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Did you know that the wealth of the world’s 358 billionaires exceeds the combined annual income of countries which are home to nearly half of the world’s population? Or that every eight seconds a child dies somewhere in the world from a preventable disease? Or that Third World Countries are paying £1.4 million in net debt repayments to rich countries every hour? Does this make you sick and angry? Or are figures like this too big to comprehend? The scale of injustice and abuse in our world is indeed almost beyond comprehension, but that does not make it beyond our responsibility, or beyond our ability to help. That is what Christian Aid Week is about: the cocoa farmers of Belize who borrowed heavily to increase crop yield on a promise from a US company of a dollar per pound of beans, only to be bankrupted when the company dropped their offer to 27 cents when harvest time arrived; the Tanzanian farmers who cannot afford education or health care because their government, crippled by debt, has to make everyone pay for these; and our response to them.
The common perception of overseas aid agencies such as Christian Aid, Oxfam, CAFOD etc is of organisations who collect money from the rich to make charitable hand outs to the poor: A legal and laudable variation on Robin Hood, plastering up some of the more visible injuries of our broken world. But as disasters continue, and the competence of aid agencies in Central Africa is brought into question, people are reconsidering their donations; last year Save the Children’s income fell by £12 million and Oxfam had to cut staff. But these agencies (some dislike the paternalistic implications of the epithet ‘charities’) are about more than simply filling begging bowls.
The agenda now is more on political campaigning and on helping countries to become self-sufficient. But most people are still more likely to make a gut response to a television picture of a starving child, than to contribute to development projects or be moved by figures of national debts. The major aid agencies know that they need to reinvent themselves in order to receive enough support to continue their work. Last year they issued a joint manifesto — ‘The Case for Aid’ — drawing attention to the ever-widening gap between the world’s richest and poorest nations and calling upon the British government to reverse its own trend of declining aid budgets (last November’s 8.4% cut brought it to a twenty year low). Christian Aid, CAFOD, Save the Children and Oxfam have joined the ‘Real World’ coalition of aid, environment and social justice groups who are lobbying for parliamentary legislation in these areas. In order to bring the public into this side of their work, Christian Aid have launched a campaign entitled ‘Change the Rules,’ focusing on Fair Trade and Third World debt, of which more hereafter. CAFOD have also launched a campaign for ethical consumerism — ‘Fair Deal for the Poor’ — whereas Save the Children are concentrating on the issue of children’s rights in Third World countries (and so-called developed nations too). These of course are not the only interests of the agencies: the abolition of landmines, exposure of child prostitution rackets in the Philippines, or educating Tanzanian people to prevent diarrhoea (a major killer of small children), and so forth, are still very much part of their agendas.
So, to concentrate on Christian Aid, and on what we can do: ‘Change the Rules’ is a four year campaign launched last year to tackle some of the root causes of suffering in the Third World. The issue of debt was in fact part of their previous campaign ‘Who Runs the World’. This highlighted the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s policies of forcing poorer countries to adhere to ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAPs) in exchange for financial help. The SAPs meant that countries had to cut funding for health and education and concentrate on cash crops for export, all of which undermined the country as a whole, even though it meant that more money was available for debt repayment in the short term. At present, for every pound spent by our government on overseas aid, 47p is returned in debt repayment. (This means that the interest you get on Lloyds or Midlands bank accounts is coming from people whose poverty is really beyond our imagination, hence Third World First’s campaign to boycott these banks). The IMF and the World Bank as well as commercial banks are listening, and some moves have been made to help the very poorest countries, mainly through rather complex deals, but any change is worth pursuing. Christian Aid and other agencies are using the principle of Jubilee in Leviticus 25 to call for a cancellation of the debts of the poorest countries by the year 2000: Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a Jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan … If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold. If, however, a man has no-one to redeem it … it will be returned in the Jubilee, and he can then go back to his property. (Lev 25:10, 25–28)
Fair Trade is an easier campaign to join in with; every one of us can be practically involved on a daily basis. Over a quarter of imported food and drink in Britain comes from Third World countries, so we are all consuming products which were probably produced by virtual slave labour or in dangerous working conditions (unprotected contact with pesticides being one of the most common problems). In 1992 Christian Aid was one of the voluntary organisations who established the Fairtrade Foundation to ensure fair wages and prices, decent working conditions, adequate health and safety standards and secure long-term contracts for suppliers. Where they feel these criteria have been met the Fairtrade mark is awarded, clearly displayed on the packaging, it makes life very easy for us. But Christian Aid do not just want us to buy fairly traded goods, but to encourage others to sell them. First they targeted the supermarkets, and are still encouraging us to write to local store managers, enclosing receipts to prove that we are regular shoppers, asking the store manager to ensure that workers from the developing world who produce their goods receive the basic rights outlined above. Now they are moving on to cafés, where more tea and coffee is drunk than at home, believe it or not, and asking us to hand in cards at local cafés informing the managers about fair trade. The fair trade message is certainly getting through: in the latest issue of Sainsbury’s magazine an article on the subject reported that sales of Fairtrade-marked products in the UK total around £5 million, only a small number beside the £43 billion spent on food in total each year, but still a promising start. At the opposite end of things, about 800,000 poor families in the Third World are estimated to be benefiting from fair trade initiatives. So we need not limit ourselves to following Christian Aid’s own initiatives but should be encouraging the use of fairly traded tea, coffee, sugar, cocoa, chocolate, etc in our societies, our churches, everywhere.
So what about Christian Aid Week? It’s happening in Week 3, and in tune with the organisation’s own agenda, this will involve both fundraising and campaigning. The former will take the form of collections of the bridges on campus on several days of the week, an inter-society football tournament and hopefully a Club Night with ‘Futureworld’ (of Ziggy’s, Toff’s and the Arts Centre), although this may have to be later in the term — please watch out for it. Both aims should hopefully be fulfilled in the Rich and Poor lunch on Sunday Week 3 at Heslington Church (see posters for further details). Members of the Christian Societies will be joining Third World First to launch a fair trade campaign (complete with sampling) on Vanbrugh Paradise the first fine day of the week, as well as going round college kitchens in the evenings. On Wednesday afternoon there will be a Café Crawl in town to hand in cards, starting in St Helen’s Square at 2:15. Stalls in Vanbrugh will provide further information, petitions on debt, café cards (so people busy on Wednesday can run their own café crawls) and other campaign items.
If anyone would like to help with these events, please contact either Third World First, the social action rep if you belong to any of the Christian Societies, or me on jlc110@york.ac.uk (internal mail: CMS, King’s Manor). These are only small acts to deal with a vast problem, but changing the rules of our unjust society has to start somewhere, the more people become involved the sooner a revolution can be achieved and the closer we get to the kingdom God envisages: “I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard no more. Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old many who does not live out his days … No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat.” (Isaiah 65:19–22). In the meantime, everyone of us may also pray for this work, perhaps using this year’s Christian Aid prayer:
O God, you have made us for yourself,
And against your longing there is no defence.
Mark us with your love, and release in us a passion for your justice
In our disfigured world;
That we may turn from our guilt and face you,
Our heart’s desire.
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Last modified: 25th November 2005