I find this reality difficult to reconcile with my reality: this morning, getting off the train, buying a blueberry muffin and a caffe latte on the way to work; cost: .30.
I have money taken out of my wages every week and sent to overseas aid organisations, and I will send some extra because of this. No, it doesn't make me "feel good". It makes me despair, because, however much I can give, it will always be a tiny drop in an ocean of poverty and misery.
How can the world allow this? The answer is that it won't. Before long, better people than I am will be over there, distributing bags of grain, setting up food stations, helping skeletal children to swallow spoonfuls of mush. Aid agencies will start putting advertisements in newspapers, and pictures will appear on television screens, and people will give. Many people will still die, but many will be saved.
Yet why must it always come to this? A few decades ago the United Nations set down 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product as a reasonable target for aid from rich countries to poor countries. The rich countries agreed on this target. Some, notably the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, have regularly reached or exceeded it. The United States never has. It gives just 0.1 per cent of its GDP.
In this year's federal budget, at a time our economy is said to be "going gangbusters", Australia's aid contribution remained at the record low level it has been at for the past several years: 0.25 per cent of GDP. Those who are as bad at maths as I am might find it easier to think of this as just one quarter of 1 per cent of the country's wealth.
Australia gives next to nothing to Africa, the world's poorest region, considering it to be Europe's problem.
After September 11 there emerged among most world leaders a consensus that to preserve the security of rich countries something needed to be done about the world's inequalities (the World Bank reports that the average income in the 20 richest countries is 37 times the average income in the 20 poorest countries; and that gap has doubled in the past 40 years).
Last week many of the world's leaders stayed away from the UN Food Summit in Rome, citing disagreements with the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the UN body hosting the conference. But at a conference in Monterrey, Mexico, in March many of the world's leaders did make a concerted effort to ameliorate world hunger, announcing significant increases in aid.
To everyone's surprise, even US President George Bush announced an increase in aid for the poorest countries of about billion, spread over three years. (Unfortunately the US has since negated much of that generosity by increasing its farm subsidies by billion. Oxfam estimates that rich countries' protection policies cost developing countries billion a year, or twice what they receive in aid.)
But while other rich countries opened their wallets in Monterrey, Australia made no such commitment.
Forget about our damned security for a while. Forget the arguments about what kind of aid works and what doesn't. Forget about whose fault it is that those countries are in the condition they are in. Whether it is corruption, colonialism, culture, climate or unfair trade barriers, one thing is certain: it is not the fault of the children - those AIDS-orphaned children, trying to keep their pitiful little families together.
Think about what future there is for these children, when they are too hungry to go to school. Then think about 0.7 per cent. Think about how much of your income that is. If you earn ,000 it is a year, or about .70 a week. A little more than the cost of a cup of coffee and a muffin.
The government appears to believe people don't care about Third World poverty, but the government is wrong. A survey last year showed 85 per cent approval for foreign aid. And many Australians give regularly and generously to non-government aid organisations.
Shame your government. Write to them and tell them you are giving 0.7 per cent of your income to overseas aid, and why. And if you can't afford to do that, write anyway.
As Malcolm Fraser said at a recent function, bombard MPs in marginal seats; they'll listen. Ask them how it is that we have failed, in our triumphant prosperity, to make sure that children do not starve.
