TAKE ACTION: Hungry People Need Our Help

 New farming technologies like improved seeds help small-scale farmer in Kenya. Ask Congress to protect poverty-focused development assistance programs like this. (Photo courtesy of ACDI/VOCA)

As you know, Congress passed a debt deal in August that enabled our country to avoid defaulting on its bills.

Under the deal, development assistance that is focused on alleviating poverty—such as aid to small farmers so they can feed their families, and nutrition programs for mothers and children in poor countries—will now have to compete with military spending for federal dollars in the fiscal year 2012 budget. Poverty-focused development assistance could bear the brunt of the budget cuts under the new spending plan, set to start October 1, 2011.

Hungry and poor people in developing countries urgently need your help. The Senate Appropriations Committee is about to decide funding levels for poverty-focused development programs within the international affairs budget. There is no question that these programs are important, strategic investments that save us from costly interventions later on. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently said, “Development is far cheaper than sending in soldiers.”

We must tell senators on this committee to protect these programs and prevent them from bearing disproportionate cuts. If your senator sits on this committee, please call him or her today. (Click here to find out of your senator sits on this committee.) Your call, along with hundreds of other Bread for the World members, can help millions of people who rely on poverty-focused development assistance so their families have food, better health, and better nutrition.

Call your senators today. Urge him or her to protect poverty-focused development assistance. Inequitable cuts now would limit our ability to assist the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, put us on the sidelines in influencing rapidly transforming regions of the world, and signal a dramatic decline of U.S. leadership in promoting a more stable world.

Use our toll-free number to call the Capitol switchboard now at 1-800-826-3688 and ask for your senators. Please make your call by today.

Thank you for your strong voice for hungry and poor people in the United States and around the world.