WCC President Joins Call for Action for Poor at G20 Summit

Tuesday, Sep. 22, 2009 Posted: 1:04:45PM HKT

A girl sits with her brother, at a shanty township in the outskirts of Jammu, India, Friday, Oct. 17, 2008. India is home to the world?s largest food insecure population, with more than 200 million people who are hungry, according to the India State Hunger Index. (AP Photo/Channi Anand)

Ahead of the G20 summit in the United States, World Council of Churches (WCC) president Rev. Dr Bernice Powerll Jackson will join inter-faith Leaders to a summit to press actions for the poor around the world.

“Our world is facing not just a financial crisis, but a moral crisis,” said Powell Jackson, who is from North America, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (USA). “Shall we create a world based upon economically and ecologically sustainable principles which will result in abundance, dignity and security for all? That is the great moral question of our time,” he said in a statement released from WCC.

More than 25 Christian, Jewish and Islamic religious leaders from the United States are meeting from 22-23 September, ahead of the Group of 20 leaders who are meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from Sept. 24-26.

Organized by Bread for the World, the Alliance to End Hunger, and other US-based organizations, the religious leaders will convene to press G20 leaders to fulfill their promises to help people who have suffered from the global economic recession.

During the week of the G20 summit, U.S. administration officials are expected to release details on a new initiative to reduce hunger and poverty around the world. Faith leaders gathered for the summit will voice their support for the initiative in a press conference on Wednesday, 23 September, at 9 a.m.

Immediately following the press conference, religious leaders will go to the First Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh, where they are slated to meet with representatives of the U.S. delegation to the G20, the statement from WCC office stated.

The Group of 20 (G20) was created in 1999, after the 1990s Asian financial crisis to give members of the G7 -- wealthy industrial powers of the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy and Canada -- a new way to talk to the wider world. Russia joined the G7 at the leaders level in 1997 to form the G8.

The G20 brings together major industrialized and developing economies to discuss global economic issues.

Gretta Curtis
CP Europe Correspondent