Scripture does not mince words: Christians are called to help
the poor. But what should that help look like?
“Poverty, Inc.,” a documentary garnering more than 40 film
festival awards and recently released on Amazon.com, examines
the impact of the widely accepted international
poverty-fighting model, depicting a multibillion-dollar
“poverty industry” and arguing that in many instances the
good intentions of outsiders have unintended, negative
consequences.
Comprised of nongovernmental organizations, for-profit
contractors, charities, celebrities and entrepreneurs, the
so-called poverty industry includes some of the West’s
revered icons of aid – the World Bank, Toms Shoes and U2
frontman Bono among them. The aim of the film, however, is
not to question motives or admonish specific groups or
individuals, but to illustrate how the current paradigm is
flawed and to highlight efforts that work.
“Poverty, Inc.” frames the problem from a secular viewpoint,
but it was filmed through a lens of faith by
director-producer Michael Matheson Miller. A Catholic, Miller
said in a recent interview that Pope Francis, in his many
pleas to help the poor, points out that aiding the
disenfranchised is an issue of both charity and justice.
“We are called by God to do something for the poor, but we
are not called to do just something, anything,” said Miller.
Charity must be coupled with justice and guided by truth, “or
else it degenerates into sentimentality,” he said.
Drawing from more than 200 interviews and filmed in 20
countries, Miller’s film recounts the U.S. policy of dumping
tariff-free, American subsidized rice on Haiti in the 1980s,
an initiative that wiped out the local agriculture.
Clips show former President Bill Clinton, who oversaw the
policy, calling the rice subsidies “a mistake.”
“I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss of
capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people
because of what I did,” Clinton tells Congress.
One vivid micro-level example in the film is the story of a
Rwandan egg farmer who was launching his business when a
Christian church decided to donate eggs to the community. A
saturation of the egg market at first helped the locals but
quickly put the farmer out of business. The following year,
when the church decided to assist a different region of the
world, there was an egg shortage.
The film claims the root of the problem is paternalism, with
the West’s concern for the poor often manifested in handouts
rather than in the tools of prosperity.
“I’ve never heard of a country that got so much aid they
became a First World country,” says Ghanaian software
entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse, echoing a multitude of
individuals interviewed on screen, including an economist,
Harvard academics, small-business owners and an
anthropologist.
Thus, when entrepreneurs such as Toms Shoes founder Blake
Mycoskie and celebrities Angelina Jolie and Bono give shoes
or funds they are “giving men fish” rather than “teaching men
to fish.” (The documentary does credit Bono for his longtime
commitment to poverty work and for adopting a more
sophisticated view of the issue).
The film walks a fine line between encouraging generosity and
condemning NGOs and others who perpetuate the system.
“I’m not against humanitarian aid,” says Magatte Wade, an
African entrepreneur. “If a disaster happens, we need to
rally to help one another. But when that aid becomes a way of
life, we have a big problem. Disaster relief has become a
permanent model.”
The harsh critique of the current system is offset by
examples of aid that appear to have more long-term benefits.
Miller profiles 100K Jobs in Haiti, an organization providing
training and support to small businesses. He interviews
American couple Corrigan and Shelley Clay, who came to Haiti
to adopt a child but ended up also starting a locally staffed
business to help poor parents, many of whom place children in
orphanages to keep them out of desperate poverty.
Of the around 30,000 children in Haitian institutions and the
hundreds adopted by foreigners each year, the Haitian
government estimates around 80 percent have at least one
living parent.
Alongside such positive efforts, “Poverty, Inc.” rejects the
traditional model that, it argues, treats the poor as objects
of poverty rather than protagonists of their own development.
Miller is a fellow at the Michigan-based Acton Institute, a
free-market think tank, and the solution presented in his
film has a clear capitalist bent.
Miller said in the recent interview that we should be asking,
“What is needed to create prosperity?”
To start, he suggests the poor need protection in courts of
justice, a legal title to their land, the freedom to start a
business and access to wider circles of exchange.
Placing his project in a faith context, Miller said that
Christians “are not called to practice random acts of
kindness, like the bumper sticker says. We must exercise the
virtue of charity, ordered by reason and oriented to truth.”
That sentiment is repeated in more secular terms at the end
of the film.
“Having the heart for the poor isn’t hard; we all have that,”
says Michael Fairbanks, a fellow at Harvard University and a
former U.S. Peace Corps teacher in Kenya. “It’s having a mind
for the poor – that’s the challenge.”
Find out more
Go to povertyinc.org. The film is
available on Amazon.com and iTunes.
