Senate Appropriations Committee to make decison on international poverty assistance

This post is from the Creighton Center for Social Justice
Catholic Relief Services
As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, your Senator will be making decisions about funding levels for poverty-focused international assistance this week. Please contact your Senators now and ask that they give priority to poverty-focused international assistance within the Foreign Operations Appropriation, and to protect poverty focused assistance from disproportionate cuts proposed by the House. Background: The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to take up the Fiscal Year 2012 Foreign Operations Appropriation Bill this week. This bill will have a substantial impact on poverty-focused development and humanitarian assistance, and could help prevent disproportionate cuts proposed by the House of Representatives. Poverty-focused international assistance amounts to less than 1 percent of the U.S. budget and provides help for people suffering from severe poverty, disease and violence. Each year this small amount of assistance will: Feed 46.5 million of the world’s hungry persons. Feed 5 million schoolchildren; Prevent more than 114,000 infants from being born with HIV. Provide millions of HIV-positive people with counseling or treatment; Save 3 million lives through immunization programs. (Statistics provided by: Bread for the World, 2011) In the last decade this assistance has brought safe, reliable drinking water to more than 1.3 billion people, preventing disease. Cutting funds to poverty-focused development and humanitarian assistance will cost lives. Church Teaching: The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops supports federal programs that provide assistance for “the least of these,” (Mt 25:45). In a joint letter to the Chairman and Ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Bishop Howard Hubbard and Ken Hackett, President of Catholic Relief Services, addressed the importance of preserving and prioritizing international poverty assistance. Send an email to your senator