{"id":8504,"date":"2005-07-01T15:59:00","date_gmt":"2005-07-01T14:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=8504"},"modified":"2024-05-02T00:53:13","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T23:53:13","slug":"8504","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulvallely.com\/archive\/?p=8504","title":{"rendered":"The Long Walk to Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Live 8 programme notes \u2013 by Paul Vallely<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It has been a long journey that brings you here today. Far longer than you might imagine.<\/p>\n

It began twenty years ago, in 1985. On 13th\u00a0 July, the day of Live Aid. A day when the entire globe seemed to come together with a single common purpose.<\/p>\n

The world was responding to the plight of the 30 million people who were suffering and dying in a terrible famine that had swept across Africa. What made it different from that unhappy continent\u2019s previous tragedies was that this time children were dying on our television screens. Before our very eyes. Every day, for weeks and months, brought more terrible images. On 13th July the world stopped what it was doing to unite, in a clear moment of absolute certainty.<\/p>\n

The largest audience the planet had ever seen \u2013 more than a billion and a half people \u2013 joined together. That day as many as 98 per cent of the world\u2019s television screens received the broadcast. It was the biggest collective event in human history. And, more than that, it was to do something unequivocally good.<\/p>\n

Twenty years on and another day arrives which, thanks in part to you, the world will remember in the same way.\u00a0 2nd July. The day of Live 8.<\/p>\n

But the journey from Live Aid to Live 8 is not just a piece of history. It is an inner journey we all must make. It is a journey from charity to justice.<\/p>\n

Live Aid raised that year over $100 million, the most by far that had ever been collected for charity by one event. That was a huge amount of trees and dams, cows and camels, schools and health clinics, medicines and blankets, tents and toys and tools, research grants and workshops, and ships and planes full of wheat and sorghum and beans and maize. I know because I went across Africa with Bob Geldof to decide how to spend it.<\/p>\n

But that passage from Mali in the west to Ethiopia in the east, and the years that followed, set the Live Aid generation on a different journey.<\/p>\n

For as the years went by, it became clear that the world\u2019s biggest charitable event had not sorted Africa\u2019s problems. And different questions began to be asked. Not, what can we do about Africa\u2019s poverty? But, what keeps Africa so poor?<\/p>\n

Those, like Geldof and Bono, who came out of the Live Aid experience as activists, soon learned that the mighty $100 million raised by the worldwide concert was merely the amount that African countries were obliged to pay back to rich countries in debt payments every 3 or 4 days. Debt was a massive problem. The world\u2019s poorest countries have spent years paying off debts to the richest nations \u2013 instead of investing in their own people. For every $1 given in aid, at least $3 is spent on debt repayments. They began to campaign for the cancellation of the debts.<\/p>\n

It was a steep learning curve. The activists had to get to grips with far more complex issues.<\/p>\n

They discovered first how the debt had come about. They learned how interest rates had soared and, simultaneously, prices for Third World commodities had plummeted on world markets, meaning the debts could never be repaid. They discovered how the International Monetary Fund had imposed cruel conditions to reorganise the debts, demanding cuts in health and education budgets for millions of the poorest children.<\/p>\n

All this was despite the fact that most African countries have actually paid back what they borrowed. Nigeria, for instance, originally borrowed about $17 billion; it has repaid $18 billion, but thanks to the wonder of compound interest, still owes $34 billion.<\/p>\n

And that was not all. They learned about international trade. And how \u2013 through a complex web of rules, taxes, tariffs and quotas \u2013 the rich world takes far more from the poor than we give them. For every $1 we give in aid, we take $2 back through unfair trade.<\/p>\n

They came to understand that the rich world does not merely refuse to help, but actually makes things worse. We impose trade tariffs which escalate if Africans try to process their own goods to make more money. The tax on raw materials like cocoa beans rises if they produce cocoa butter. It rises again if they turn it into chocolate. That explains why African countries which produce 70 per cent of the world\u2019s cocoa make less than 5 per cent of the world\u2019s chocolate.\u00a0 We actually tax Africa\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

And at the same time we in Europe, the United States and Japan subsidise our farmers to the tune of\u00a0 $1bn a day \u2013 sixteen times what we give in aid to Africa. In recent years the average European cow has, grotesquely,\u00a0 earned more than the average African, receiving almost $2 a day in subsidies \u2013 double the average African per capita income. It is the same story for sugar, cotton and much else. And a lot of this subsidised produce is exported to the Third World. Poor African farmers \u2013 unable to compete with these subsidised prices \u2013 go out of business.\u00a0 And their children starve.<\/p>\n

Faced with all this the response of Western politicians has been to promise, again and again, that things will change. But they have not changed.<\/p>\n

Pledges of aid are made, but not delivered. Targets for health or education are set, and ignored. Reform of farm subsidies, and an end to agricultural dumping, are promised \u2013 and then subsidies are actually increased rather than cut. Changes in trade rules to help the poor are planned, then not delivered. People across Africa actually die as a result.<\/p>\n

Five years ago, the world community made its greatest pledge.\u00a0 In 2000 in New York almost every world leader, and international body, signed up to an historic declaration. The Millennium Development Goals which ensued were an extraordinary plan which promised that by 2015 every child would be at school.\u00a0 That by 2015 avoidable infant deaths would be prevented.\u00a0 That by 2015 poverty would be halved.<\/p>\n

At present rates of progress virtually every one of those solemn Millennium promises will be broken.<\/p>\n

All of which brought Geldof and the other activists to the realisation that nothing would improve for Africa without a more just system. Not long after Live Aid I noted in my book Bad Samaritans: First World Ethics and Third World Debt,<\/em> that: \u201cGeldof, for all his skill as a populist, found no way of moving the issue on from one of charity to one of justice\u201d. Twenty years on he has found a way. From charity to justice.<\/p>\n

The final straw for Bob Geldof came in January 2004. On a visit to Ethiopia he realised that more people were at risk of starvation there than had died in the terrible famine of 1984\/85 which had prompted Live Aid. Angry, he rang the British prime minister Tony Blair from Addis Ababa.<\/p>\n

\u201cCalm down Bob,\u201d said Blair when Geldof had concluded his opening broadside. \u201cAnd come and see me as soon as you get back.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result was the Commission for Africa.\u00a0 Blair invited Geldof and 16 other Commissioners, the majority from Africa and many of them politicians in power, to undertake a year-long study of Africa\u2019s problems. They came up with two conclusions:\u00a0 that Africa needed to change, to improve its governance and combat corruption, and that the rich world needed to support that change in new ways. That meant doubling aid, increasing debt cancellation, and reforming trade rules. The Commission drew up a detailed plan of how that can be done.<\/p>\n

There are those who will tell you it will not work. If aid worked the problem would be solved by now, but instead it is pocketed by corrupt dictators and put in Swiss bank accounts or spent on arms in endless wars. <\/em>So goes the accusation.<\/p>\n

But the facts give the lie to so much of that. What the critics, with their outdated half-truths and stereotypes, fail to acknowledge \u2013 or, in many cases, in their ignorance simply do not know \u2013 is that that things are changing in Africa:<\/p>\n