THE FIGHT AGAINST INJUSTICE AND POVERTY

More than a billion people in the world today cannot afford the bare essentials of life. The rich countries of the North, with only 25% of the world’s people, consume 80% of the earth’s resources. Eighty-three per cent of the world’s population receives only 18% of the world’s income. One in three people in the developing world do not have enough to eat.

Oxfam has worked for many years with poor communities throughout the world. Our experience tells us that poverty has many causes, including conflict and environmental degradation. The ‘feminisation of poverty’ means that more and more women are finding themselves impoverished relative to men and that in any poor community women suffer the most. Finally, we know that many of the causes of – and therefore solutions to – poverty in the South rest in the hands of the powerful in the North.

The causes of poverty

Armed conflict is a cause of immense suffering in the southern hemisphere. All but two of the 127 armed conflicts which happened in the world between 1945 and 1990 took place in developing countries. During World War II, 52% of war-related deaths were among civilians. Now the United Nations puts the figure at 84%. There are 17 million refugees around the world, and a further 24 million people displaced within the borders of their own countries.

There is a pattern to all this. Impoverished families trek into the nearest centres of potential relief, swelling the shanty towns and refugee camps, where insanitary conditions increase the likelihood of disease and death. Besides creating large numbers of refugees and internally displaced people, conflict disrupts the production cycles in rural areas. The economically active may be killed or forcibly conscripted. Abandoned farms are laid waste, destroying the chances of a speedy return to cultivation. The impoverishment caused by war increases pressure on the environment, often with disastrous effects.

Rape, torture, mutilation and child abduction are common, and terror is often used as a deliberate weapon. Women are hit particularly hard. Many are left to shoulder the increased burden of looking after their families alone. Eighty per cent of the world’s refugees are women and children.

Inequality and war

Whether expressed in racial, ethnic, religious or other terms, it is the inequitable distribution of wealth and power which commonly underlies civil conflicts. In Sudan for example, it is the historical ‘underdevelopment’ of the south of the country with its largely Bantu population, in contrast with the investment in the Arab north, which is one of the major causes of the civil war. Inequalities in access to land are also a major source of poverty and conflict. And the imbalance in wealth at the national level is often made worse by international economic relationships.

In El Salvador, as in much of Central America, most of the land is owned by a tiny number of companies and individuals. During the earlier part of the century, the country’s growth was based on coffee and cotton, produced on large plantations. Subsistence farmers, who received little support, were pushed into the mountains.

The collapse of coffee and cotton prices in the 1970s led to widespread impoverishment, and helped to strengthen a growing demand for land among the poor. The popular land reform movement was met with violent repression, which plunged the country into a civil war which lasted almost two decades.

Rwanda – failure of the UN

The role of the international community and the United Nations are of central importance in the debate about conflict situations. The tragedy gripping Rwanda is a case in point: the catastrophe started many years before the campaign of genocide began. For years, many international donors, including France and the United States, supplied arms to the Rwandan government, despite the evidence that the Government itself was a gross violator of human rights, and despite the fact that these same powerful nations were official “observers” to Rwanda’s peace process.

Some of these arms exported to the former government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front continue to claim lives to this day – including the anti-personnel mines, which even now maim and kill thousands of refugees per month as they return from neighbouring countries.

Throughout the crisis, the UN Security Council delayed action which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. The UN has proved itself totally inadequate in situations of peace-enforcing and certainly in need of urgent reform to prevent future avoidable disasters like Rwanda.

World Poverty – an environmental timebomb

Environmental crises are no longer in the future: they are already here. The poorest people are hardest hit, because they are directly dependent upon natural resources for their livelihoods, and they have no alternatives when these resources are threatened.

For most of these people the quality of their lives – indeed their very survival – depends fundamentally upon the health of the natural environment. Thus, for many people the rapid deterioration of their environment undermines the daily struggle to maintain, let alone improve their living standards.

In two decades of drought and deforestation, many villages of the Sahel – the arid land along the southern fringe of the Sahara desert – have lost as much as half of their cultivatable land. The fine balance between the earth and its farmers, sustained for centuries has broken down under the pressure to grow more cops to earn more cash to service ever-increasing national debts and to finance “development”.

The people of Amazonia – the Yanomami and Kayapo Indians, for example have survived for generations by managing the rainforest in a sustainable way. Now, millions of hectares of forest are burned and bulldozed each year to make way for mining operations, oil drilling, cattle ranches and landless families from outside the forest. From Amazonia to the Sahel, environmental devastation is closely linked to poverty and injustice.

Every year, more than 6 million hectares of land, an area almost the size of Ireland, are turning into desert, more than doubling the rate of the last three centuries. At present rates of destruction, one fifth of the world’s crop lands will have disappeared by the end of the century. The United Nations Development Programmes estimates that up to 14 million people have already become ‘environmental refugees’.

Environmental refugees

Those abandoning the land make for the cities, where they hope for a better life. Their growing numbers add to the sprawling shanties at the margins of cities, which in turn become sources of major environmental hazards.

Many calls go out from environmentalists, academics and northern governments for rapid control of the world’s population to curb the strain on the environment. The focus on high rates of population growth in some developing countries distorts one key fact: that the affluence of the few in the North is more damaging to the global environment than the population growth in the South.

If the world’s resources were more fairly distributed they could easily support the growing numbers of people in developing countries. But the high consumption levels per capita in developed countries, and our expectations of increasing levels of material wealth help to maintain millions of people in the South in extreme poverty.

The annual consumption of energy in the USA where the population growth rate is 0.8 per cent, is equivalent to 55 barrels of oil per person. In Bangladesh, with a growth rate of 2.5 per cent, each citizen consumes the equivalent of 3 barrels a year. To sustain its much smaller annual population increase, the USA will require an additional 110 million barrels, while Bangladesh will require only 8.7 million.

Sustainable development

This is not to say that the right of people in the developing world to control their fertility is not an issue. Curbing population growth in the south will mainly affect the local environment; in contrast, consumption and pollution in the North have immediate and a direct impact on the global environment: the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming.

When people are struggling to survive, it’s unrealistic to expect them to conserve resources for the future. An effective approach to sustainable development must support poor communities in their efforts to meet their basic needs, while caring for their environment on which they depend. This requires action to increase food security, improve shelter, sanitation and water supplies, provide better health care and education and increase incomes. It also means courageous action on land reform.

Women’s needs and opportunities are especially important, as women often play the major role in environmental management. It is usually the women of a community who are responsible for gathering water and firewood and growing food for families. They are therefore the first to feel the effects of environmental degradation.

Their ill-health, repeated and often unwanted pregnancies, and the burden of caring for small children unaided also limit their capacity to play a full part in the sustainable management of their environment. Enabling women to contribute to and benefit from more effective management of natural resources is vital, if we are to save the earth.

Ripping Off The Developing World

Unfair trade and debt pressures have combined to ensure that the industrialised North continues to profit at the expense of developing countries in the South

The World Market price for sugar crashed in 1985. From a high of 28.66 US cents per pound in 1980 the price dropped to a meagre 3.51 cents per pound in December 1984. On the island of Negros in the Philippines, which grew 70 per cent of the country’s sugar, the broad green fields of cane weren’t worth cutting. A quarter of a million landless sugar workers were thrown out of work and within a year two thirds of children on the verdant plush island of Negros, were malnourished.

Before this, the market and the price for sugar had been good. The USA and the Europe had been large sugar importers. But by 1985 the market had collapsed. Subsidies for sugar growers under the Common Agricultural Policy had turned the 12 countries of the EC from importers to exporters of sugar. US subsidies to its growers boosted production there.

Then sweeteners made from corn syrup began to replace sugar in the US market. By 1984 the USA – the world’s largest sugar importer had halved its imports. A trading disaster had hit: traditional markets disappeared and millions of tonnes of subsidised sugar flooded onto the world market.

The near starvation of the people of Negros was only one visible and immediate result of the price collapse. Sugar-producing countries in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean faced a cash crisis as export income tumbled. The cut-backs they were forced to make inevitably hit the poorest people hardest.

It was an international problem, requiring international action from the countries whose trade policies and protectionism had combined to produce the crisis. However the commodity crisis continues today: the case of sugar in the Philippines is one of many. Today many developing countries remain heavily dependent on selling a small number of primary commodities, such as tea, coffee, cocoa or copper.

In sub Saharan Africa, ten countries rely on single commodities for more than half their export income. Zambia for example earns 97 per cent of its foreign exchange from copper; Uganda earns 95 per cent from coffee. During the ’80s, the terms of trade for developing countries – the purchasing power of exports against the price of imports – fell by 30%.

In many cases this dependence on a few commodities is the legacy of colonialism, but it has become endemic because of the weak trading position of developing countries as providers of cheap raw materials to the industrial north. One of the major obstacles preventing poor countries from breaking out of this dependence is the system of tariffs and quotas which governments of the North use to protect their industries from competition.

According to the World Bank, trade barriers in the North are costing developing countries $55 billion a year in lost export earnings, more than all the aid given in any one year by the North to the South. Without changes in the terms of global trading relationships, the poorest nations are caught in a downward spiral.

Caught in the debt trap

In 1991 developing countries transferred US$ 20 billion more to the rich nations of the North (in the form of interest and capital repayments) than they received in new loans an investment. They have been caught in this trap every year since the debt crisis broke in 1982, yet most are further away from paying off their debts than ever.

By the end of 1990, the total external debt of developing countries stood at US $1,430 billion, compared with US $900 billion in 1982.

As these facts and figures indicate, there is a deadly interaction between trade and debt pressures operating on the world’s poorest economies. While the deteriorating trade environment has eroded the purchasing power of exports from the South, debt repayments are claiming a growing proportion of trade earnings for many poor countries.

Debts have to paid in hard currency – which has to earned through trade. As debt service obligations rise and the real prices of exports fall, an increasing proportion of trade earnings are being diverted from domestic expenditure – health care, food subsidies, social welfare, etc., towards creditors in the North. Both Latin America and subSaharan Africa now spend more than 25% of their foreign exchange earnings on debt servicing.

For an increasing number of developing countries, international trade – once upon a time an engine of growth – has become part of the mechanism for maintaining a haemorrhage of capital resources from south to north.

The debt crisis of the 1980s exposed the weaknesses of the southern countries within the international economic system. It also forced southern governments, faced with a sharp cut in export revenues and a rising debt burden, to introduce painful policy reforms, often under the auspices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund “structural adjustment programmes.”

The most visible victims of Structural adjustment have been the poorest, most marginalised people, particularly the urban poor and especially poor women. The withdrawal of government subsidies on basic goods such as food, kerosene and on public transport hits those on the lowest incomes the hardest – particularly when devaluation, a common component of structural adjustment, boosts inflation.

The poorest also lose out when cuts in government spending lead to the closure of health clinics, schools and other welfare services. In the Philippines, where at least half the population of 62 million is officially categorised as poor, the government spent over a third of its budget on debt servicing in 1993; in the 1994 budget, a shocking 1% of the budget was allocated to health care.

Urgent reform needed

The World Bank is the largest single financier of development projects in the world, having committed US$23 billion in 1993 to southern governments. In spite of this, at the recent 50th anniversary celebrations of the World Bank and The IMF in Madrid, many developing country governments and the vast majority of voluntary groups said they’d had enough of the two institutions. Calls for major overhaul of the Bank and Fund went out from the every corner of the globe. With an admin budget of $1 billion, even many friends of the Bank called for a slimmer version.

Most complaints about the Bank and the Fund focus on their profoundly undemocratic nature: the World’s ten richest nations hold 54 % of the World Bank votes, with the US alone controlling 17 per cent. These ten nations, of course, represent less than 20 percent of the world’s population.

In contrast, 48 Sub-Saharan African nations have five percent of the World Bank votes. The President of the Bank is always an American, possibly to protect the huge return ($1.80 ) on every American dollar invested in the Bank. Not that the Bank projects are so successful on the ground: an internal review in 1992 found that 37 percent of completed projects were considered “unsatisfactory”, up from ten percent in 1981. The same review found that the bigger the project, the more likely it was to fail.

Having ruined the birthday celebrations with our damning appraisals of their work, the World Bank broke with its longtime policy of silence and held a press conference in Madrid to hit back (said The Guardian) at Oxfam and Greenpeace. They won few friends with their temper tantrum and the song of the day was “it’s your party and you can cry if you want to . . .”

Women: Dying To Be Heard

There are many ways of summarizing women's status relative to men's. One is economic; the United Nations summed up the economic situation of women over a decade ago in a way which still rings true: "Women constitute half the world's population, perform nearly two thirds of its work-hours, receive one tenth of the world's income and own less than one-hundredth of the world's property."

Yet women are biologically stronger, live longer than men and naturally outnumber them. Where they do not, it is only because of the effects of war or because they have suffered severe and systematic discrimination.

Throughout the world, girl children are born slightly heavier than boy children, giving them a natural advantage over male infants; however in poor countries, particularly in rural areas, constant child bearing, lack of local health care and the conscious or unconscious neglect of girl children in favour of boys all make living more hazardous for women.

Women activists from south east Asia continually call for international recognition of the “missing 1 million women” from their region – those girl children who have died through foeticide, female infanticide and neglect in the face of stringent population control policies which lead families to favour the boy child.

As they continue in life, the news doesn’t get much better for women: over half the women in SubSaharan Africa are malnourished; every minute, of every day a woman in the Third World dies due to a complication of pregnancy or childbirth. In fact a woman in Africa is fifty times more likely to die due to pregnancy than a woman in an industrialised country. Almost everywhere the gap in literacy between men an women continues to widen: in 17 countries, over 90% of women are illiterate.

All these factors which conspire to keep women poor and powerless are rooted in the unequal distributions of power and status between the genders. Until very recently women, especially poor women, were “invisible” to economists and development planners, regardless of their contributions to the local economy and to family welfare.

Perhaps the greatest achievement of the World Conference on women in Nairobi 1985 was that it focused the world’s attention on the struggles facing poor women. The last decade has seen a growing awareness of the plight of women, and an increasing recognition of women’s economic contribution.

As we come into 1995 – which is designated the UN Year of Women – data is beginning to emerge which verifies women’s contribution and their unequal access to productive assets such as land, credit and social welfare provisions. There is finally an international effort to unfold a development pattern which acknowledges, empowers and enriches women.

The most recent investigations have demonstrated clearly that the economic decline which is gripping the developing world and the consequent “tightening of the national belt” have hit women hardest. The phenomenon of longer hours for less pay, in unsafe and un-secure jobs is increasing throughout the developing world. As governments cut back on public services, it is women who pick up the slack: women make do with less, care for family members when health care or hospitalisation is unaffordable and educate children when school fees make formal schooling an option for the wealthy only.

The challenge to development agencies such as Oxfam is twofold: one priority is to influence reform of economic adjustment policies so that they do not interfere with women’s basic human rights to health care, education and safe working conditions.

At the same time Oxfam supports women’s community groups throughout the world. We provide funds for comprehensive health care, education, and agriculture work, and for training which empowers women, and enables them to clearly define and fight for their social, economic and political rights.

Throughout the world, women and girl children are literally dying to be heard; let’s hope that in the International Year of Women, those in power are willing to listen.