Politically Driven Injustice: Fixing global poverty requires more than Rick Warren’s PEACE plan

Politically Driven Injustice: Fixing global poverty requires more than Rick Warren's PEACE plan is a great article in Christianity Today!

While this [exporting fruit] would no doubt provide needed income for a poor country, I wonder if Warren has been able to sit with the leaders of the European Union and the United States to address the injustices of these countries' current agricultural trade policies. Rwanda will not find receptive markets in the consumer powerhouses of the West. Currently, the U.S. and the E.U. provide more than $90 billion in annual subsidies to their domestic agricultural producers in order to protect them against competition from foreign exporters.

These farm subsidies assault the idea of free trade, and the ramifications for countries like Rwanda are profound. Without genuine trade-policy reform, no one in the U.S. or the E.U. will be buying Rwandan produce anytime soon. It is not enough to teach a man to sell fish. The question of who controls the market must also be addressed.

Bingo! Free Trade. Not only will it help African nations, but it will force American and European markets to adjust to more productive enterprises. Painful in the short run, but less painful now than later.

The impoverished world needs educated action accompanied by genuine compassion. It does not need a religious version of the modernization theory that emerged following World War II. That kind of top-down, Western, ethnocentric approach has left us with almost 3 billion people living and dying in extreme poverty. As Warren's team disperses throughout Rwanda with their "in-a-box" development plans, they should know that this one-size-fits-all approach has already failed.

International development is a complex endeavor. For years, many of us have hoped that the sleeping giant known as the American church would wake up to the injustices of poverty that plague our world. If Warren and his acronymic plans succeed in raising the collective awareness of the church about the daily struggles of much of humanity, they will have succeeded far beyond imagination.

God bless the Warrens and their efforts. Only God knows fully the despair that victims of poverty and conflict endure. On their behalf and theirs alone, I pray that PEACE brings awareness and transformation to the people of Rwanda.