I want to begin by telling you that I have renamed my talk toward a politics of Hope lessons from a hungry world, and I hope that you will find it. a path of Hope I must begin by asking the most basic question of all. What is hunger Because unless we understand what it is. We cannot search for its Solutions and I found myself several years ago after being asked for many many years how many hungry people are there in the world? I found myself resisting answering in statistics because I did know that indeed between 1/2 billion and a billion people presently go without adequate nutrition. I knew that chronic hunger the day in day out deprivation of people throughout the world the type that doesn't make the Evening News kills as many people or twice as many people as died annually during World War Two. I know these statistics and I know that they can startle us and they can shock us but I became convinced over the years that they can also numb us they can um us from seeing something that is really quite close to us. It is not distant and that can't be measured in numbers. So I began thinking, how can we approach what is hunger in a different way and I decided that yes indeed. We've experienced it when we tried to stay on that diet and we've had the knowing sensation in our stomach but there is still another way to begin to understand in a very personal sense. What is hunger if we think of hunger in terms of universal human emotions feelings that we have all felt at one time or another in our lives. Then we can get closer to what is hunger and therefore to what our Solutions this morning. I'm only going to mention four of these feelings. They come to me in people that I have met first in El Salvador a family that lost two children. They lost these children the year that they paid the full half of their crop to the landlord in order to keep their land if they had not given that full payment to the landlord. They would have not been able to keep their land to feed their family on into the future. In other words these people faced an impossible Choice the anguish that no human being should ever have to face. I remember also in Guatemala meeting poor Indian families who had to send a son to join the Army and yes, they knew that that same Army was killing tens of thousands including many Indians themselves, but the $25 a month that the sun got by joining the Army was half the total income of a typical poor family in Guatemala that money was necessary to keep the Other children alive. So anguish. I am suggesting the human emotion of Anguish making impossible choices is part of what it means to be hungry. Second in Nicaragua several years ago. I met a woman who until until very recently had never had enough food to feed her family. She had experienced five still bursts and watch six children die before the age of five for her hunger meant watching people. She loved died. It meant grief. I remember in the Philippines walking into a poor home in the first thing that I heard was an apology for the poverty of the dwelling because in the Philippines just as here in our own Society the poor are made to blame themselves for their poverty. So the third emotion is humiliation. But increasingly throughout the world hunger has a fourth dimension. It comes to me into people. I met in Guatemala in the 1970s. I visited the highlands and there I was introduced to two people who were teaching their neighbors better agricultural techniques Contour ditching to prevent the erosion of the land from the steep slopes on which the poor had been pushed by the big landowners in the valets. The person who introduced me to these two people visited our Institute a few years later and explain to me that one of these people was now dead he had been murdered the other was underground for fear of his life. Their crime had been teaching their neighbors better agricultural techniques. This was a crime in the eyes of the oligarchy who controlled the land in The Valleys because it made these people less dependent on going into the valleys to work at subsistence wages on the plantations. So the fourth dimension of hunger increasingly throughout the world is fear. So what if we were to refuse to count the hungry If instead we try to understand hunger in terms of universal human emotions anguish grief humiliation and fear we would discover. I believe that how we understand hunger determines what we think are at Solutions. If we think of hunger as numbers numbers of people with too few calories, the solution appears to us in numbers also tons of food Aid numbers of dollars in economic aid, but once we begin to understand hunger as real families coping with the most painful of human emotions, we begin to perceive its roots. We need only ask ourselves. When have we ever felt ourselves any of these emotions has it not been when we have been out of control of our own lives unable to protect those. We love you. Other words when we have been powerless we get then to the root of hunger Hunger has become for me the ultimate symbol of powerlessness. But we must go further. We must ask. What is the root of the powerlessness that lies at the base of hunger? Certainly. It is not powerlessness before Nature's scarcity not when the world is Awash in Grain the greatest reserves. We've had not when five pounds of food is produced for every man woman and child every day of the year not when a mere 2% of the world's grain output could eliminate the entire food deficit of those who go hungry. We cannot blame nature not even in Africa because even there the experts tell us that their resources of that continent could well make it self-sufficient in food. Now having said this I don't want you to misunderstand. I'm not dismissing the problem of population growth of Rapid population growth that is not my point. My point is that we must go to the root and we could eliminate half the people in countries where people are starving and it would not reduce hunger because increasing population growth rapid population growth is a defensive reaction of people to the powerlessness at the root of hunger. So we must attack the root. I would say that we can't blame natural disasters drought and flood either between the 1960s and the 1970s, excuse me deaths from so-called natural disasters lept six-fold in one decade but climatologists tell us that there is no weather change to account for this drastic increase instead the increase deaths from droughts and floods reflect a social breakdown in the pictures that protect people from these disasters that human beings have always had to protect themselves against so on one level we can say that the root of hunger lies not in scarcity of food or land but in scarcity of democracy, I mean by this the increasing concentration of decision-making power over all that it takes to grow and produce food from the village level to the level of international Commerce. I want to briefly outline for you what I mean by this increase in concentration at the Village level. It comes very real to us in Central America. Where by the mid-1970s in El Salvador a mere six families controlled as much land as 300,000 peasant producers that is concentration at the level of ownership of land with fewer and fewer families controlling and ever greater share of the land many have no land at all. So that landlessness increases faster than the natural population growth rate. So that by the mid 70s 50 countries in Excuse me by the mid-1970s in 20 countries in the third world 50% or more of the rural people had no land at all. The Village level who controls the land is but one level of concentrating power on another it is the decision-making concentrated in the hands of national governments that are unaccountable to their people who answer to a small Elite lavishing credit and other forms of support on them and protecting their privileges with the military in the third world expenditures on arms left for fold in the decade ending 1980 in Africa government spend four times more on Military than on agriculture in Ethiopia, which is just an extreme in this point. I'm making an extreme form if the opiate today is spending more on its military than all other budget items combined it is using food as a weapon to force people to move into areas under its control. Such governments as these actively and with increasing brutality resist genuine reforms that could make more fair the decision-making power over land and other food producing resources. Now, they love terms like Land Reform, but we need not be confused in El Salvador. For example, there was a US Aid sponsored Land Reform the problem with it is that it ignored the most powerful the coffee estate owners who control the best land and great wealth from those Estates and it ignored the most powerless the sixty percent of people with no land all it did achieve was to lock into plots of land too small to support them tenant Farmers locked in who had to pay for this land over time and ended up no better off than they were as tenants previously. Monali in the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos announced a land reform in 1972 as soon as he took over but during this one family rule in the Philippines that while Land Reform has been proclaimed the land ownership has become increasingly concentrated and the Philippine people are among the hungriest in Asia today, according to the World Health Organization so we can document the increasing concentration of decision-making power. Then at the Village level at the government level and then at the level of international Commerce where of handful of Corporations could dominate world trade in most of the raw Commodities that are exported from the third world according to the United Nations of the about 200 billion dollars that we in the industrial countries spend to pay for agricultural Commodities from the third world only 15% of that returned to the third world and only at Tiny fraction of that to the producers themselves, but so far I have pulled off only one layer. I have said that the root of hunger lies and powerlessness and identified the increasing concentration of decision-making power from the village level to the level of international Commerce. But that is only one one layer that I'm trying to pull off of our away from our eyes this morning. We must go deeper and ask why why have we allowed this to happen? Why even at the cost of millions of deaths? Why do we rationalize condone and indeed sure up governments with our tax dollars that generate needless suffering even here in our own country. We tolerate The situation where according to the recent Harvard's physician study one in 10 of us in America is so poor to be at risk of hunger. Why do we condone this? Why do we rationalize it? It is this question that I've asked myself many many times and I'm going to just suggest for you this morning where I have arrived. Peeling off another layer. I've concluded that at the root of hunger lies a self-imposed powerlessness before economic Dogma. 18th century intellectual advances forced us to relinquish the ever so comforting notion of an interventionist God who would come in and set the human house or right then we faced a frightening void and we have desperately sought a substitute something anything to relieve us of the burden of moral reasoning with Newton's Discovery outs of laws governing the physical world and with Darwin's breakthroughs and laws governing Evolution and the natural world. We seized upon the notion that we could find a parallel in the social order absolute laws that we could put ourselves. Under the rule of absolute laws governing the social world that would relieve us of the responsibility of moral reasoning that we could place above human intervention. It is these absolutes that I call our faults God's precisely because though they be human inventions. We have made them sacred. We willingly Place ourselves of the mercy of dogma and at its Mercy. We acquiesce to hunger. This morning. I will mention only two of the tenants of the economic Dogma now ruling the west and the consequences of making them Absolute rather than simple simply devices to serve deeper values. First is the market. We certainly hear a lot about it these days the free market that is and who can deny that it is indeed a handy device for Distributing Goods any society that is attempted to do away with the market has faced very serious headaches the problem arises when converting a useful device into an absolute. We become blind to its pitfalls. What are the central pitfalls of the market that directly relate to hunger? I recently had the dubious pleasure of debating Milton Friedman Nobel Laureate Friedman insisted that night that the greatest virtue of the market is that it represents it responds to human preferences, but I said, wait a minute. Dr. Freedman. I thought that the most fundamental human preference is to eat. And in market economies in the world today, there are about half a billion people not eating. The lesson to me is unmistakable. The market doesn't respond to human preferences. It responds to money. Nowhere is this obvious truth clear than in the flow of food in the World Trade. Now, we think of the third world as being dependent on Imports when actually it is the industrial countries that are the largest importers of agricultural Commodities importing almost 70% of all farm Commodities traded the u.s. Known for our Cowboys and our 16-ounce steaks for example is among the world's largest importers of beef. This flow from the hungry to the overfed is simply the market at work exports from Hunger intensify even as hunger itself deepens. Why In the third world as people are increasingly marginal push from the land and must compete for fewer jobs often in the countryside. They are less and less able to register their preference for food in the marketplace. So with a stagnant or shrinking domestic Market those who remain in control of the land Orient their production more and more to the export Market where the profits are more lucrative and voila. What do you have you have the global Supermarket? My first personal glimpse of the global Supermarket was driving in the 1970s and northwest Mexico driving through Acres made productive with expensive irrigation Millions. Probably billions of pesos from the Mexican Government to make that land productive. But I didn't see corn and beans for Mexicans who I knew were hungry. No mile after mile. I saw cotton then tomatoes cucumbers Peppers all destined for North America. We stopped an agricultural research station. We asked the agronomist there. Why is it that this land that could be growing Basic Foods for Mexicans that are hungry is instead growing for North American tables and he scratched out a few simple calculations and he said quite simply an entrepreneur in this region can make 20 times more growing tomatoes for North America than growing basic food for Mexicans. Several years later. I remember Landing in the rural Philippines. And as far as I could see from the airplane window were banana trees. I learned that only a decade earlier the land had produced a variety of crops and the Del Monte and a castle and Cooke came in offering contracts to the large landowners in the region contracts for export bananas to the Japanese Market. Therefore the local entrepreneur had a great incentive to expand and you know that in the third world very few people have title to the land nor can they pay a lawyer to defend their right to their land so it's very easy to expand and So within less than a decade 50,000 Acres was taken over for banana exports to the Philippines overall since 1970 while hunger has deepened export Crop Production throughout the world has grown two and a half times two and a half times as fast as the production of Basic Foods. But in my own work the most telling consequence of the markets distribution within a world of gross inequalities is the disposition of the world's grain Supply when I first wrote diet for a small planet back in 1971. I learned that one third of the world's grain was going to feed livestock and I was shocked When I went back to do the 10th anniversary edition of diet for a small planet. I learned that one half of the world's grain is going to feed livestock even in famine-stricken Africa the demand that is what the market can register for feed. Is growing twice as fast as the demand for food? The glow the growth of the global Supermarket is reflection of the problem. Not the problem itself. It reflects the increasing gap between rich and poor between those few who can live by their wealth and those many who cannot live by their work the lesson left to its own devices the market simply reflects and reinforces this deadly wealth Gap. Thus it must be seen for what it is are useful device. And that is all we must no longer delude ourselves into thinking that it registers the needs and wishes of real people, but I want to move to the second Pitfall of the market that misleads us the second Pitfall is that the market is blind it is blind the human and resource costs of the product of the productive impetus that it claims to Foster. I want to use an example very close to home that you heard about I understand. Tonight very close to home over the 1970s our agricultural exports boom six-fold in value in one year. I agree cultural exports brought in over 40 billion dollars in foreign exchange. What a bonanza the market tells us, but what doesn't the market tell us the market couldn't tell us that just producing all that grain required an energy expenditure equivalent to at least one third of what we could earn by exporting it and the market couldn't tell us that about the topsoil that was eroded in the first three years of the export. Boom soil erosion in the Corn Belt increased almost 40% nor could the market tell us that the export push meant that groundwater was being pulled from the earth faster than nature could replenish it with rainfall so that we are effectively mining it nor could the market inform us of the social cost all out production. The two tens of thousands being pushed from the land and hundreds of rules communities destroyed in theory the market rewards hard work and production in reality the market requires hard work and production, but it only rewards those who can expand and who are they just as in the third world they are those who already have considerable Equity so that they have access to credit and therefore can expand to make up in volume what they're losing and profits per acre as the production push leads to price depressing Lutz. Does the second Pitfall of the market taken as a be-all-end-all rule of economic life is that it is a blind to critical costs both resource and human costs. The market left to its own devices has a third fatal drawback. However, that undermines our most deeply held values and that is that it leads to the concentration of economic power. Now, this is very easy to see when we look at the third world. It's very easy to see the connection between hunger and El Salvador and six families controlling as much land as 300,000 peasants. Why can't we see the connection at home between the growing concentration of economic power and needless suffering here? In other words cast more fully at the mercy at the vagaries of international markets in the 1970s American farming experience the most dramatic concentration of reward in our history in just one decade the biggest one percent of farms by sales increased their share of net farm income from 16 percent to 60 percent and there's no evidence that the greater efficiency of the top 1% justifies this extreme concentration of reward because mid size font Family Farms those losing their land capture virtually all economies of scale in farming. This third Pitfall of the market its tendency to concentration of economic power beyond anything efficiency can justify draws our attention to a final point. I want to make about the market as Dogma. Clinging with Blind Faith to the Theology of the market if you'll excuse the expression as a price Setter as an allocator of resources hides the truth that know where our markets free while idealogues view the market as the interplay of impersonal automatic forces. In fact because all markets lead to concentration if left to their own devices all markets reflect ultimately the disproportionate power of a relative few nowhere. Is this truer than an agricultural trade as we have already seen. Now facing unflinchingly the pitfalls of the market does not mean that we throw it out in favor of another Dogma say top-down State planning. No, it means that we approach the market as a useful device and nothing more we asked ourselves. Under what circumstances can the market to serve our values under what circumstances can the market enhance human freedom and then we work to ensure those conditions. Let's pause here to ask. Under what conditions could the market distribution serve to reduce hunger prevent hunger under what conditions could the market respond to human preferences as Milton Friedman would have it I put forth for you this morning this very simple proposition. The more widely dispersed is purchasing power. The more the market will respond to actual human preference. I'll repeat that it's very simple. The more widely dispersed is purchasing power. The more the market will respond to actual human preferences as it all. We've already seen of course. The opposite is true where income is highly skewed the preference of the majority are ignored altogether as the bananas flowing from Hunger in the Philippines that to Japan or beef shipped from hunger and Central America to our tables. But what can we say in a positive vein? Is there evidence of relative equality of income allowing the market to work to prevent or eliminate hunger? Well, I think that we can say that the very few market economies in the world that have successfully eliminated hunger do and show enjoy a more even distribution of income than we do the Scandinavian countries, for example, and in the third world, we can see some dick indicative examples in Taiwan where there is say much less hunger than in the Dominican Republic to pick two widely different examples in Taiwan because a widespread land reform in the 50s laid the basis for a more equal access to resources there is less hunger of a both of markets or compare the Indian state of Kerala with other states in India the death rate of babies in Kerala, which is a good measure of nutrition is half. The all ended all-india average. This is in part because Land Reform and a strong union movement in Kerala resulted in a wider distribution of economic. Power and therefore the market was able to more respond to human preference to eat. But how within a market system and only within a market system in which everything Land Food human skills is bought and sold with no restriction. Can we work toward a more equal distribution of buying power. The answer is we cannot for the historical record shows and certainly the last three decades of US economy have proven that the market leads in the opposite direction toward concentration as an aside here 1/10 now of 1% of all corporations in America control two-thirds of corporate assets. In other words the market left to its own devices undermines the very condition. So obviously necessary for it to serve human needs. Now if we are unwilling to do away with the market and I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that tossing it out would be foolish, but we want to let go of rigid dogma and take our rightful responsibility as moral agents. What do we do in answering this question? Unfortunately, we Face a second major stumbling block posed by economic Dogma. It is the absolute notion of unlimited private control of productive acts as a productive property even such property is farm land on which our very survival depends. The dogma of property rights allows us to swallow as fair and inevitable the excelling accelerating consolidation of our own farmland and fewer hands in the hands of absentee owners. Just as we have seen in the third world for example today in Iowa the very symbol of Family Farm America half or more of the land is now rented not owner-operated and we are acquiescing to this because of taking economic pattern as Dogma today believing that are very nation was built on the right to unlimited private control of productive assets and many Americans view this right as President Reagan does as the most basic protector of our freedom certainly not a constraint on it. But as Yale philosopher Economist Charles Lindbergh bomb points out what we Overlook he very concisely has written income-producing property is the bulwark of Liberty only for those who have it. And I will add most Americans don't 80% of Americans own no stock at all and of the 20% who do one half percent owned half of it not only do most of us have no income producing property. The majority of Americans have no net savings. Now while President Reagan and many other Americans May believe that the right to unlimited private control of productive property is the very essence of the American way. This was certainly not the vision of our founders. It was not their understanding of property in the eyes of our Founders property rights were not absolutes but linked to the concept of the common good dismayed over the misery caused by the concentration of ownership in France Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison in 1785 legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property indeed Jefferson. Wanted to redistribute land every generation. In their View Property could only serve Liberty when it is widely dispersed. The right to property was valid only when it served a useful function to society that is when it didn't interfere with the need at all people to own property Benjamin Franklin. For example argue that Society had the right to reclaim Superfluous property and use it as deemed best for the common good thus Central to my concept of a politics of Hope one Breaking Free of constraints of Dogma is a fundamental rethinking of the meaning of ownership certainly ownership of resources on which all Humanity depends indeed. We see a worldwide movement towards such rethinking already underway in this rethinking ownership of productive assets instead of an absolute to be placed above other values becomes a cluster of Rights and responsibilities in the service of our values and this is a very fundamental Rethinking it is neither the rigid capitalist concept of private ownership nor is it the rigid statist concept of public ownership? Where do I see the movement towards such rethinking in such a time we have this morning. I can only suggest to you a couple of examples in 1982. I had the privilege of visiting perhaps the most productive industrial complex in Europe. It is in Northern Spain in the Mondragon region. There are 90 or so Enterprise has integrated into their own banking system own Technical Training schools and own social services are entirely owned and governed by the workers themselves. This is not capitalism As We Know It This is not state is MM as we know it but it results in a very different set of priorities another set of values during the recession of the early 80s when Spain as a whole suffered 15 percent unemployment virtually. None of the worker owners were laid off they Trained themselves to meet the demands of the changing economy. We can't ekta values first approached in ownership of land in the third world to since 1979. Our Institute has served as an unpaid advisor in The Agrarian reform going on in Nicaragua. What is impressed us most about changes in that country is the flexible and non-dogmatic approach to reform. The Keystone of The Agrarian reform in Nicaragua is not the elimination of private property indeed. There are many more property owners in Nicaragua today than there were in 1979. But the Keystone is the attachment of an obligation to the right to ownership. In other words, if you know anything about Latin America, you know that historically the large landowners have left most of their land and planted in the mid-seventies studies showed that the big landowners planted only 14% of their land and left the rest to sit while people starved. So in the Nicaraguan agrarian reform, there is a very simple theme it is Idle lands to Working Hands In other words. If you are making your land produce as long as you are working it and making it produce. I will not be threatened with land your land being taken from you. If you are not making it produced. It will be taken from you through a legal process and redistributed to those who have no land this very flexible approach to agrarian reform. In other words. There's No Stealing in Nicaragua on the amount of land that one person can own as some other reforms of attempted. It is simply attaching an obligation to the right to ownership. The result of this very flexible reform has been that the small peasant producer those who produce the Basic Foods of Nicaragua now have 10 times more land than they did under the former dictatorship. Now these examples are far away. They might seem irrelevant even alien to our own experience. I want to come a little closer to home and consider a very recent decision of Nebraskans on this very question of land ownership a few years ago. They passed an amendment to their state constitution which said in effect you have to be a farmer or in a farm family to own Farmland corporations like Prudential Insurance, which had been up buying up Nebraska farm land could buy no more in their overwhelming support for this amendment Nebraskans put the value of dispersed ownership very much in tune with our Founders Vision in Family Farm agriculture above the absolute notion at anyone's right to buy whatever their dollars will allow. They certainly didn't end private property in Nebraska, but they attached an obligation to it an obligation to protect the higher social value of Family Farm agriculture. Now you may recall that I introduced my comments on property rights in response to the question. What would be required to achieve such a disc dispersion of economic power that the market could actually reflect human needs rather than demands of wealth. Well part of the answer I suggested lies in rethinking property rights as a device to serve higher values not attending cells, but there is an additional approach worth worthy of our consideration. Given that the movement toward a more fair distribution of buying power requires time and given that even under the best of circumstances the market left to its own Nature has its ups and downs so many civilized people have simply decided that that which is necessary to life itself should not be left to the vagaries of the market. So in Kerala India, for example, I mentioned earlier that stayed in India one third of the grain is distributed through publicly controlled fair price shops. And in that state despite low per capita production infant mortality is half the all-india average in Sweden far away from India to avoid good Farmers going under due to the vagaries of the market swedes simply said and Swedish Sweden is a very capitalist country in many ways. They simply said Family Farm agriculture is too precious to be left to the vet. Reset the market. So in Sweden, wholesale food prices are set in negotiation periodically representatives of Industry agribusiness that is government consumer retail cooperatives and representatives of farmers themselves, sit down and negotiate prices. So that farmers aren't like they are in America where they have to wake up and turn on the radio and basically find out from day to day what the price is they're going to get for their commodities. Now I present these examples not as the final word. Of course, I present them as signs of growing courage to confront. The rigid is isms into which we have trapped ourselves courage to put our deepest values first and judge economic priorities according to how they serve our values. Let me move ahead here. Running out of time and move to another section of my talk, which is entitled the impact of our rigid Dogma on the hungry abroad. Because I believe that this war of the giant isms capitalism versus statism has perhaps his most devastating impact on the hungry abroad through how it directs our country's foreign policy viewing the world divided between two competing isms are government becomes blind to hunger worse. It willingly abets the very concentration of power at the root of hunger. Thus our foreign aid becomes not a channel through which we can put ourselves on the side of the hungry. It becomes a weapon our government uses to make the world conform to our Dogma as a result. The direction of our foreign aid has nothing to do with need High income recipients of US foreign aid get almost $12 per capita, but low income countries is a group 50 cents per capita today Central America receives. Per capita six times as much Aid as famine-stricken Africa. Despite hunger being the most terrible problem facing most third world countries aid for food Agriculture and nutrition projects amounts to seven percent of US foreign aid. By contrast military aid in general budgetary support for allies has grown from about half to under the Reagan Administration almost three-quarters of our foreign aid. This militarization is dramatic military aid to Africa has grown 160 percent since 1981. The role of us Aid lavished on anti-democratic regimes in countries like El Salvador right behind Israel as a second largest per capita recipient of us Aid the Philippines and Pakistan is not to reduce poverty but to shore up governments no matter how brutally they deny basic rights. So what is our responsibility to the hungrier bar abroad I'm going to suggest that is not to go in there and to try to set things straight. It is not to protect the status quo out of fear of the competing ISM requires first that we admit the tragic failures in meeting human needs of both capitalism and statism. But this willingness to face failure does not mean to spare. It means accepting the need to Except fundamental change, it means the understanding that the pressure for change is inevitable because people don't go on watching their children die of hunger. I remember meeting someone in Central America who describe for me what it felt like to live on a plantation and watch ones children die of simple childhood diseases while the doctor came in to treat the dogs on the plantation people don't go on watching their children died needlessly first. They resist peaceably because no one wants to risk their lives unnecessarily and then they take up arms. Pressure for change is inevitable. That's our choice is only do we block it showing up government standing in the way of the hungry or if we truly understand the roots of hunger in people's fundamentally imposed powerlessness. We must get out of the way of change. We must give change a chance and this is what is so difficult because Americans hearing this they say, but but but but if we get out of the way of change if we stopped showing up these governments that are denying their people their rightful demands for food, then the other ISM will come in and fill the void. This is a deep fear and so we go ahead despite our reservations. I think that we have to look this fear right in the face and think about it dispassionately if we possibly can we have to ask ourselves. What choices do we really have? I see it that we only really have two choices either we continue on the path that we are on blocking change protecting the status quo regardless of how much hunger it results in and where does this path? Take us? There is one country that has become for me the symbol of where this path leads. It is Guatemala. You may not hear a lot about Guatemala today. But according to Amnesty International it is a country that is peopled by prisoners is a country in a state of Siege a government that we've supported since 1950s when we helped depose a democratically elected government. We've supported through tens of thousands of deaths of innocent people, even the moderate opposition being killed and hundreds of church people. It is the state of siege. That is the ultimate end of trying to protect the status quo when that status quo is hunger. I rejected this myself and I think that we do have to give change a chance and then we have to ask what are the consequences? I think that the fear is that well if we give change a chance it will just be another Cuba and we don't want that. That is Unthinkable. Well, let's look at that. What if giving change a chance meant the creation of another Cuba we first have to ask in what way has Cuba really damaged our self-interest. I think that it most I think that realistically it has been a major drain on our adversary the Soviet Union. But I think that there is another possibility a much more likely possibility and that is that a country when it emerges after decades even centuries of domination when people are realizing their potential for self-determination for the first time. They will want to avoid both superpowers. They will want to chart their own path and certainly having been close to The Agrarian change in Nicaragua. This is exactly what I pick up. It is demand to do it our way. It is a matte demand of the Nicaraguan people to try the untried and certainly they have broken with previous Revolutions in many many dramatic ways. Perhaps most dramatically upon the victory of the Revolutionary forces in 1979 in Nicaragua. The first thing that was done was the elimination of the death penalty. This is a dramatic break from the theme of Retribution of past sins. In fact, they tried and Half of the National Guard's this is because the deeply religious nature of so many of the people in this process that has allowed a rethinking and breaking with past with the past. My concluding remarks. You may think that I have come a long way from hunger and its roots, but I have not I believe that the causes of hunger are read rooted in belief systems that robbed us of our power that teach us to abdicate before the false gods of economic Dogma our moral responsibility and our intuitive human feelings for each other's well-being. I've challenged us to break loose I've challenged us to take this risk, and I know it's a risk for all change is risk, but that is the only way that change is possible. We must risk challenging are deeply ingrained ways of thinking for if only if we can experience ourselves changing will we believe that the world can change willing to change ourselves we are To understand the politics of hope not blind faith in models, but honest hope glean from looking at real examples of human courage and Innovation from Nebraska to Nicaragua from Spain to Kerala India. Now, my father just turned 70 not too long ago and he's a very thoughtful man and he found himself mulling over the fact that if you just multiplied his age by a hundred you'd have pretty much the history of human civilization as we know it and I was stunned because I had always thought of human civilization is being so old that surely we would have given up our Folly by now, but if my father's lifetime represents one hundredth of our history, maybe we are just in our adolescence. Maybe our tragic stubbornness are clinging to forms that sacrifice human life to human made law is just a sign of the fanaticism of Youth. Maybe we are on the brink of a new confidence born of Greater maturity in which we have the courage to put our values first indeed human beings were warned of the consequences of following false gods, but we Mortals did not listen now the ante is upped. It is upped it is up to the ultimate Stakes the very survival of life on Earth. So perhaps we will be stirred at this moment to a higher stage of maturity that is now required of us. That's a politics of hope lies in our courage to unflinchingly challenge the false gods of economic Dogma the path of hope lies in garnering the confidence to trust our deepest moral sensibilities our deepest emotional intuitions about the meaning of life and our connectedness to others well-being and on this basis challenging all Dogma demanding that it serve our values rather than continuing to contort our values so that Dogma remains intact while our fellow human beings die of starvation. Thank you very much.