Our Daily Bread
Christian reflections for the IF Campaign
Here is a series of weekly Christian reflections and prayers for the IF Campaign which will focus
on the theme of ‘Our daily bread’ with contributors from CAFOD, Christian Aid and Tearfund.
This week's reflection is a contribution from Christian Aid.
The good seeds…
The first ideas that came to my mind on the Sunday service before writing this reflection were
the historical efforts of the landless people in Brazil and a nice testimony from Jeff Williams, the
former head of Christian Aid in Wales. In 1992, in a Christian Aid communication trip, he visited
the region of Cascavel in the southern state of Paraná. He spent one week accompanying the
landless people of that time, who were living in very difficult conditions: precarious plastic tents
in an encampment alongside the road, severe cold weather and mud everywhere.
In 2012 he came back to Brazil and, by coincidence, visited the Paraná state again. There, he
met again Solange and Chico, who, twenty years before were living in that encampment. Now
they live in a cooperative from the Christian Aid partner Landless Movement (MST) COPAVI
and Jeff could see the cooperative thriving, the fertile land being socially used and producing,
even serving the community around by selling bread and milk.
He shared with the Brazil office his good feelings to realise “that long journey from the Cascavel
encampment to the cooperative must have involved huge commitment and hard work”. Jeff told
us how difficult it was to eat the rice and beans – the traditional daily bread of all Brazilians ––
under the threats from the “pistoleiros” who, paid by the big landowners, were terrifying women
and children in order to force the landless to give up in their effort to break down their history of
poverty and exclusion.
Coming back from Paraná to São Paulo, he shared a meal, prepared by my husband, in my
house, made with the organic rice produced by MST cooperatives in the state of Rio Grande do
Sul and commercialised by one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country. That BrazilianWelsh dinner was one of those special moments in our lives where we can pray for our daily
bread and be happy for all those different gestures we do to challenge the structural inequalities
and to contribute to poor communities to thrive and live with dignity and fullness.
This story reinforced the idea that in this world it is not enough to support the access to land and
credits for food production, but we must contribute, with different partners, to inclusive markets
which allow us, living in a big city, to buy MST cooperatives’ products such as organic rice, milk,
brown sugar, cassava flour, tropical fruits compotes… These products are the results of “the
seeds which fell into good soil, grew and produced a hundredfold”, as in the parable which
Jesus shared in Luke 8:8.
As Brazil continues to have one of the biggest levels of land concentration in the world and 16
million people – equivalent to the population of Netherlands – living in abject poverty as a result
of an economic growth model in which cars and infra-structure projects are more important than
God´s creation, our prayer is:
Merciful God,
Give us our daily bread
Without
Pesticides which can slowly kills us,
Forced and child labour which is against all human dignity,
People displaced by the soya plantations to feed cattle in Europe,
Ill environment because the eucalyptus plantations take all vitamins of the soil,
Young people living in the “favelas” because their land must produce agro fuel for the cars and
the consumerism of a few.
Give us our daily bread
Produced by
Small producers
Thriving cooperatives,
Dignified work of all women,
Environmentally sustainable options such as agro ecology,
Happy families and smiley children with a future full of hope.
Thanks God.
Mara Manzoni Luz – Christian Aid Brazil Country Manager
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