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Food for thought..
This page contains information about the world we live in that i have come across and thought was worth sharing for others to consider. Much of the information here was pinched from the New Internationalist magazine, or from various Amnesty publications. (Free passage of ideas is more important than copyright, as i'm sure these organisations would agree).
This is probably the least maintained page on this site, most of the information added back when i started this site in 1997 and probably at least half a decade out of date. But the basic power structures and relations in the world haven't changed much and the ideas remain typical of the way things go. So, i've left this as is, like a sort of snapshot, and recommend those that are interested go investigate further for themselves (maybe check out some of the sites listed in my Links page).
Trade and Hunger
Some Facts and Figures
¨ Almost 800 Million people will go hungry today, one in five people in developing countries.
¨ 12 million die of hunger every year.
¨ More than enough food is produced in the world to feed everyone, but inequalities in the distribution of wealth prevent this.
¨ At the height of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, Ethiopia was exporting green beans to Britain.
¨ Four out of every five people live in the "South". Four out of every five units of resources are consumed in the "North".
¨ Australia’s 18 million have twice the impact on the world’s resources as Africa’s 640 million.
¨ The richest 25% in the world control 85% of the wealth. The poorest 25% survive on 1.4%.
¨ The richest 10 people in Britain have as much wealth as 23 poor countries with over 174 million people.
¨ In 1991, US citizens spent $30 billion on jewellery and watches - equivalent to the GDP of 20 low-income countries.
¨ $33 billion is spent in the US each year in attempts to lose weight.
¨ In 1993, for every dollar given in aid by rich nations, they took back three in debt repayments.
¨ In 1985, during severe famines, Africa received $3 million in aid. The same year, falling commodity prices meant that Africa received $19 million less for its export produce.
¨ Western tariff barriers to textiles and clothing alone cost poor countries $53 billion a year in lost trade. This equals the total of all Western aid to the Third World.
¨ An acre of cereals can produce five times more protein than an acre devoted to meat production.
¨ 40% of the world’s grain is fed to livestock.
¨High-technology Western-style agriculture is inefficient and costly, using 10 calories of energy for every 1 calorie of food produced. It is expensive, polluting and beyond the means of farmers in poorer countries. Every kilo of wheat grown in the US uses 2000 litres of water.
¨ In 1994 the world spent $767 billion on military power - more than the total income of 45% of the world’s population.
Principles and Underlying Causes:
¨ In most countries surpluses of food exist which are sufficient to feed their population, but the poor lack the resources to buy the food. In India, a reallocation of 10% of its food supply would feed its hungry population, the largest in the world. Instead, the food waits for the right price or a foreign buyer.
¨ Poor countries took up loans in the 1970s when prices for the raw materials they exported were rising. Commodity prices fell, interest rates soared, and in many cases corrupt officials pocketed billions of dollars. The Third World Debt had come to stay.
¨ Further loans to poor countries from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are conditional on plans to increase exports to help pay off existing debts. So already saturated Western markets get more of the same products from Third World countries, who are forced into competition with each other. Prices drop as fast as production rises.
¨ Aid and loan money is often used inappropriately in large-scale infrastructure programs (often to the detriment of local and indigenous communities). Bribery and kick-backs are often used to channel this money to projects which benefit foreign interests. Some countries, notably Germany and Japan, actively encourage this practise. According to one estimate, DM600 Million a year is claimed by German companies as tax-deductible bribes to foreign governments.
¨ With so many poor countries unable to meet their debt repayments, the IMF and World Bank have agreed to cancel part of the debt of the poorest indebted countries. Under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries scheme, the first country to be granted debt relief was Mozambique, which pays nearly three times as much money in debt service to rich countries as it does on medicine and hospitals for its own people. However, when the figures were announced, the debt repayments had only been reduced by the amount that Mozambique had been failing to pay already, ie they only cancelled the part of the debt that the country would never have been able to pay anyway, the country continued to pay the same amount it had already been paying and not one extra dollar was available to be spent on hospitals or schools.
¨ Western nations - the primary overconsumers of environmental resources and owners of the worlds information resources - demand "free market" competition on the sale of primary resources, but claim monopoly rights to intellectual properties, which are by nature non-depleting.
¨ Once people’s basic needs are met, they begin to want more variety. Fairer distribution of wealth and economic success in the Third World would lead to increased trade, particularly in finished and value added goods, and would create more, not fewer, jobs in the West.
¨ Meat production for rich countries results in deforestation on a vast scale, particularly in the developing world, and the inefficient use of grain resources as livestock feed.
¨ Rich nations protect their own production with generous subsidies and tariff barriers to manufactured goods ensure that the Third World remains a cheap source of raw material.
¨ Surpluses of subsidised grain from rich nations are dumped at cheap prices on Third World countries, undercutting local producers and driving them out of business. People in these countries are then dependent on continued supply from overseas.
¨ Multinational corporations source product from all over the world. Because they operate in several countries at once, they can overprice where there is no competition and underprice where they want to kill it. They can undercut local producers and put them out of business, then benefit from a monopoly. Meanwhile, once self-sufficient farmers and producers become unemployed slum-dwellers in the big cities.
¨ The "Green Revolution" was supposed to bring benefits to Third World farmers. In reality, only the richest could afford the new high yield grains and the associated chemicals and fertilisers. Poorer farmers were forced out of business by those who could afford the new technology.
¨ With the emphasis on production of a single cash crop, plants that for centuries had provided people with essential vitamins were suddenly declared weeds and doused with pesticides. Crop diversity which once allowed a balanced diet and flexibility for changing conditions gives way to genetically enhanced grains.
Some Possible Solutions:
¨ Poor countries can only begin to break out of the cycle of poverty when they are free from servicing debts to the rich world. The Jubilee 2000 campaign is lobbying rich governments to cancel these debts.
¨ "Fair Trade" products ensure a fairer deal for producers in the Third World. A reasonable price is paid to the producers, rather than fat profits for the multinational importers. Fair Trade products are available at many community oriented shops and some supermarkets. Write to supermarket chains and ask them to stock Fair Trade products.
¨ Fairer distribution of land to peasant farmers, together with access to credit and means of production (machinery etc) would allow the poor to produce for themselves. Organisations like the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh allow small-scale low-interest credit for poor people to build better means of supporting themselves, instead of driving them further into debt.
¨ Co-operatives that provide a direct link between local producers and poor consumers can provide jobs for the unemployed and a better deal for both producers and consumers by bypassing the monopolies of the large distribution companies.
¨ Members of the public can lobby their politicians to support fairer trade arrangements and to scrutinise the activities of multinational corporations.
¨ Reduction of over-consumption in richer countries, particularly of luxury goods such as meat, can allow for better use and fairer distribution of resources.
¨ Self-sufficiency programs for Third World farmers should be supported to reduce dependence on imported food and cash-crop dollars. Seed banks for a diversity of crops should be encouraged.
¨ Aid and loan money used for large-scale infrastructure projects would be better used to help support development of subsistence crop programs for self-sufficiency. Governments should be lobbied to direct their overseas aid programs to small scale projects that help local people, instead of tying them to projects that benefit their own business interests.
Health
¨ The World Health Organisation rates poverty as the world’s number one disease.
¨ Most children can survive without medicine. None can survive without food.
¨ The money poor families spend on medicines instead of food contributes to child undernutrition and high mortality. Home remedies help families spend less on pills, more on food, and improve children’s health.
¨ User pays health care attacks those most in need. Poor families are sick more often, and so pay the most.
¨ A grossly disproportionate amount is spent on health problems prevalent in wealthy counties, such as heart disease and cancer, while preventable diseases kill millions in the Third World.
¨ Tuberculosis killed 1.9 million people in 1990, but less than 20 million dollars of aid was given to combat it. AIDS killed only 0.2 million people, but 190 million was spent to combat it.
¨ The W.H.O. lists only 270 chemical substances which are sufficient to meet the world’s health needs. But the market is flooded with 100,000 drugs. However, half the world’s population is too poor to afford even the essential medicines they need.
¨ According to the W.H.O., two thirds of all drugs used by children may be of little or no value.
¨ About twice as much money is spent by pharmaceutical companies on promoting and marketing their drugs as on researching them. Most of the money spent on R&D is spent on developing variations of existing drugs (to get around patent laws and move in on competitors' market share) rather than new cures. A study by the British Department of Health concluded that research was being ‘directed toward commercial returns rather than therapeutic need’.
¨ Less than 4% of research money goes to finding treatments for diseases prevalent in the Majority World where three quarters of the world’s population live and die.
¨ Simple, low cost solutions are often ignored. Iodine deficiency causes 30,000 stillbirths and 120,000 babies born with severe disabilities. Iodising salt supplies would cost as little as 5 cents per person per year. Home-made rehydration solutions are not promoted widely, in preference for commercial oral rehydration salts.
¨ Inappropriate use of antibiotics is resulting in antibiotic resistant bacteria. In Pakistan, where antibiotics are freely and indiscriminately used for any illness, first line antibiotics are almost useless against many bacterial illnesses, and second and third line antibiotics are being used, also inappropriately. Drug companies encourage this misuse of antibiotics, as they profit much more from expensive second and third generation drugs, regardless of the human cost.
¨ In 1983, the head of the Japanese AIDS research team, Takeshii Abe, reversed his position on the risk of HIV infection in using unheated blood products, after receiving donations of $500,000 from drug companies involved. Although he had previously maintained that haemophiliacs risked HIV infection from such products, after becoming head of the team he ordered that reports be written recommending that the products be used. When a member of his team refused to write the report, he threatened his job. The products were approved for use, and 2,000 haemophiliacs were infected with HIV as a result.
Women
¨ Women produce half the world’s food, but own only 1% of its farmlands.
¨ 70% of the world’s adult poor are women.
¨ More than 80% of refugees are women and children.
¨ In developed countries, women earn around half as much money as men.
¨ An Inter-Parliamentary Union survey of 96 national parliaments in 1991 found that only 11% of their members were women.
¨ Twice as many girls as boys in the world are denied a chance to go to school. Twice as many women as men have never learned to read or write.
¨ Every year over a million baby girls are killed or allowed to die throughout the world because they were born female.
¨ An estimated 11 million women throughout the world are suffering serious health problems as a result of forced genital mutilation.
¨ One woman dies every minute from causes relating to childbirth and pregnancy. Thousands more suffer temporary or permanent disabilities. Much of this is to do with poverty. In developing countries, 20-45% of women do not have enough to eat and nearly two-thirds of pregnant women are anaemic. Basic health services are often non-existent, due to government cut-backs and 'structural adjustment'.
¨ The annual cost of providing basic reproductive health for every woman in the world has been calculated at less than what the world spends on arms in one week.
¨ A black woman in the United States is four times more likely than a white woman to die from childbirth complications.
¨ In Egypt, men may be excused for killing their wives, if they find them in the act of adultery. Egyptian women who kill their adulterous husbands face the death penalty.
¨ In India, around 5,000 women a year are killed in disputes over dowry. (4,785 reported in 1992).
¨ In Pakistan, a raped woman must prove charges against her attacker by providing three male witnesses. If a rape charge is not proved, then the woman may be convicted of promiscuity and imprisoned. 15% of rape trials in Pakistan end this way.
¨ Under Pakistani law, adultery (including cases where couples have married after a divorce later ruled invalid) may be punished by death for a woman and flogging for the man.
¨ Rape is used by armies to dehumanise the enemy in the minds of their soldiers, as a form of torture, as a weapon of intimidation and "ethnic cleansing" and as a reward for the soldiers. Women are often seen as legitimate "spoils of war" and members of the armed forces are rarely punished. The social stigma of rape means that many rapes are not reported.
Some Possible Solutions:
¨ Equal access to land and capital should be granted to women.
¨ Support for women-based community development projects can support the status of women and help their community in general.
¨ Better educational opportunities for women will improve their social and economic position and help add to their awareness of family planning and other issues.
¨ Governments must be lobbied to amend their laws to remove discrimination.
¨ Governments should ratify and implement international human rights treaties and promote women’s rights through official education and training programs. Cultural traditions and customs must not be used to justify abuses or discrimination against women.
¨ Governments should be pressured to act to stamp out rape and sexual abuse committed by their security forces and to properly investigate reports of such incidents and punish those responsible.
¨ Female guards should be provided and be present for the of interrogation of female prisoners.
The Media
¨ Media "news" stories have to be "new" and exciting, combining novelty and drama within a limited timescale. Ideal events are natural or political catastrophes such as air crashes, earthquakes, cyclones, famines or coups.
¨ Positive stories from the Third World are rarely told because they tend to unfold slowly, undramatically. Increasing female literacy in Bangladesh can’t compete with a flood, although the links between a mother’s education and her children’s survival are direct and proven and the lives saved by educating women is likely to far exceed lives lost in a flood.
¨ The Western mainstream media is hooked on images of its own people going out and saving the world. News teams with expensive high-tech gear crammed into desperately underequipped clinics in Somalia, filmed starving children ("stick action"), interviewed newly arrived Western aid workers, then left, ignoring Somali doctors and nurses who had been there all along, working around the clock without pay.
¨ News and current affairs stories often reflect and reinforce the prejudices and biases of their target audience. In 80% of cases of paedophilia in Australia, the victims are female. Yet media stories on paedophiles focus almost exclusively on offenders who have molested little boys. Questions have been raised as to whether the media are trying deliberately to paint homosexuals as paedophiles, or whether they simply think that molesting little girls is quite acceptable by comparison.
¨ High concentration of media ownership threatens the independence of news reporting. Advertising and the commercial interests of the media owners will influence news bias. Even dramatic "hard" news is threatened by the advertisers demand for "fluff" or trivia to encourage a "buying mood".
¨ In 1967 the New Yorker magazine started running articles critical of US involvement in the Vietnam War. It opened eyes. The magazine began to attract a new, younger, more liberal readership. The audience grew - and profits plummeted. The advertisers had begun to pull out. They complained that it was attracting the wrong kind of reader - not the kind with disposable income to spend on Rolex watches and the like.
¨ News agencies and journalists often rely on information from official government sources via briefings, news conferences and media releases. By quoting official sources, the news media can add an air of credibility and authenticity to its information, as well as saving costs for its own investigative journalism and for background checking to avoid factual errors or libel suits. Thus, the government position is accepted by the news agencies, becomes 'fact' and is repeated by news media worldwide.
¨During the Gulf war, the media dutifully repeated the official US military line. The sheer volume and intensity of the information coming from the US Government became, almost automatically, the definition of what was happening. Conflicting voices and opinions struggled to be heard. The language of news reporting was consistently biased, for example the repeated references to "Allied Forces" and the Iraqi "war machine".
¨ Western news approaches the violence in Colombia solely from the angle of drugs and "drug barons". In fact, drugs have almost nothing to do with human rights violations in Colombia. In 1992, fewer than 2% of all political deaths were committed by drug traffickers. In the first 9 months of 1993, none was ascribed to drugs. 56% of political killings (excluding combat) with known killers in this time were carried out by government forces. 18% were ascribed to government backed paramilitary groups and 25% to rebel guerillas.
¨ Political issues and politicians are presented in terms of image and personality, rather than the issues of policy and performance. Adverse response to Government actions are treated as problems of perception. Former actor Ronald Reagan alone spent US $158 Million in his presidential campaign in 1980.
Cliché: "We bring you the news as it’s happening."
Comment: Modern technology has made "live" coverage almost essential for tv and radio networks, with journalists flown in to report stories as they break. Accuracy is the first victim - there is no time to check facts. Context is the second - journalists don’t understand themselves what is going on behind the action.
Question: Do you need to have news as it’s breaking? What are you going to do with it ..? Have you ever been left with the feeling that you don’t understand what’s happening? How often has a story been left hanging because it’s not "news" anymore?
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Crime and Punishment
¨ Severe sentences give perpetrators an extra incentive to eliminate or intimidate victims or witnesses in order to avoid conviction.
¨ Juries are less likely to give a conviction if the sentence is severe.
¨ New South Wales abolished the mandatory life sentence for murder in 1982. Victoria followed suit in 1986. No increase in homicide was reported in either state.
¨ The death penalty is used disproportionately against the poor, the illiterate and ethnic minorities. In the U.S., a black man convicted of a capital offence has a higher chance of being executed than a white man convicted of the same offence, and even more so if the victim was white. Out of 455 executions for rape in the U.S. in 1930-72, 405 of those executed were black.
¨ The use of mandatory life and death sentences usually has little to do with the circumstances and severity of the crime, but is more to do with political motivation and current public confidence in the justice system.
¨ An execution can never be undone if the convicted person is later found to have been innocent.
¨ There have been 400 known wrong capital convictions and 23 wrong executions in the U.S. this century.
¨ No deterrent value has ever been demonstrated in the death sentence. States in the U.S. which have the death penalty have the highest rates of violent crime, such as in Texas.
¨ Texas spends $2.3 million on every execution, three times the cost of a 40 year sentence.
¨ US law imposes a mandatory sentence of 5 years for possession of over 5g of crack cocaine (predominantly used by blacks) on a first offence and 100 times that amount of powder cocaine (predominantly used by whites) for the same sentence.
¨ In 1992, the US Public Health Service estimated that 76% of illicit drug users where white, 14% black and 8% Hispanic. Yet 92% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison in NY and 71% in California were black or Hispanic.
¨ The number of white juveniles brought into the U.S. criminal justice system increased by 1% during 1987-8 and 42% for non-whites.
¨ In many states in the U.S., people convicted of a felony crime lose their right to vote for life, even after they have served their sentence. Around 2% of the adult population has lost their right to vote in this way, but for blacks the figure is 13%. If present trends continue, it has been estimated that 30-40% of the next generation of black males in the U.S. will be stripped of their right to vote.
¨ In Western Australia, aborigines make up 3% of the population and 51% of people sentenced to prison.
¨ Despite falling crime rates, the public, influenced by media, perceive a growing crime problem.
¨ Prisons serve as finishing schools for career criminals, teaching them violence, fear, hopelessness, distrust, drug abuse and how to look out for No. 1. Once released, prisoners are poorly equipped with social and other skills to rejoin life in the outside world and often turn to crime again.
Some Possible Solutions:
¨ The death penalty should be abolished in all countries.
¨ Governments should aim to reduce poverty and provide adequate social services to reduce the number of people turning to crime out of need or frustration.
¨ Many crimes can be resolved without recourse to the criminal justice system, using mediation between offenders, victims, social workers and other specialists to determine an appropriate response, including some sort of pay-back to redress the harm done. New Zealand and Norway are already implementing such a system.
Class, Wealth and Labour
¨ On February 25, 1991 the board of directors of General Dynamics approved a plan whereby the top 25 executives would receive a bonus equal to their yearly salary if General Dynamics stock rose by 10 points and held that position for 10 days, and twice that if stocks rose by 20 points for 10 days. The executives then announced a massive layoff of more than 12,000 workers, cut spending and froze the salaries of anyone below their rank. Stocks rose, and by the end of the year the executives had earned for themselves $18 million in bonuses and made $600 million for the shareholders. In effect, each of the 24 board members pocketed the wages, self-respect and aspirations of 500 workers. Their ability to do this, and get away with it, is supported by a system designed to empower such a small group of people to do this to a much larger group.
¨ In the mid 1970s, CEOs of large organisations received 35 times more than the average worker. By the mid 1990s, the ratio was 187 times.
¨ In 1983, two thirds of all individual wealth in the US was owned by the top 10% of the population.
¨ By 1989 the richest 0.5% of US families had increased their share of total private wealth from 24% to 29%. They could have paid off the entire national debt and still been 10% richer than they were in 1983.
¨ In the US’s "Golden Era" 1947-1973, economic growth was evenly distributed across all sections of the population (2.5-3% from top fifth to bottom fifth). But from 1973-1993, this distribution was skewed such that the income of the richest 20% continued to grow at around 1%, but the lowest 20% fell by a similar amount.
¨ Traditional "working class" jobs are disappearing from the industrialised world, with workers moving into the service sector (or unemployment queues). Blue collar jobs are subcontracted to companies operating in the Third World, where pay and conditions are more to the liking of corporations.
¨ Globalization allows for the free flow of money, goods and capital around the world, and the freedom of corporations to shift at will in search of the cheapest labour and least restrictive working conditions. However, immigration and visa restrictions prevent workers from moving around the world at will to seek more favourable wages and conditions for themselves. Corporations can pick and choose where to employ workers, but workers must live and work where governments and corporations say they can.
¨ In 1995, 200 young workers died in a fire in a doll factory in Bangkok. They had been locked in so that they could work unsupervised and would not steal from the company.
¨ A worker making Disney merchandise in a factory in Haiti would have to work for 156 years to earn what the CEO of the Disney Corporation earns in just one hour.
¨ Multinational Corporations operating in the third world employ predominantly female workforces. Women are less likely to unionise, receive little support from male-dominated unions and male family members and are often culturally discouraged from challenging authority.
¨ Anger is directed away from the corporations by feeding racist and nationalist sentiments. When a plant in the US closes and then reopens in Mexico employing labour at four dollars a day, workers don’t blame the company or government but the Mexican workers. International competition is used as a basis for demanding more concessions from workers.
¨ Union support and membership is falling as fewer and fewer workers identify themselves as working class or blue collar.
Some Possible Solutions:
¨ The trade union movement needs to take a more internationalist approach, co-operating with unions and NGOs in other countries instead of defending parochial interests.
¨ Action on the shop floor often leads to dismissals and mistrust of unions. Unions need to build support in the community, networking with women’s, religious and other community groups.
¨ Consumer pressure can also be used effectively. Trade organisations, religious groups and consumers put pressure on the Gap clothing label over conditions in the company’s subcontracted sweatshops in El Salvador. The campaign embarrassed Gap so much that they suspended their contract with the subcontractor, putting all the workers’ jobs at risk. The campaigners responded by demanding that Gap take responsibility for how its clothes were manufactured, instead of running away from the problem. Gap was forced to intervene in the labour dispute and ensure fairer treatment of the workers.
home .. about me .. photo gallery .. drawings .. poetry(1990-1) .. poetry(1992-5) .. poetry(1996 +) .. writing .. rants .. links .. rings .. mail me