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 PrintableVersion Making poverty history?It’s in the news. It involves all the aid agencies, and many churches, trade unions and celebrities — all uniting under the banner, ‘Make Poverty History’. This is a crucial year, with Britain assuming the presidency of the G8 and of the European Union. This could be a kairos moment, a time of special opportunity and blessing for the world’s poor. Live8Rock star Bob Geldof (key organiser of Live Aid in 1985) lifted the profile of the campaign with the announcement of Live 8. This a series of live concerts across the world which will kick-start what is being called ‘The Long Walk to Justice’ which is looking for thousands of people to walk to Scotland to put pressure on the politicians. The leaders of the world’s richest countries are meeting at Gleneagles July 6-9. The Live 8 press release stated: ‘The G8 leaders have it their power to alter history. They will only have the will to do so if tens of thousands of people show them that enough is enough. By doubling aid, fully cancelling debt, and delivering trade justice for Africa, the G8 could change the future for millions of men, women and children.’ But this is just one of a series of events challenging the political leaders to act decisively. Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife Cherie welcomed a delegation of African women at Downing Street on May 12, receiving baskets laden with some of the 2.5 million messages of support for the Make Poverty History campaign. Abject povertyBut what do we mean by ‘poverty’? ‘World poverty’, says Ronald Sider, ‘is 100 million mothers weeping, because they cannot feed their children.’ World poverty is this in Zambia, a peaceful Commonwealth country with a democratic government: ‘The doctor looked up and saw a woman with her two boys. One was 13 years old, the other three. Both were ill. The diagnosis was simple and the prescription straightforward. Another routine case. Some time later, he saw her again and asked after the children. Her face flushed. The older child was doing well, but the younger was dead. Unable to afford treatment for both, she made an impossibly painful choice. The oldest received the medicine, the youngest she had to watch die.’ That is poverty, abject and absolute. How do we respond to such a world that forces a mother to make such an agonising choice? I believe sincere Christians face two dangers. First, there is the danger of hypocrisy. I can think of nothing more repellent than for a person with a reasonable income to have strong views on economic justice, while grudging more than the spare change in his pocket for the world’s poor. ‘Hard hearted and tight fisted to the poor’, as Moses put it, they suffer from the ‘skinflint mentality’. We do have an obligation to contribute at a personal level. My beloved Tearfund, for instance, makes a beneficial impact on the lives of literally millions of desperately poor people every year, almost entirely due to the support of British evangelicals. But perhaps a greater danger is that of sentimentality — a sentimentality which contributes personally, even sacrificially, but is content to remain silent while the monstrous injustices of inherited debt and unjust trade rules grind down entire generations, across whole continents. These people suffer from the ‘sticking plaster mentality’ (see Proverbs 31.8-9). OutrageFor example, in the 1970s, Western banks loaned over £500 million to Idi Amin, the butcher of Uganda, and those debts became inflated by usurious rates of interest (up to 20%) in the 1980s. The idea that we have any right to demand the money back from Uganda (now a multi-party democracy), most of whose people were either children or as yet unborn at the time the debts were incurred, is an outrage to any sense of what is reasonable and right. Or take the trade rules which have allowed the US to spend $4 billion a year, subsidising its cotton farmers (over three times as much as it spends on aid for the whole of Africa!). The cotton is then dumped onto world markets driving millions of poor African farmers into total destitution. And Europe is as bad. Mats Karlsson, the World Bank’s director in Ghana, said: ‘The biggest problem facing farmers in the developing world is the subsidies the West provides for its own farmers. These are deeply unfair.’ The cases cited are just small tips of very large icebergs. Our leaders have issued stark warnings about the dangers of terrorism, and rightly so. However, whereas terrorism kills thousands of innocent people each year, abject poverty kills many millions and ruins the lives of many hundreds of millions. I would not dream of suggesting that it was ever the intention of Western countries to bring misery to the world’s poor. Nevertheless, to the hapless recipients, the effects amount to nothing less than economic terror on a global scale and we all need to face up to this most painful reality. Looking to usBecause the debt and trade campaigns started in Britain, people elsewhere still look to us to lead the way. Joyanna Cleary, of the Mothers Union in New Zealand, writes: ‘Far from the action as we are, the staunchness of the campaigners in the Northern Hemisphere, with the resounding support of the Church, fills us with awe.’ But above all, we must keep faith with the world’s poor: ‘We congratulate you on the success of your campaign’, wrote Charlotte Bagorogoza of the Scripture Union in Uganda, ‘but the struggle continues and the challenge still stands. We beg and appeal to you not to give up.’ Let the word go forth to Joyanna in New Zealand, to Charlotte in Uganda, and throughout the world, from every church and chapel across the land, that we are not giving up. God being our helper, we go on: ‘On to the Jubilee; on to Trade Justice; and on to Make Poverty History!’ David Golding,
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