The Stats Don't Lie

We’re coming back around to the time of year when we start making noise about global poverty again. I don’t know why the Australian spring is the designated time, apart from the fact that we’ve just finished World Vision 40 hour famine season.

The global Make Poverty History movement has emailed me to let me know that the Stand Up Against Poverty event is coming up this week. Given my monumentally successful contribution last time, I decided to look into what I could do to add my voice to this year’s outcry.

Unfortunately there are no major events planned for Darwin, where a ‘flash mob’ is just a group of men wearing climatically inappropriate suits on Mitchell Street. And to me, the 40 hour famine has always seemed like an extremely token sort of effort for anyone aged over 14, unless you’ve got some kind of weighty corporate sponsorship. No offense if you’re doing it; good on you for doing something.

Triple Kudos to my friend Hannah, who is undertaking something like a 40 day famine, and collecting sponsors for her effort to live on nothing but typical refugee rations for nearly six weeks. That’s how you do it if you really want to make a point. Check out her blog and drop her comment about how awesome she is.

“And what point is she making?” I hear you ask. I’m glad you asked. I was going to break with convention and embed an awesome video that they showed at my church the other week about what the statistics on global food supplies look like in real terms, but I couldn't find an online version of it. So instead, in more traditional Cum Tacent Clament style here are some boring written statistics (it also saves me the embarrassment of having my html skills fail in a public forum).

Chronic hunger, or the lack of a sufficient amount of nutritious food, currently affects 1 in 6 people worldwide.
13 million children are born every year with growth and development issues due to the mother's malnutrition.
Many of the world's poorest people spend 80% or more of their annual income just for food, and even this is often not enough to provide them with adequate amounts of food.
More than 24,000 people die every day due to hunger related causes.
The percentage of overseas development assistance allocated to agricultural development has dropped dramatically in recent years - from almost 20% in 1980 to less than 3% today.
In the developing world, 50% to 60% of all childhood deaths are hunger related.
More than 5 million children die every year simply because they do not have access to adequate amounts of food and water.

Due to an ever increasing global population, the demand for food keeps going up. But due to disastrous droughts in many countries (including Australia) the supply of food is going down, and the amount of food that governments are prepared to export is decreasing. This makes sense from governments who are interested in looking out for their own people, but it leaves developing countries in a whole pile of trouble.

One of the great initiatives we as a planet are taking to adapt to climate change and focus on renewable energy is the development of bio fuels. This technology uses organic matter to power engines directly, rather than waiting millions of years for them to decay into fossil fuels. But the dark side of this that we rarely hear about is that we are now burning food to run our cars instead of feeding the hungry with it.

At one point a while ago, the global food reserves were down to six weeks’ worth. That’s not just for some Ethiopian kid on the TV. That’s for the whole world, you and I included. Six weeks.

It's hard to know what to do about stuff like that. I know if I tried anything as drastic as Hannah’s effort, there’s a reasonable chance I would die, so I’m taking the coward’s road and writing about it instead. The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say, so in the digital age perhaps the keyboard is mightier than the intercontinental ballistic missile.

I’ve been planning for a while to write to the federal government about my concerns. And now that Australia has a federal government again, perhaps the time has come to make good on those intentions. Unfortunately I wasn’t really sure which minister to write to, as I don’t know whose portfolio global food shortages come under. Trade? Foreign Affairs? Sustainable Population? Looking for answers, I headed for the shopping centre, where to my dismay I could not find a single charity spruiker to help me. What is this world coming to, I ask you, when a man can walk down a shopping mall without being accosted by volunteers even when he wants to?

You’re right. As rhetorical questions go, that one was a bit of a train wreck.

Obviously the idea of writing about the issue here had occurred to me, but I wasn’t convinced that I had the readership to make spending the time on a poverty post worthwhile. But then I came across some interesting statistics of my own.

Google have added a hit counter to the blog creation interface, which records how many page views my blog gets over time, and even more fascinatingly, what part of the world those hits are coming from. To my astonishment, in the past week my blog has been viewed 25 times from the United Kingdom (apparently the drunk Englishwoman I made up in the previous post is real and she’s stalking me), eight times from both China and the US, six times from Australia (most of them are probably me), six times from Germany, twice from Belarus (I don’t even know where that is) twice from Russia (what the?) once from Brazil (wicked), once from Canada (thanks sis) and once from Taiwan. Either someone is playing silly buggers with a proxy server, or Cum Tacent Clament is silently crying out much more loudly than I thought.

For one thing, this makes self-indulgently whiny posts like last week’s effort seem even more stupid than they did before. For another, although, with the exception of my North American cheer squad, I have no idea who could possibly be reading this, Google is telling me that every week people from all over the globe are reading my blog. And Google never lies. So here’s a message from me to the Blogosphere:

Get off your arses and… get back on them again in front of your computer. Write to your politicians. Write a blog article. Write a song. Write a limerick for all I care, just make some noise. People need to know about this stuff, because the only way to fix it is to make the issue too all-pervasive to look the other way, and too big to sweep under the rug. The Global Food Shortage and the poverty that accompanies it are the moral challenge that will define our generation (suck it, Kevin Rudd). For God’s sake do something!

Okay. Please, please, please don’t write a limerick.

…




Garry with 2 Rs

A One-Man Anti-Poverty Machine

I read on the news this morning that bloggers all over the world were uniting to bring up the issue of ending world poverty. I thought “Blinder! I’m a blogger of sorts, I could totally get into that.” I read on to discover that international bloggers do stuff about poverty day was actually two days ago, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me.

It turns out that today is also International Make Poverty History day (for normal people, that is, not just bloggers), so I decided today was the day to get out and change the world. I have emails in my inbox about organising “stand up” events. I realised that it was probably too late to organise anything for today, by I decided to stage my own localised demonstration. At half past eleven at work this morning I stopped typing and stood up at my desk for three minutes for no apparent reason. Very few people noticed. Those who did were starting to look at me like there was something really wrong with me, so I sat down again. I think I got my message across.

Lunch time came around, and I decided I could do more. I marched straight down to my local Oxfam shop and took my stand against corporate greed by buying myself a bar of fair-trade chocolate. Take that Establishment! And I didn’t stop there, either. I also bought myself a rather fetching white “Make Poverty History” wrist band. Oxfam Girl was totally impressed. I wore it for the rest of the day, and I’m still wearing it as I write. It was covered by my long-sleeved shirt at work, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the thought that counts right?

So now I’m writing a letter to Kevin Rudd, making sure he’s aware of how many people are living in poverty. And let me tell you, it’s pretty strongly worded. I don’t pull my punches when it comes to letting politicians know how morally superior I am, that’s for damn sure. As soon as I can find someone to translate it into Mandarin for me, the feathers are really going to fly.

Oh yeah. That’s a good day’s work, right there. I’m going to go and get some ice-cream.

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs

Saving the World

A friend of mine in Sydney has got me onto the fair-trade chocolate band wagon. Well... when I say onto, what I really mean is ambling alongside the wagon, trying to figure out where it's going. My point is I've taken to deliberately buying fair-trade chocolate over not fair-trade chocolate. And furthermore, I think that's the first time in quite a while I've managed to say "my point is" in the third sentence of a blog post. Usually it comes in somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph, depending on how many irrelevant tangents I've diverted myself onto. Which reminds me, I need to shift the sandwiches from the dining room table to the cabinet. I'm not into statements like "If you eat non fair-trade chocolate, that means you support child slavery, you filthy nazi child-hating elitist backwards homophobic lazy bigoted communist ignoramus!" I've just decided that when I have the choice (which is most of the time), choosing to pay a bit more for chocolate in order to support farmers in difficult circumstances can only be a positive thing.

If all that was completely meaningless to you, you can check out the following links:

Fair trade chocolate
Bandwagon
Cabinet

As an interesting (well...) consequence of this, I've been developing quite a rapport (which is to say flirting (but not actually flirting (well... (this set of parentheses is completely redundant (as are these))))) with the girl who works in the Oxfam shop that I buy my fair-trade chocolate from.

It all started out innocently (well...) enough. I strolled absent-mindedly through the door, and our eyes met for just a moment. Across a deserted shop. The melodious smulch of a George Michael song began to play in the background, and the young shop assistant stepped outside to ask him to stop, as he did not have a busking licence. Meanwhile, I started browsing the chocolate shelf. The assistant returned from admonishing the itinerant crooner and uttered the words that will forever linger in my lonely soul:

"Can I help you, there?"

And so it began. I had a hard time convincing her that the armfuls of chocolate I was buying were not all for me. I was buying supplies for our bible study group. No, really. I felt a little out of place in the Oxfam shop; it's all so clean and earthy (is that a contradiction?) that it makes me fell like my synthetic clothing is somehow polluting the aura of the place. And I don't even know what an aura is. But I reckon Christine does.

Her name, by the way, isn't Christine. Actually I don't know what her name is. We're still just keeping the relationship at the 'haven't actually formally introduced ourselves' level.

So I did what I always do when I'm feeling out of place and unsure of myself; I defaulted to the classical Garry façade persona; goofy, yet strangely compelling; clueless, yet inexplicably knowledgeable; flagrant, yet captivatingly mysterious; ridiculous, yet irresistibly charming; literate, yet somehow unable to stop using semicolons.

It has been said that this persona is actually just me being myself, but I'm not convinced. I'm just not that charming.

And the problem with that approach is that it relies on everything being fresh and at least a little bit unusual. But I have now been back to the shop on a semi-regular basis and it´s becoming dangerously habitual, which means in order to make the façade work, I need to come up with a new (well...) and creative way to be suitably off the wall every time I go in there. My latest effort looked something like this:

Christine: Hello again.
Garry: Hi.
Christine: Looking for more chocolate?
Garry: (looking to throw her off her game from the outset) Well, now that's just a huge assumption. How can you just assume that I'm here for chocolate?
Christine: Are you?
Garry: ... Yes. (moves to the chocolate shelf, but...) "Hey! You've moved it!"
Christine: Yep, it's over here now.
Garry: Right. (grabs some chocolate) Found it. (moves to cash register)
Christine: Is that all?
Garry: That's all for today
Christine: Would you like an environmentally friendly calico shopping bag?
Garry: Nah, that's ok, thanks.
Christine: That's seven eighty-five, please. (Garry proffers his eftpos card) I'm sorry, there's a ten dollar minimum on eftpos
Garry: Right... What have you got that costs two dollars and fifteen cents?
Christine: Our environmentally friendly calico shopping bags cost two dollars fifty each. And you'll get the added satisfaction of knowing you're saving the world.
Garry: With a shopping bag?
Christine: Yes.
Garry: Does it have magical powers?
Christine: No, but if you shop with it, then we won't need to use plastic bags any more.
Garry: (well...) Right... (types in his PIN) You know, I might have been coming in here to buy some babushka dolls, for all you know.
Christine: You could have been. Maybe next time.
Garry: Yeah... ... Well... Have a nice day.
Christine: Bye.

Yeah, it didn't really play out quite the way I had envisioned. I think next time I'm just going to burst in and ask, before she has a chance to mention chocolate, whether she has in stock any of those wooden hand carvings of a Chinese man with a fishing net.

Far from home



Garry with 2 Rs