About the Book | Climate Change | Ethical Consumerism | Global Poverty | Recycling | War

GLOBAL POVERTY

“What a world we live in that we can buy so much, have so much and give so much to our own while others are dying. Actually dying. Not just getting by with less but dying of malnutrition and preventable diseases. The dichotomy in the reality we face compared to the 30,000 children who die every day in sub-Saharan Africa should require at the very least that we go through the looking glass to find this alternative reality. Better to go through the looking glass than look at ourselves in it.”

(Excerpt from “How to win a Nobel Prize – A Stay-at-Home Mum’s Guide”)

What we can do as Individuals

What we can do individually can be divided into four main categories:

Debt relief

Major campaigns are ongoing that lobby governments for debt relief and also follow up to make sure that they keep their promises – such as those made during the the G8 meeting last year held in Scotland

Great sites addressing the issues include www.makepovertyhistory.org.

A site that traces the history of the campaign to give Third World countries relief from the debt crippling their economies and killing their people is at www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk.

Trade justice

The most important thing that mothers can do in the context of trade justice is spend our money wisely. The essence of the current trade injustices involve protectionist policies to prevent the goods produced, especially agricultural products, from third world countries being sold in our supermarkets. The flipside of the coin is the huge subsidies being paid to the agricultural industry in Europe, Japan and the United States which render these products “cheaper” than the equivalent being grown in the Third World.

The steps we can take therefore are:

• avoid/boycott subsidised goods
• purchase Third World products directly

Avoid/boycott subsidised products

Subsidised products include rice, milk and other dairy products, sugar, cotton, peanuts, tobacco, soybeans, wheat, and corn. The easiest method to help redress the trade imbalances perpetuated in our name is to avoid the produce of these countries when it comes to our supermarket shopping. If you want the specific companies that have received the major share of the subsidies, have a look at www.farmsubsidies.org, a wonderful site setting out the brands I personally will really enjoy avoiding!

Avoiding these products and brands is relatively straightforward when it comes to buying a pound of sugar. However, it is more difficult when trying to avoid buying clothes that have been made using subsidised cotton. It is by no means clear when you walk into a department store where the 100% cotton in your cotton t-shirt came from. Or where the sugar in your canned drink came from. However, as the point about these subsidies is that it makes the produce unrealistically competitive, once again we have to assume that the cotton and sugar etc. are subsidized.

Buy ethically sourced products

In the old days, this would definitely have meant wearing hippie tie-dye t-shirts! But there are mainstream products out there now which we can source over the Internet.

Once again, Fairtrade-certified products are a good bet. See www.fairtrade.org.uk for a listing of major brands that carry ethical products including Fairtrade cotton lines by Marks & Spencers and various suppliers that have mail order catalogues and online stores.

And of course, the trendy end of the market is covered by www.edun.ie and the new Project Red effort by Bono which can be found at www.joinred.com.

More generally there is www.getethical.com,and my favourite so far,www.hippyshopper.com which has great stuff!. And for constant update news including the very useful and entertaining Ethiscore (which rates the ethics of products and companies in various categories), subscribe to www.ethicalconsumer.org.

An important note:

When you need something urgently, it is a pain to do anything but rush down to the nearest store and get whatever it is. However, once you have done the hard work once for all the ‘usual’ purchases you will know what is on the ok list. As for the one off purchases, presents and suchlike, a little advance planning is necessary, of course. I really enjoy trawling the ethical websites looking for interesting things to purchase as Christmas gifts and wedding presents which don’t set the planet back and allow mine to be the most unique gift at the party! I hope you feel the same way.

Of course, by the time we have completed the revolution, you will just be able to pop down to the store and buy something ethical. In the meantime, a little bit of hardwork seems a small price to pay for a future for our children.

AIDS relief

The story of AIDS in the developing world is almost impossibly tragic. The despair, the death, the poverty, the blighted hope, the orphans.

The grim statistics can be found on www.avert.org and www.theglobalfund.org. There are plenty of channels to donate money to ongoing treatment, rehabilitation and education programmes. If you want to help the children directly, which seems the best thing mothers can do, useful links include:

www.orphandoctor.com,www.care.org and a huge list of orphanages on www.orphanage.org. Please check individually before donating money to individual associations. But getting together with other mothers and adopting an orphanage does seem a great way to help.

More aid

The details on how little we actually give as societies and nations to alleviate intense poverty can be found at www.globalissues.org.

If you have read the Guide, you know I am recommending that we each give 0.7% of the family income (arrange for a monthly deduction or it is too easy to get lazy) in addition to whatever else we do, to poverty reduction funds. This is to shame our governments into meeting their commitments, made as long ago as 1970 and reiterated often and as part of the Millennium Development Goals, to give 0.7% of GNP to reducing intensive poverty.

Part of the proceeds from the sale of the Guide will be donated to UNICEF at www.unicef.org. Other great charitable organizations include Oxfam (www.oxfam.org), the Grameen Foundation (www.grameenfoundation.org) and www.savethechildren.com.

Scaling up

We’ve explored what we need to do as individuals to improve the lot of those children so much worse off than our own. To scale up, we need to persuade others to do the same. Do send in any ideas you have to spread the message that we mothers acting together are one of the most powerful demographics in the world!

I love the idea of community level involvement. If you can persuade the neighbourhood committee, school board or town council to take responsibility for a similar entity in a poverty stricken area – it might help engage people in the plight of others and also show demonstrable results, always important to keep people enthusiastic.

Persuading people to pledge 0.7% of their income would be a huge step. I think the best way to do this is by example.

And of course, the easiest and most powerful weapon we have, shop ethically to ensure that we do not support people-killing farm subsidies.

Letter to Government on Global Poverty      ( letter in Word format)