Opus Diaboli

Christian Aid is currently spending an obscene amount of money on a multimedia campaign to tell us that world poverty can be ended.

Just one of the adverts they have put in the media  this weekend is a two-page advert in the Saturday August 1 Telegraph magazine (p19, 21) that cost around £67,000 (based on Telegraph rate card).

You can visualise this sum of money by imagining 6,700 people giving £10 to Christian Aid thinking it would be buying a water pump in the Sudan only to find that their money has been wasted on a facile campaign that even a sanctimonious adolescent hung up on Bob Geldof would find short on substance.

There is one good reason why we cannot ever eradicate poverty and I’ll give that last (so you can skip to the bottom if you want to save time), but here are Christian Aid’s ten reasons why poverty can be ended.

1) 500 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 25 years.
Yes, but that is only 20 million people a year. How many billions has that cost us each year in terms foreign aid projects? Would it not have been cheaper just to write these people a cheque?  And another thing, ‘lifted out of poverty’ sounds very much like a New Labour phrase.  Just how closely do you want to be linked to this corrupt and failing government?

2) Over 70% of us think that poverty eradication is important
More than 70% of us think that world peace is ‘important’ and just look at the shape of this place.

3) World leaders agree that financial structures that exacerbate poverty must change.
So what’s the problem then?  It sounds like our world leaders have things in hand.

4) Almost 190 countries have signed up to halve extreme poverty by 2015
See above

5)  It’s a big task, but no bigger than ending slavery and putting a man on the moon.
Slavery ended?  The good news has not trickled down to North Africa yet.  And we haven’t had a man walk on the moon in more than 35 years.

6) A fair deal at this year’s climate change summit could save 250 million people in Africa from poverty by 2020.
If you lent me £10 I could put it on a horse and I could pay you back double when I win.  Show me the figures.
Also, that’s less than 25 million people a year and at what is this ‘fair deal’ going to cost the people who have to actually pay for it?  Poverty isn’t going to be ended by any climate summit.

7) People created poverty and the systems that hold it in place, people can end it.
Yes.  The systems that create poverty are largely caused by inefficiency and corruption in developing countries.  Until the peoplewho live in those countries stop accepting that, no amount of foreign aid is going to make any lasting change.

8) If multinational companies paid a fair amount tax, developing countries would receive an extra $160bn a year.
Show me the figures.  If countries ensured that multinational companies paid a ‘fair’ amount of tax, would it be right and moral for those countries to give all of that revenue away to other sovereign nations?  Do they not have their own healthcare and education responsibilities to their citizens?  Do they not have moral duty to ensure that their citizens’ own tax burden be lightened if revenues increase?
And if $160bn was pumped into the developing world, would it end world poverty?  Or would it just cause a leap in sales of Rolexs, Mercs, Learjets and uniforms with a lot of gold braid on them?

9)  More than  $110bn of the world’s poorest nations’ debt has already been cancelled.
By cancelled, you mean that someone, somewhere else has paid for it. It has been absorbed by tax payers and by shareholders.  And has that done how much to end  poverty? If proper governance is not in place, cancelling debt just helps keep bad leaders in power.

10) The United Nations Secretary-General has categorically stated that this can happen.
Why didn’t you say before?  We need only sit back and wait for poverty to be ended… after all it’s not as if the UN is just a pointless talking shop that couldn’t organise a box of pencils.

And finally…

Some agencies define poverty as living on $2 a day.  In the UK, everyone in the lower 40% of the earning bracket is considered to be in poverty. Some of those in ‘poverty’ in the UK would qualify as in the comfortable middle classes in other countries.  And as societies develop, our ideas of what constitutes poverty change. Within living memory, children in the UK were defined as being in poverty because they did not have proper food, clothing or access to healthcare or education.  Now children are considered to be ‘deprived’ if they live in a household that can’t afford branded trainers for them (they’ll be vulnerable to bullying) and broadband (they will be socially excluded).
If we raised the quality of life of those on $2 a day to $5… guess what?  $5 a day would become the new baseline of poverty.

We can never end poverty because… the poor are always with us.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 am and is filed under Comment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.