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Make Poverty History
13 October 2006
Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA and the Australian union movement support the Make Poverty History campaign and believe that the following complimentary propositions need to be addressed if global poverty is to be halved by 2015:
Increase real aid
Cancel debts
Fight for trade justice
Good governance
Extend hman rights and democracy
Food sovereignty
Human security and peace
Decent work
A full statement can be found by clicking more and a flyer can be downloaded at the bottom of the page.
Eight complementary propositions:
One, increase real aid. This requires a doubling of aid by donor countries like Australia. Just increasing the aid budget is not enough, since most of the government aid budget of $2.5 billion is contracted to a handful of high profit-taking companies owned by Australia's richest people (and now key American companies registered in Australia as well). The real question is how aid is delivered, and whether it helps to build societies in which workers, farmers, women and poor people can organise to defend their rights. Too much aid is now diverted from poverty alleviation towards Australia's national security interests and imposing our government's agenda's on neighbouring states.
Two, cancel the debts. The Global Unions, as part of the Global Call for Action Against Poverty (www.whiteband.org), renewed their call for the Group of 8 (G8) powerful industrial countries to cancel the debt of the poorest countries. A child dies every three seconds from a preventable disease, and yet the world's poorest countries spend more on debt repayments - USD$100 million a day - than they do on health. "Without urgent action on debt cancellation, the obscene poverty that kills 50,000 people every day will continue," said ICFTU General Secretary Guy Ryder. "We strongly believe that now is the time for G8 governments to truly act against poverty before it scars several future generations and condemns millions more to a hopeless and miserable form of poverty".
Three, fight for trade justice. Trade justice should mean that subsidised agricultural production in Europe and North America no longer stymies the ability of developing countries to maintain food security and export their products to wealthy countries. But trade justice means more than just the free trade agenda. The MDGs assume that trade-related growth is alleviating hunger and need, and that trading systems are becoming more fair for "developing countries", but the reality is often the opposite. World trade is also exacerbating impoverishment of millions by consigning them to the role of producing commodities that cannot be sold at decent prices, and by enforcing international patents which keep prices of goods from industrialised countries unreasonably high. This incudes essential medicines, and new therapies for pandemics such as HIV. Even if commodities such as copper, coffee and cotton are sold at reasonable prices on the international market, the owners of mines and farms may not reward their workers properly. The free trade agenda is often used by the biggest corporations to privatise infrastructures and take over markets in the most exploited countries.
While the free trade agenda allows investments to flow unhindered across borders, the Australian government resists the inclusion of social, labour rights and environmental protection clauses in free trade agreements, and resists regulations to protect the rights of people who migrate to work. The super-exploitation of workers in China, or of Pacific Island seasonal workers in Australia, undermines the standards of working people across the region.
Four, good governance. Deregulated trade, debt cancellation and increased aid can also be misused by local elites and corrupt, repressive governments, so it is essential that all types of debt relief and increased aid are geared to improve basic health, education and services for the poorest. To some extent, corrupt governments are kept in power by western companies who either buy their raw materials, sell them arms, or bank their stolen funds. We see the best avenues of ensuring good governance in the strengthening of democratic civil society, of independent media, of unions that can fight for the rights of teachers, health workers and public servants, of women's and citizens organisations that can demand proper services from their governments.
Five, extend human rights and democracy. The MDGs ignore the questions of democracy, sovereignty and self-determination (National, indigenous and community): who decides on ownership of resources? Unions around the world see the development of democracy, political freedom, and democratic control of resources and the economy as crucial, and in particular the right to organise to struggle for decent wages. People have a right to decent incomes from their labour (wage work or farming) as well as health care and schooling. Aid can be more than charity for the poor and victims of conflict, it can help shape a fairer, healthy, democratic and environmentally sustainable world.
Six, food sovereignty means that communities and countries have control over their sources of food production or trade. This is more than food security, which is ensuring that communities have enough diverse sources of nutrition to meet their health, social and cultural needs. Trade deregulation can mean the expansion of big-business mono-cropping agriculture in developing countries, dependent on expensive western-patented western genetically modified seeds, fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. Food sovereignty -- and arresting the drift of millions form rural areas to urban slums - requires serious land reform and protection of marine resources, to ensure diverse food production by rural communities, and the organisation of rural workers, small scale producers, fisherfolk, and landless peasants
Seven, human security and peace. It seems we again live in a time of wars and terror, and of crimes against humanity, problems that arise not only because of poverty and encroaching environmental crisis, but due to persisting injustices. War between states and within nations, trauma and international terrorism is a major factor in world poverty, not just the diversion of spending from poverty alleviation to armaments, but also the long-term impacts of destruction of civilian infrastructures, of gender violence, of epidemic spread occasioned by war, and of persistent weapons -- toxic pollutants and landmines. In order to build peace, injustices such as unresolved refugee situations, need to be addressed, and in "fragile states" investments in education, health, environment and job creation, can avert civil conflict and terrorism borne of despair.
Eight, decent work. The key agenda of the union movement all over the world is that of decent work and the creation of sustainable jobs. No progress can be made against poverty, in fighting HIV, in ensuring access to education and health, in eliminating child labour, if adult women and men cannot get skills training and worthwhile employment. Mass unemployment and underemployment, the marginalising of the majority of the workforce (and particularly women) in "developing" countries into the informal and seasonal sectors of the urban and rural economy, and the loss of livelihoods in primary production, contributes to the polarisation of the world into the prosperous elite and the impoverished majority.
According to the ICFTU, "extreme poverty is linked to a shortage of jobs and low wages - for example, of a total of 550 million working poor in the world, 60% are women, a situation exacerbated by the poor working conditions and the severe exploitation that the majority of them endure. Therefore, the anti-poverty alliance calls on G7 governments - who together hold more than half of the voting power in the IMF and World Bank - to properly integrate the issue of decent work into the international financial institutions' agenda, as this is the only sustainable avenue out of poverty for millions of people across the world."
The struggle against poverty doesn't begin at our borders! Howard's "Work Choices" laws, his "Free Trade" agreements, his destruction of social security, and skyrocketing costs of education mean that Australian workers are losing decent jobs, with proper pay, decent hours, security, entitlements, and safety, and are being forced into low pay casual, part-time positions or are being forced to do unpaid overtime. Meanwhile Australian employers move jobs to countries where workers are unable to organise, are overworked and are paid incredibly low wages, or seek to import temporary workers they can super-exploit. Howard wants Australia to be like the USA, where tens of millions of people are "working poor". Central to the Australian and global struggle against poverty is to ensure that there are decent jobs and that workers have the right to organise and bargain collectively.
Download File:
Download union flyer - Make Life Fair, Make Poverty History [ [ rtf ]
Contact Details
Union Aid Abroad - APHEDA
Ph: (02) 9264 9343
Fax: (02) 9261 1118
office@apheda.org.au
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