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Barbara Stocking at the 2003 Geographical Association Conference
In April 2003, Oxfam GB Director Barbara Stocking gave the following
speech at The Geographical
Association’s annual conference
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Photo: Oxfam |
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I think that many of you will know that Oxfam’s purpose is
about overcoming poverty and suffering in the world. We (Oxfam Great
Britain) work currently from 70 countries. We are part of the Oxfam
International family – there are 12 Oxfam’s around the
world and between us we actually work in 100 developing countries.
That is quite a lot of geography we cover.
For me, in the two years that I have been Director, I’ve
had a fantastic experience. It is an enormous privilege as Director
of Oxfam to go and visit a lot of our programmes in different countries
and to get really right inside those societies because we obviously
work with the poorest people in those countries. As such a lot of
partner agencies are very deep into the life that goes on there
and it’s fantastic the way as the Director of Oxfam you sort
of suddenly get transported right into what is really happening
in a particular community. Fantastic experiences like sleeping in
a Tuareg village under the stars and things. So, really I have had
a wonderful time apart from anything else in the two years I have
been Director.
I say that as my way of introduction. It’s a wonderful experience
to go to different places and particularly to really meet the people
in those countries. I have found it quite hard to understand those
people who don’t want to meet other people or understand other
places so I was rather taken with this newspaper headline that our
people in Global Citizenship brought to my attention. It says, “adrift
on an ocean of geographic ignorance”, and I thought it was
a rather catchy phrase … catchy but also rather frightening.
It was the headline on a study that you probably know, about what
young people know about places and facts about the world: in particular
young people between the ages of 18-24. Three out of ten of them
did not know where the Pacific Ocean was, even though, as you know,
it covers a very large part of the globe. That particular one, that
was a statistic on American young people but actually British and
European young people didn’t do all that well either. All
sorts of things about population: which countries had a population
of more than a billion? Who had nuclear weapons? All sorts of things
– they had really very little idea about. Just after September
11th, my colleague the Director of Oxfam America said to me when
we met, “Did you know, it has been like having geography lessons
on the TV every night because nobody knew where Afghanistan was”.
Again, that just brought it home to me about how desperate it is
when the world events that are happening, people don’t have
the knowledge of where they are or what their importance might be.
I guess I see as much history and geography into that. I will give
you just one little quote, which has actually been fed into the
Royal Geographic society: “If young people cannot find places
on a map and lack awareness of current events, how can they understand
the world’s cultural, economic and natural resource issues
that confront us?” Well, we from Oxfam would absolutely agree
with that. The things that we are trying to strive for in overcoming
poverty and suffering… if people really have no understanding
of people and place, no way to read the world, then we are really
lost. We need that to really engender that development awareness.
So, for us in Oxfam, it is incredibly important that young people
really do grow up with a knowledge of the world and the people that
live in it. I could talk about all sorts of things from Oxfam that
would help describe that. I could take natural disasters where we
are out doing the humanitarian work and so on. But what I thought
I would do is just take two examples of major chunks of work that
are going on in Oxfam at the moment and try to illustrate some of
the issues about why this geographic understanding is so really
critical to what we are doing and in particular what we hope that
young people are thinking about today in what they’re doing.
The first one is the issue of Iraq. For anybody who is interested
in it you can pick up these leaflets on our stand which are what’s
on our Cool Planet website for those who use it. It’s about
how to discuss a whole set of questions about war in Iraq. I hope
some of you will find that useful… Now to the points I want
to make about Iraq, and I will weave in some of the story about
what Oxfam is doing there because I am sure you will be quite interested
in that. The first issue for Oxfam was what did we think about the
war? Oxfam doesn’t necessarily come out against war; it is
not a pacifist organisation although of course intrinsically it
is a humanitarian agency which spends a lot of its time picking
up pieces after conflict. We have a tendency not to think that war
is a good thing but for example with the Rwanda genocide we did
actually advocate getting in troops to sort that out. So it is not
pacifist but clearly has a very strong leaning against war.
As a charity though, under the Charity Commission rules, we are
not allowed to get into the politics of this. Now we all find this
quite amusing because poverty is about politics - that is what it
is. Nevertheless, going to say something like “Stop the War”
is a political statement that does not necessarily fall immediately
out of our mandate/remit. So if we want to say something about war
we have to trace it back quite carefully to why it fits in with
our mandate to overcome poverty and suffering. Now, in the case
of Iraq, we did come out clearly and say that war from Oxfam’s
perspective was unjustifiable. The reason for that was twofold.
One was the humanitarian consequences, as we knew what was likely
to happen and as I will describe in a minute or two it is pretty
much what is happening, from when we were there in 1991.
After the Gulf War, Oxfam was one of the major players in Iraq
in trying to repair water and sanitation systems. Maybe that is
the first bit of where ‘knowledge’ that I guess you
would call geography or development comes in because the first point
is an understanding of what Iraq was like before 1991 and like now.
In the sense that it was a very well developed country. Now for
water and sanitation, that has particular implications. In most
of the countries that Oxfam works in, you can dig pit latrines and
you can drill bore holes for wells but that isn’t the way
that water works in Iraq. It’s like a country, just like the
UK, where it all works off the mains, off power stations and electricity
supply and I think that has come to you off the media recently.
What we knew before the war started was that if you bomb power stations
you basically switch water and sanitation off and therefore the
humanitarian consequences are dire because water is something that
you need immediately and urgently. Last November our engineers went
into Iraq to do an assessment of what the state of water sanitation
was then. The guy leading the team was the same guy who went in
in 1991 and he described how much of the water supplies were already
off then. Half a million tonnes of raw sewage was being pumped into
the two rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates. Goodness knows
what is going into it at this moment. He had seen in ‘91 what
had happened when the mains stopped working because basically the
sewage doesn’t get pumped away. What happens then? The pipes
burst, you get loads of sewage in the street and again that is what
is happening now ... We have just had reports that there are rising
lakes of sewage in the bottom of one of the hospitals that our teams
visited. That is what happens when you cut off electricity supplies
in a country that is so developed that it is dependent on electricity
to actually run its water and sewage supply. We were very convinced
before war started that the humanitarian consequences would be or
could be very significant.
The other thing that we were very concerned about was the whole
region and the whole set of questions about regional stability.
And of course that’s where ‘place’ geography comes
in very clearly. I don’t think, before this, most people knew
which countries were bordering Iraq for example. I certainly didn’t.
I had to go and have a good look. But it was very important to know
which countries for example would open their borders to refugees.
For us, which countries do we need to work in to prepare refugee
camps? Where are the refugees going to come? A bit of history: we
knew where they came before but also thinking about which countries
were likely to be on which side in all this and what would be possible.
So we had our teams out working before the war in Jordan, in Syria,
a presence in Turkey and also in Iran – all getting ready
to work on where refugees might flow in. So, for us, understanding
the geography of this area, understanding the implications on regional
stability if you took out the government in Iraq (no matter how
horrible) was the thing alongside the humanitarian consequences
that made us say ‘no we don’t think war is justified’.
I think to understand this it is so important to understand the
geography because the bit that is not on that map of course is probably
the most important thing that is going on in the Middle East. Just
to the west is Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories and
if you don’t understand that, you don’t understand quite
a lot of what’s going on in the Middle East. We know much
more about the collective punishment that is going on in the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, which is horrific, but equally so is the
fear amongst the Israeli population of endlessly being suicide bombed.
So if you don’t understand that you don’t understand
much about what is likely to happen in the Middle East and why for
instance the Al-Qaida terrorism really was able to take hold in
such a strong way. So that was the first point – we’d
been arguing against the war and trying to explain why but also
trying to explain why you need this knowledge.
I’ll come on to now what we are doing in terms of humanitarian
response. The first thing that we did was to start saying, well,
we are not present in Iraq, we don’t have a programme in Iraq
but what we need to do first of all is to understand where refugees
may go and get ourselves prepared for that. And this is, in Jordan
actually, where our staff are training local people in terms of
water supply. There’s one of our big water tanks and tap stands
and so on there but that’s the first thing we did. Again it
sort of all rolled off this because we have got a camp there for
5,000 people to which 11 people have so far arrived. That’s
fine though – I would rather have the camp ready because last
time well over 100,000 people arrived and they didn’t arrive
till four to five days after the war so you can’t quite tell.
Wars unfold in mysterious ways and you have to be prepared. That
is one of things we’re doing.
The other part which you will probably be interested in is what
we are now doing in Iraq. Although we are based in Amman in Jordan,
our teams are now going in through Kuwait, into the southern part
of Iraq. The situation is so insecure at the moment that our staff
can’t stay in overnight; they have to drive in and out on
the same day. Now that is really difficult of course, in terms of
how far you can actually go and what work you can do and this work
is all about water and sanitation. We were able to send out - I
don’t know if you saw from the television - a planeload of
water kit just last Thursday. There are fascinating complexities
you get into in Oxfam. Of course, I hadn’t realised that we
would need an export licence to do that because it was going into
Iraq. Because Iraq is a country under sanctions you need government
permission and an export licence to get anything into Iraq. You
just think how can we be in the middle of a humanitarian crisis
that I have to go through DTI and then through the UN to actually
permission to get water tanks into Iraq. That is fascinating to
me - the way the world works. But our teams are going in but what
they are trying to do is help Iraqi engineers really who are trying
to prepare pipe work and pumping stations, partly by providing them
with some of the tools that are necessary. There are some wonderful
stories about the way Iraqi engineers are actually trying to guard
places like pumping stations to stop them being looted because they
know how important it is to water and sanitation.
As you probably know, as you’ve heard on the news, the water
is off in Baghdad, or Basra, or Nasria or wherever so you will understand
how really bad the situation is. Where there is water a lot of it
is very contaminated water - there is no pure water. The saddest
part that I heard about just yesterday is there is a chlorine factory
somewhere in the south that is now on fire and as far as we know
it provides most of the chlorine supply for Iraq. You may say a
factory went up in smoke and that is pretty bad, but for us that
is devastating because that means we now have got to ship in all
the chlorine for all the water treatment because that factory won’t
be producing any more. So, trying to lay out for you a bit of what
we are trying to do - which is restore water and sanitation but
the complexities of the situation of getting in.
The water engineer who is our most senior person - we have seconded
him to UNICEF as their water coordinator actually. He was telling
me before he went what he was trying to plan to do having been there
before. He was describing to me the problem about pit latrines in
Baghdad. The real issue in Baghdad is you can’t really dig
pit latrines in gardens or certainly not in blocks of flats because
the water table is so high and all of the sewage starts filtering
into the water table. So before he went out he was saying to me,
“I’ve been thinking, everywhere else we work we’ve
had these fantastic pit latrine containers” (by which the
sewage gets chewed up by sort of anaerobic workings in these big
containers) and he was thinking his way through what are we going
to have to do if the sewage is really off and we can’t get
it repaired very quickly? I thought it was absolutely fascinating.
It is wonderful in Oxfam how you get to learn all sorts of things
that you never knew you wanted to know but now I know about the
water table in Baghdad and I know why we need pit latrine containers
there. So that’s what our people are currently working on,
as I say, in very difficult circumstances.
The third thing I just wanted to say about Iraq was the issue that
we are working on now. I have been talking about the practical work
but also all our advocacy work and what we are saying very strongly
at the moment is we want the UN to be the body that sets up a transition
government in Iraq. It goes back to that geography. We have very
great concerns about the regional stability if a body/authority
of government is set up by the coalition government, particularly
the US as the occupying power – it doesn’t have legitimacy.
An occupying power doesn’t have a legitimacy to set up a new
government. The UN is the only body that has that legitimacy so
we are arguing very strongly that both what is the possibility of
immediate regional stability but also long term stability in that
region. It’s very important that the UN really takes control
of that part of the activity. All of that requires not only a good
knowledge of geography but also quite a lot of history knowledge
too. Looking back at previous occupations tells you what will happen
if you put into Iraq, as the British did in 1917, a puppet leader.
Then there was rebellion within two years. Now that is the sort
of thing you could easily see people play out in a completely different
way in the 21st century but it has the same risks there.
Now the last bit on Iraq I just want to show you is a lovely little
story about connection around the world. This is a little boy in
Um Quasar who is wearing a T-shirt and his T-shirt it turns out
comes from Wales. Now how did this T-shirt get there? It is just
a school on the front there. This T-shirt got there because a school
in Wales gave their spare sweatshirts to Oxfam. Oxfam couldn’t
actually sell them in the shops so it went to our Wastesaver set
up in Huddersfield. Some of that is turned into rag but some of
it is sold on and again makes money for Oxfam and is sold cheaply
overseas. This boy’s family had clearly bought this T-shirt
for him somewhere in Um Quasar. This was spotted, I think, in a
Times Educational Supplement and the school in Wales is now trying
to get in contact with the boy and his family in Um Quasar. This
is fantastic and, I mean, a terribly and immediately obvious way
that we are working in a completely interdependent world and I think
it is a lovely story for the end of what I was going to say about
Iraq. So let’s hope some nice connections made out of that
help children learn.
Now I want to move to another area. What we talk about in Iraq
is clearly our humanitarian work and about half of our overseas
spend is in humanitarian work – water, sanitation and food.
But the other half is spent on our overseas programmes and backing
our overseas programmes up is our campaigning work. Our campaigning
work is really about trying to get at the causes of poverty. I think
Oxfam has recognised throughout its history that it is no good just
tackling say, providing water and sanitation or whatever. You want
to get to the bottom of why these things are happening to people.
So people often say to me, “but Oxfam’s just started
to campaign” and I say, no actually. In 1942, when the people
in Oxford set up Oxfam, the first thing they did (which was against
famine in Greece actually)… the first thing they did was to
lobby the government about the blockade of shipping that was going
into Greece that was stopping food getting through to a famine ridden
country. So that even came before people started giving money to
the Greek Red Cross. So it is not just trying to help provide relief,
it is actually trying to get at the causes of some of this.
So our campaigning work is very much about causes and one of the
biggest campaigns that we have got going on at the moment which
some of you may know about is Make Trade Fair. What all that is
about is about saying that the world’s rules on trade are
simply completely unfair to poor people. We try to illustrate that
through a whole range of different issues: whether it’s about
subsidies, farming subsidies in the North - not just the EU but
America - whether it’s about commodity prices (of which our
coffee campaign is an example), whether it’s about access
to medicines and the way the intellectual property rules stop poor
people getting access to the latest HIV/AIDS drugs and so on. They
are all about the way trade works in the world. For us this has
been quite interesting because most development agencies have not
thought that trade was a good thing. There has been a sort of inherent,
long-standing, sort of slightly anti-trade view of the world, particularly
above the biggest campaigning agency. Oxfam took quite a stand when
it came out and said “It’s not that trade’s wrong,
it’s that the trade’s not fair”. It isn’t
a level playing field – people can’t compete in this
world the way it is set up. The reason that I would like to say
we did it was because actually poor people are in trade. 70% of
the world’s poor people live in rural areas, not to speak
of the trading that goes on in inner cities, but all those poor
people in rural areas are in trade in every way. Any surplus they
have got, any way they can find natural products – any way
to sell anything they are in to all that. So the idea that any of
us could nicely say, you know, trade isn’t sort of right for
Oxfam as a charity is just ridiculous really. It wouldn’t
be meeting our concerns about what poverty is all about. So we are
unapologetic about talking about trade and making trade fair.
The one example I wanted to give you on this is the one that’s
on the overhead here, which is about sugar. And we have some special
sugar packages that we have put together for the World Summit in
Johannesburg and it says on it “Less sweet than it tastes
– 100% pure EU sugar” and explains on the back how it’s
made in Europe and dumped in Africa. Now, I really enjoyed this.
I went out and saw the team who were doing our campaigning out there
because actually within the conference thing itself, which was fantastically
security controlled, you are not allowed to demonstrate at all –
fair enough! But what our people were doing was going round and
putting sugar sachets on all the cafe tables so that people were
actually picking them up and reading them. They were being followed
by security police who kept coming round behind them and trying
to pick up all the sugar sachets to take them away again. In fact
it got to be such a catchy thing on the local radio station they
were offering a reward to the first person who could bring in a
sachet of the sugar which was wonderful media coverage that we didn’t
expect.
Anyway let’s get on with this issue.
What’s the problem then about sugar? The problem about sugar
is that to make sugar for the table it’s about 50% cheaper
to make it from sugar cane than it is from sugar beet. Of course
in Europe we have beet sugar - that is our sugar production. The
way the Common Agricultural Policy is set up sugar producers are
guaranteed a price – quite a high price and with subsidies
built in as well as that. So there is a massive incentive to produce
a lot of sugar. In fact the amount of money that goes into the EU
in subsidies and price support is 1.6 billion Euros a year (£1bn
a year into sugar subsidies in Europe) of which Britain gets a significant
portion: British Sugar is a pretty strong in all this. So what happens?
Sugar gets sold to the processors here and you get a high guaranteed
price but because of the over-production the producers can then
afford to dump it onto the sugar market i.e. selling it at a much
lower price onto that market than it ever costs to produce. This
lowers the price of sugar on the world market and makes it impossible
for people in developing countries to actually compete in that market.
They need to compete because some of those in the south are actually
trying to sell their sugar, not just in their own country, but across
borders into other countries. Hence why we are doing this, particularly
in South Africa.
For example Mozambique is a good sugar producer and is trying to
sell into South Africa and others. Here is a picture of a Mozambique
child in one of our projects in Mozambique, actually having their
own break and having a chew at the sugar cane. But the story of
Mozambique is that since 1992 and when peace was settled there,
the country has really been trying to develop. It is one of the
less corrupt African countries and they are really trying to do
something and they want to invest in sugar because that is a very
good crop. They simply cannot do it. They can’t sell outside
the country. They can’t export to Europe because there are
quotas on how much they sell into Europe. I think the proportions
are something like (I might get my figures wrong) Europe exports
100 million tonnes a year and they are only allowed to export into
Europe eight million tonnes a year – that is a maximum on
their quota. So they have no chance in competing because of all
the guaranteed prices and so on. They can’t export locally
either. Now what seems so ridiculous to me about all that is that
we not long ago had the Mozambique floods. Everybody saw the stuff
on the television. Everybody felt terribly sympathetic for all the
people in Mozambique…The woman that we saw giving birth up
a tree, women giving their children dirty water and so on. We asked
for money for an appeal to deal with that flood and all that money
came flowing in. But in the same country those very same people
are trying to stand up for themselves and get their own living to
get themselves out of poverty, but we are stopping them do it. We
are stopping them doing it by all the rules of the game that we
in the North, including as I say America, are setting up - world
rules that are applied through the World Trade Organisation and
so on. That is just a story to explain why we feel so strongly,
and I hope you do to, about why making trade fair is so absolutely
critically important. It is no good just giving people aid, that
won’t do it. It won’t get them out of poverty but those
people are very keen to get themselves out of poverty and to do
that work but you have to have world rules that make that possible.
They are absolutely stacked against them at the moment.
Now if you want to look at any more of these dumping examples,
there is a nice one again on the Cool Planet website – Milking
It – which you are welcome to have a look at and I think there
are leaflets about that on our stand as well. But there are many
products that are dumped because of subsidies in developing countries
– milk is one of them, cotton is another problem, wheat, maize,
all of those things, milk, sugar, a lot of the basic commodities.
There is really completely unfair competition because of the subsidies
and the dumping that then results. Anyway if you are interested
in looking at that, the milk one is a nice example.
We are using all these examples to try and bring it home to people
that we need to Make Trade Fair and we are trying to make a Big
Noise about that. Here is the wonderful Chris from Coldplay who
has got the trade thing and has got maketradefair.com (which is
where you can go on the web for that) on his hand, and at all his
Coldplay concerts he is now having Make Trade Fair on his hand.
He keeps getting it wrong because Make Trade Fair the logo is two
equal signs (trying to make things equal) and he keeps putting three
equal signs on his hands and we can’t quite get him to stop
it. But he has been doing this quite spontaneously around concerts
all over the US and all over Europe. What we are trying to say is
we have got to be able to get to young people and with the people
that they respect and they are interested in and he is one of them.
Making the Big Noise is getting people to sign up, particularly
on the website, and put their own voices onto tapes to say why they
want to Make Trade Fair. We have been doing quite a lot of popular
campaigning and this is just a picture of Wales where there was
a very big event. It is the South Wales Inter-Cultural Community
Arts Carnival in Cardiff and Swansea and about 1,300-1,500 people
from local communities really got engaged with this whole set of
issues about Make Trade Fair and really demonstrated on the streets
and much larger numbers of people. At the big event there was 35,000
people who made the Big Noise to say we want to Make Trade Fair.
That was sent with Roger Morgan to the World Summit in Johannesburg
to say that the people of Wales wanted to be there making trade
fair as well which was fantastic! When you get those sorts of numbers
of people saying that, that’s the moment when politicians
start to really listen. I’ll tell you one of the reasons,
in case any of you are donors, I’ll just add on why politicians
often listen to us. In this country we now have 600,000 individual
donors, many of them giving us quite a small amount of money. It
can be the £2 a month – that is terrific. The fact is
we have got 600,000 people who support Oxfam. When I go to see government
ministers I know I have got more people behind me than the Labour
Party and Tony Blair knows that too. That is really quite important
to know that degree of support for those issues is all there and
gives you tremendous power in really advocating for these supporters.
So that’s about Oxfam’s work overseas and bringing
it back to some of the campaigning that we do at home. I just wanted
to finish by one bit about bringing it back home to the UK and the
issues about diversity and about identity. The reason I am saying
is because after September 11th I think people began to start asking
questions about identity much more, sometimes very negatively as
we know. You know, who are the Muslims in our community? People
were labelled with a particular identity and yet we all know (in
fact our Honorary President, Amartya Sen, has written some very
nice stuff on this) about how people all have multiple identities.
You know, I might be British but I might also be Bangladeshi. I
might be a British Muslim. I might be British Christian and be Bangladeshi.
I might be a young person and at different times and at different
moments we all want to emphasise one aspect of our identity over
others. At this moment I am the Director of Oxfam, when I get home
tonight I’m mum. I am one of the UK’s great, great,
cohort of mothers. That is an identity that I belong to. We all
know we have these multi-identities but it is actually about recognising
those and enabling our young people to understand what their identities
are. Then amongst them to really enjoy the differences that people
have amongst and between us in the range of those identities and
again that is what we are looking for in Oxfam really. The young
people really to understand a lot more about their own identity
and the link they have sometimes in different places all around
the world but also to be able to share that and to share the richness
of that and to really enjoy that diversity. That is part of it,
but to me the other part of it is that when you understand the diversity
and enjoy it, you get much less frightened of it. If you are less
frightened of it you can see behind all these sets of diversities
to understand common humanity and that I guess for Oxfam is the
fundamental of all of this. What we are saying right across the
world is we are all people and it is that common humanity that really
makes us want to work together.
To finish off, my most wonderful experience in the two years with
Oxfam have been actually when there are moments when you feel that
wonderful common identity, common humanity with people right across
the world. I have had wonderful times. One of my ... it is almost
funniest really ... was sitting in the Rajasthan desert with a bunch
of women under a sort of slight awning in their backyard, in 45
degree centigrade heat, absolutely baking (but they were used to
it of course). We were sitting talking about methods of contraception
and what our husbands in our various cultures would or would not
go along with – fantastic, just wonderful sharing! There were
moments in the West Bank where I was sitting in Nablis with a bunch
of women who were explaining to me how awful it is when the night
comes down and the curfew starts because of the tanks rolling in
and they just start firing everywhere. Of course their children
can’t get to sleep. Again, common understanding of human experiences.
Perhaps a really nice one to end on, it is lovely when I get off
a plane in some far country and lo and behold there is one of Oxfam’s
programme staff. There is one of our nice African programme staff
who comes up and gives me a big hug because I am part of the Oxfam
family. You feel like, yeah, we are all linked, we’re all
these people together, let’s both understand diversity but
also understand common humanity as well. I am asking all of you
lot to get out there and get our young people able to understand
that and see that because that is what we need if we are going to
solve some of the world’s problems.
Question: What proof of your got that your campaigns work?
We are collecting evidence. We have some proof from the past. For
instance the Jubilee Debt Campaign when that got really mobilised
around the world, something that was seen originally by government’s,
the World Bank and so on as completely off the wall, impossible,
stupid. Suddenly, well not suddenly, but very gradually over a number
of years began to be ... ‘well, yeah, we had to do something
about this’ and the whole Debt Relief plan work actually came
into effect. So that is the big evidence that it can work. We can
see from more minor ways. Let me give you a nice one on the trade
one. Just before Christmas, you may have heard this. In Ethiopia
there was a factory that was nationalised by the government in 1975.
This factory is now owned by Nestle after a series of changing hands
and the compensation has never yet been paid. The factory was worth
$1.5m and the Ethiopian government was prepared to pay $1.5m. Nestle
were trying to get it set up at current prices and wanted $6m. They
had been negotiating it through the World Bank through a negotiation
arbitration body, MEGA. MEGA told us that Nestle were completely
intransigent and we got this message through our Ethiopian partners
and colleagues there and could Oxfam do anything about it. We gave
that story to the Today programme. It didn’t actually say
much about Oxfam and I don’t think a lot of people knew that
Oxfam had done it. When we did that though we got 40,000 people
bombarding the Nestle website within 24 hours saying how absolutely
disgraceful it was that a country that was in famine was being really
ripped off by Nestle who were getting $6bn profit a year and they
wouldn’t even stick to taking this $1.5m for this factory.
Within 48 hours Nestle had backed down and said “No, we will
now renegotiate”. In fact they settled at $1.5m and agreed
to give $1.5m back to famine relief. So that’s what you can
do. It is not very often that you get a wonderful one like that
where you can see something happening so directly but that’s
what gives me the faith that actually if you keep going at it you
can really shift something. Because politicians recognise where
the public mood is and that is what happened in that case. The few
who ran Nestle recognised very strongly that it was not in their
interest to have the whole British public against buying Nestle.
Question: There is a lot of emphasis in geography now on development
and poverty and so on as there has been for a number of years on
environmental issues. Can you comment on my concern that we are
over-loading our young people with the problems of the world at
a very tender age. One of my GCSE students said to be not long ago,
“I wish I hadn’t done geography, it is so worrying –
environmental issues can’t be solved, you’re teaching
two sides to everything. Now it’s poverty and the world’s
such a mess”. I constantly feel this – 13, 14 15 year
olds – are we over doing it?
Well I think you would know that better than me but my answer to
that would be, if you stop taking the big problems and focus on
the lives of ordinary people, poor people, in this case, you see
such wonderful and dramatic things happening and enthusiasm, and
real ways of working. It shouldn’t promote despair, it should
promote how we can help opportunity. Just looking round Oxfam, all
the pictures that we use, we don’t show people in despair.
You might have to if you get someone in a war situation but all
our development work is showing how people are getting on and doing
something for themselves and being positive. I will tell you from
the visits I do, there is fantastic joy in loads of the projects
I have seen. So I think we have to balance. It’s not that
there isn’t joy in that as well. The other thing we are absolutely
convinced about with young people is you have to give them some
way of doing something which is why some of the campaigning is so
important that you can make a difference. You can do something,
not just on your own but if you get momentum around some of these
issues it really does make a difference. Some of the campaigning
activities, you know, we sit and argue in Oxfam ‘well it is
OK but does it really make a difference? Does it change anything?’
But apart from anything else sometimes the buzz it gives people
of being out there and showing that they care. That’s important
and it does change. I was talking to somebody just over lunch who
had been out on the Stop War campaign with Iraq. Well it didn’t
stop the war but, my goodness, those million people being out on
the streets didn’t half give Tony Blair a bit of a shake and
make him treat George Bush differently and made him focus on some
of the real concerns about what was going on. So I think it is also
about showing people what they can do to make a difference, especially
young people who just want to do something. But I take your point,
I understand that too.
Chair’s closing comments: Thanks very much once again. I
think it is inspiring to hear and it is very reassuring to know
that those 600,000 people in Oxfam GB who (I am sure some of you
here must be in that group) are actually led in such an able and
direct way. I feel very reassured as a parent, and as someone involved
in education. I understand all the issues about the guilt and the
overload of our society but I have been reassured very recently
by the passion which young people feel about big issues. Even if
they can’t always solve them, they can make their voice heard.
I think whilst Oxfam goes on its education route and produces its
excellent resources and supports teachers, we are all in this together.
Oxfam are helping us enormously. As geographers, that’s what
we’re about - inspiring young people to actually take on these
issues and get them central in their geographical education. Thanks
very much indeed.
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