Rick Steves Addresses Structural Poverty, Climate-Smart Agriculture

I innovated a way for me to be a more ethical travel company by giving myself my own carbon tax...I'm creating a portfolio...What I want to do is empower development in the hungry world...to be able to develop in a way that would not be impactful in a negative way to climate change....  -Rick Steves, travel writer and television host

Rick Steves was a surprise guest speaker at the Bread for the World Lobby Day reception on June 11. Steves happened to be in Washington lobbying Congress on another topic, and by coincidence found himself on Capitol Hill on the same day that a few hundred Bread advocates were meeting with their members of the House and Senate to advocate for global nutrition initiatives.

So Steves, a very close friend and supporter of Bread for the World, came to our reception.  His presence was serendipitous because it gave him a chance to tell us more about the television special on hunger that he plans to release later this year, entitled Hunger and Hope: Lessons Learned from Ethiopia and Guatemala.

Ending Structural Poverty
"I went down there not to do a tour show on Ethiopia and Guatemala...We didn't even go to the famous places..We can use those countries as a classroom for why there is poverty," Steves told dozens of people gathered in the  It's structural. Bread for the World tackles the structural underpinnings of poverty and hunger."

As an example, Steves mentioned the global debt relief campaigns, that Bread and other organizations supported in 2000. "Bread for the World spearheaded this. We led the way in forgiving the debt of the more heavily indebted nations on this planet.  That's structural poverty. And we took away that bit of structural poverty."

Climate-Smart Agriculture
In his comments at the Lobby Day reception, Steves spoke of the need to take climate change seriously when creating development programs for poor countries. 

"I want to empower development in the hungry world, to be able to develop in a way that is less impactful in a negative way to climate change. There are a lot of desperate people in desperate countries,..so that just to live, they have to deforest,  they have to abuse their soil."

Steves spoke of the need to develop "climate-smart agriculture," which would allow people to produce food and at the same time not contribute so much to the carbon problem on the planet.

To this end, Steves has pledged $200,000 for Bread for the World to support climate-smart agriculture in the hungry world. He is raising these funds by giving himself a carbon tax applied every time he travels to Europe or other destinations to produce his popular programs. Steves outlines his commitment in an article on his website.

This video contains about six-plus minutes of Steves' comments at the Lobby Day reception.