Speech by Helen Goodman MP to Make Poverty History North East seminar to celebrate UN World Poverty Day, 17/10/2008
Let me begin by saying that it is a great honour and a privilege to be speaking to you this morning at the opening of your three day event ‘Stand Up Against Poverty’ initiated by the UN Millennium Campaign and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty.
I want to thank all of you for involvement in campaigns against global poverty over many years.
You have led the way, you have shown what is possible and you have succeeded.
The Jubilee Debt Campaign, starting more than ten years ago, realised the vision of Isaiah to undo the burden of debt and let the oppressed go free, and instead of debts being paid to rich bankers, debt relief was given so that resources could flow where they were needed in the poorest countries.
And Make Poverty History has been successful: both in the countries of the South where two million people are receiving treatment for HIV/AIDS who might not otherwise have lived, but also here in the North by motivating and mobilising young people.
Almost the first invitation I received after being elected was to a Make Poverty History event at St. John’s School in my constituency. Outside on a hot June day 600 young people cheered me on when I called for action: I didn’t realise that this would be once-in-a-decade experience in the life of an MP!
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So why, given these successes, is the world still not on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals?
How can it be that 345 million people are expected to living in hunger in 2015? How is that 1.9 billion people still don’t have safe drinking water and that half-a-million women die in child birth every year, leaving their children orphaned?
At the moment, everyone is facing rising food and fuel prices. One of the things which you in voluntary and faith communities have succeeded in doing has been communicating the practical reality of problems, and making the statistics human.
And I want to give two examples of the impact that rising food and fuel prices are having:
The first is from a woman in my constituency: let us call her Sheila.
Sheila is a lone parent with three teenage boys aged 11, 13 and 15. Sheila does three jobs to support her sons. She is a teaching assistant, a cleaner and a lunchtime supervisor. She earns £15,000 per year but she is too well off to get free school meals or free travel to school for her children.
In September the cost of the boy’s school bus went up from £15 to £30 per week: that’s £540 per year extra, a 3% cut in her income before she’s paid her rising utility bills or gone to the supermarket.
It’s a real problem.
The second example is Nathalie. I will never meet Nathalie, and nor will you, but she is in touch with Christian Aid because Nathalie lives in Haiti. She has a family of seven and a weekly income of £13: £11.50 – 88% – of which is on food. Each week she buys:
5kg of rice
1 gallon of oil
3 litres of milk
2.25kg beans
500g of salami
Chilli sauce
400g of tomatoes
4kg of spaghetti
3 peppers
5 flat breads
Rice prices have doubled so Nathalie says “I cannot spend more than that. We have decided to cut two of our three meals a day. We now have just one”.
Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere: 2.4 million Haitians (a quarter of the population) cannot afford the minimum calorific intake recommended by the World Health Organisation. Mudcakes – which sell for 1.3p – have become the staple diet in one of the capital’s slums. Widespread starvation is expected in six months.
At the risk of being considered a group of communists, we must ask why?
The first level in which we can ask why is at the level of policy: what have been the policy failures which have brought about this catastrophe?
The great Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen in his study of the Bengal famines found that the problems was not a shortage of food: it was their meal distribution, and similarly the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation say there this enough food to meet the needs of everyone on the planet, but that $30 billion is needed to avert further shortages.
So the level of aid is clearly important.
That is why the Government is raising this country’s aid budget, and will have trebled it by 2010.
But I am sure that everyone here knows that the rules of the international trading system are also a problem: poor countries have been forced to open their markets and privatise their industries, and have consequently been flooded with subsidised imports from wealthy countries.
One of my cousins lives in Managua, and says that since the privatising of their electricity supply, their have suffered repeated power cuts.
In terms of agriculture, local producers have been put out of business as a result of unfair competition. This is the case for urgent reform of the Common Agricultural Policy.
Farmers in developing countries have been encouraged to grow cash crops such as flowers and tobacco for western markets, but when a downturn comes, demand for this produce inevitably falls away. The result: farmers lose their previous sustainability, while the cost of imported food and fuel becomes unaffordable.
So in Kenya, crop planting is now just 1/3 of last year’s level and in Egypt bread prices have trebled. Rioting and violence are the inevitable consequence. In Egypt 11 people have died while queuing for bread this year.
Meanwhile, hedge fund traders speculate in basic commodities.
But this is also a failure at a human level. I cannot do better than remind you of what Rowan Williams wrote three weeks ago:
“[We have] lost sight of the fact that [markets] are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits and agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get use to speaking about any of them as if they a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses like an organism, and ascribing independence to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry”.
All this, of course, is made infinitely worse by the horror of climate change.
Marginal families having to walk further each day for wood and water: unpredictable weather disrupting the seasons and cycles of insects and birds making it impossible for farmers in Bangladesh to know where to plant their crops.
The Bangladeshi Ambassador told me recently he expected 40 million of his compatriots to be displaced: Climate change is caused by the wealthiest but suffered first by the poorest.
So it was good news yesterday when Ed Miliband, the new Secretary of State with responsibility for climate change and energy announced dual action: tightening our CO2 reduction target to 80%, and acting to help poor families at home.
Undoubtedly this is a moment of crisis. We could retreat into a narrow concern for our own welfare; raising barriers, cutting support for overseas projects, engaging in competitive beggar-my-neighbour policies of deregulation.
Or we could move forward: adopting an international, multilateral approach, acknowledging that we are all in this together, that government has a responsibility to act in the general good.
I am cautiously optimistic: and not just because we’ve nationalised banks, which was unimaginable only a year ago.
What is far more important is that at last, policy makers and politicians have fallen out of love with market ideology. The market has been revealed for what it is: an instrument, and not an end in itself.
In dealing with these global forces, Government of course has a key role: only Government has the resources and legitimacy to act on the world stage. But government does not act in a vacuum and cannot act without the support of citizens and civil society groups like Mark Poverty History and the Jubilee Debt Campaign. In particular there are three things which you are vital for:
i) Influencing the climate of public opinion.
You are trusted because you are seen as independent of any political group, so campaigning and spreading the word remains crucial.
ii) Influencing behaviour.
Governments negotiate trade rules, but people buy fair trade coffee. And it’s not just that we need to encourage people to do things; sort their rubbish; volunteer in Oxfam shops etc: there is also an urgent need for people to stop doing some things. It is not, for example, a human right to fly across the Atlantic every year. Perhaps the western tourist can afford the ticket, but the African farmer cannot afford the cost of global warming.
iii) You can pray for change.
God gave us this beautiful world so that we might all flourish. Timothy Radcliffe writes:
‘We thank God for the whole miracle of fertility which is a gift to all that lives and breathes. The private good of individuals and nations and the common good of humanity are not in competition. No one can fully flourish if humanity does not. Humanity cannot flourish if the planet does not. At harvest time we remember the common good which is the good of each person, bound up with each other as we area’.
And I will end by quoting the words of St Ambrose of Milan:
‘The bread that you keep for yourself belongs to the hungry, the cloak that you store away belongs to the naked, the money that you salt away is the price of the poor person’s freedom’.
