbors, destroyed the breadbasket of southern Africa, is more than a little hard to take. But then again, I don’t have to–millions of malnourished Zimbabweans are another story.

So once again, it’s the same old story–the WCC rings its hands over the conditions of the world’s poor, and rants against the world’s non-poor, all the while advocating for policies certain to result in far more poor people than there are now. All in the name of a god who looks more like Marx than Yahweh.