When most of us meditate on Matthew 19: 23-24 [Then Jesus said to his disciples, I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God], we often think of those with mansions, BMWs, and a six-figure (and then some) salary. We imagine extraordinarily successful business people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, and A-List celebrities like Brad Pitt and George Clooney. We tend to assume that this verse is meant for somebody else, for “rich” people.
If you have a car, you are one of only 8% of people in the world. 92% of people in the world see us driving in our cars and they think “rich.” Do you have access to clean drinking water? Because somewhere around one billion people in the world don’t even have clean water. When we go to the fridge and get something to eat and a glass of water, hundreds of millions of people are watching and thinking to themselves…“man, it must be nice.” When was the last time you went hungry? Somewhere around 800 million people won’t eat today. 300 million of those are children. Every couple of seconds, somebody dies from hunger. Over a billion people in the world live on less than $1 a day.
Experts say that in order to provide water and basic health and nutrition for everyone in the world, they estimate it would cost somewhere around $20 billion. That’s about as much as Americans spend in one year on ice cream. We are so rich. But we look around and we think we have little because we see people who have even more. We are bombarded with images, and the ploy of marketing is to create a sense of depravation. But what isn’t good enough for us, to the rest of the world, would be more than enough. We might need to think again about who Jesus was referring to in that verse.
Speaking of the filthy rich, forty of America’s billionaires and their families have pledged to give more than half of their fortune to charity in a drive organised by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett: Read more here.
The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute web-film that explores the often hidden environmental and social consequences of America’s love affair with its stuff. Currently, the film has been viewed over 10 million times on-line and in thousands of schools, houses of worship, community centers and businesses around the world.
The film that takes viewers on a provocative and eye-opening tour of the real costs of our consumer driven culture—from resource extraction to iPod incineration. Annie Leonard, an activist who has spent the past 10 years traveling the globe fighting environmental threats, narrates the Story of Stuff, delivering a rapid-fire, often humorous and always engaging story about “all our stuff—where it comes from and where it goes when we throw it away.”
Leonard examines the real costs of extraction, production, distribution, consumption and disposal, and she isolates the moment in history where she says the trend of consumption mania began. The Story of Stuff examines how economic policies of the post-World War II era ushered in notions of “planned obsolescence” and “perceived obsolescence” —and how these notions are still driving much of the U.S. and global economies today.
Leonard’s inspiration for the film began as a personal musing over the question, “Where does all the stuff we buy come from, and where does it go when we throw it out?” She traveled the world in pursuit of the answer to this seemingly innocent question, and what she found along the way were some very guilty participants and their unfortunate victims.
The Robin Hood Tax is a new idea which is basically a tiny tax on banks, hedge funds and other finance institutions that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change, at home and abroad:
The International Development arm of the Salvation Army is running an Easter campaign with a twist. Instead of eggs, they are encouraging people to buy chickens. They’ve found places where chickens are required: Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania and figured out that widows, orphans and HIV/Aids patients can exit the poverty cycle through owning a chicken.
Not only do chickens provide fresh eggs, which are a good source of protein for a needy family, but as chickens multiply, the eggs can also be sold to provide extra income to cover family expenses, like food, clothing or the children’s schooling. Chickens grow fast, are easy to take care of and don’t occupy too much space. The chickens you buy this Easter will go to chicken projects in Africa that are providing opportunities to build a better life.
Kraft has promised to honour Cadbury’s current commitments to use Fairtrade cocoa beans in the dairy milk range now being sold in the UK, New Zealand, Australian and Canada.
Our campaign to Tell Kraft: “Keep Cadbury’s Commitment” has been a great success: messages from over 1,300 supporters were passed on to the CEO of Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld.
Despite this success, our work is not yet over.
Kraft has not confirmed whether they will continue Cadbury’s ongoing talks to expand its use of Fairtrade cocoa beans to other products.
There is additional concern that Kraft’s current commitment may be time limited, with the possibility that Kraft may abandon the commitment when existing contracts end— a commitment that provided secure and sustainable livelihoods to cocoa farmers, empowering them to tackle poverty in their communities.
The Global Poverty Project team will be monitoring Kraft’s future plans to ensure Cadbury’s promise to keep and expand Fairtrade is honoured.
Your support is greatly appreciated and highly valuable. We will keep you up to date on this matter.
Before Kraft’s take-over bid, Cadbury had made one of the largest Fairtrade commitments – their whole Dairy Milk range would go Fairtrade by Easter 2010.
Cadbury estimate that by 2018 their Fairtrade partnership and Cadbury Cocoa Partnership will make a demonstrable difference to the lives of around half a million cocoa farmers.
We need your help to hold Kraft to Cadbury’s important commitments.
On Tuesday 19 January 2010, the Cadbury board agreed to recommend a $19.6 billion bid by Kraft to shareholders, paving the way for a takeover.
In 2009, Cadbury launched its commitment to ensuring that more and more of their cocoa is ethically sourced through its partnership with Fairtrade.
The Fairtrade commitments made by Cadbury are already assisting cocoa farmers, their families and their communities to secure their livelihoods and tackle poverty, and will assist more cocoa farmers into the future.
Tuesday’s take-over bid raises concerns over the future of Cadbury’s commitment to Fairtrade products.
Kraft currently do not subscribe to sourcing their products from Fairtrade. If Kraft renege on Cadbury’s promises it will be a huge backwards step for the world’s poor.
So…
Will Kraft keep Cadbury Dairy Milk as a Fairtrade product?
Will they keep Cadbury’s future commitments to introduce Fairtrade to other products?
It is important that Kraft maintain Cadbury’s commitment to providing secure and sustainable livelihoods to cocoa farmers that will enable them to tackle poverty in their communities.
And we will present everyone’s views to the CEO of Kraft, demonstrating the global support for Cadbury’s Fairtrade commitment and encourage Kraft to maintain and extend these commitments.
‘The Project’ is officially back up and running again after a break over the holiday season—you’ll be seeing regular posts from here on in.
For most of us, this year has begun well. For others, it has been tainted by disaster. You have no doubt heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti. On Tuesday January 12, a catastrophic magnitude 7 quake struck approximately 25 kms west of Port-au-Prince (Haiti’s capital). According to some estimates, up to 200,000 people are tragically reported dead.
All of a sudden, this tiny Caribbean nation has been cast into the international spotlight. The nations of the world are lending their support and resources to respond to the disaster and aid agencies are appealing to the world for humanitarian aid all in an effort to lend a helping hand to Haitians. I personally gave to World Vision’s relief effort and I encourage you to do the same.
Now, here’s the thing. Why does everyone care so much about Haiti all of a sudden? On January 11, Haiti was just as desperate as it was on January 12. There is a strange phenomenon that occurs when a natural disaster strikes—we all of a sudden become sympathetic. Why? Is it because we feel that a natural disaster is the only justifiable reason to respond hastily to human tragedy in the third world?
Are not hunger, disease, dirty water, inadequate shelter, internal conflict etc good enough reasons to respond hastily? 30,000 children die each day from hunger alone. Where are the celebrity tele-fundraisers or charity sporting events for them? Is it because we feel that a natural disaster, unlike systematic poverty, isn’t their fault and they are therefore deserving of our help only in this situation?
The same thing happened with the 2004 Tsunami. Wow, what a response! But why did we care so much about death in Indonesia when it was by Tsunami as opposed to hunger? Haiti is a really interesting example, they have a complex past and a very complicated political and social situation today. A victim of European colonial enslavement, Haiti continues to struggle with external political influences.
Corruption, structural violence, disease, desperate poverty, slavery, despotism, conflict and environmental devastation are rife in Haiti. This tiny nation was often an object of critical engagement throughout my undergraduate political science degree, often cited as an archetype of systematic oppression. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the time, it flies under the radar.
If there was ever a country that needed help, a plight that ever needed to be broadcast to the world, a story that ever needed to be told—it was Haiti. But being a victim of structural violence, systematic rape and starvation is apparently not as newsworthy as being a victim of an earthquake.
As my friend Richard Fleming points out, Japan and California have had much stronger earthquakes in more densely populated areas than the one that hit Port-au-Prince, yet the death tolls have been relatively minor. The high death toll in Haiti is purely a product of its complete and utter vulnerability due to its poverty – an issue that clearly has never been worth a front page story.
Reason #1: Because 2.5 billion people worldwide are without access to proper sanitation, which risks their health, strips their dignity, and kills 1.8 million people, mostly children, a year.
Reason #2: Because even the world’s wealthiest people still have toilet problems – from unhygienic public toilets to sewage disposal that destroys our waterways.
Maybe you don’t think you can change the world, or maybe you don’t want to change the world. Well, that’s fine. But there are people out there who believe they can. You probably know one of them. They are the ones who constantly invite you to activist events on Facebook, that get you to watch every Michael Moore film or some documentary on the oil crisis, they are the one’s who get up early to go to the farmers market, that only shop at op-shops, that talk about things like slavery, child soldiers, hunger, and climate change, they probably ride their bike and use public transport, always give you some strange political book to read, or drag you along to hear some speaker you’ve never heard of, and they likely always ask you whether you know where the chocolate you are eating comes from.
Sometimes those people get tired. They feel like nobody listens, and worst of all, like nobody cares. They constantly feel discouraged, alone, and powerless. So encourage them: buy them lunch, support their cause, comment on their blog, buy some fairtrade chocolate for goodness sakes, give money to the charity they work for, watch that stupid documentary, read that book, or just tell them you believe in them and support what they are doing. Because these people are special, their heart breaks when they see pain, they get uncomfortable thinking about injustice, a tear rolls down their cheek when they see a world vision commercial, and they lay awake at night dreaming of a world where children no longer have to starve to death. They live each day in the hope that maybe just a taste of this kind of world might be possible if they just keep working towards it.
Wanna change the world? Well, encourage someone who already is…
“Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They’re not fond of rules,
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.
They push the human race forward.
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world,
are the ones who do.”
- Steve Jobs
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