Rowan Williams, The Archbishop of Canterbury, has been directing attention recently to environmental issues and our responsibility to reduce our ‘footprint.’ One of his suggestions (in a recent interview with The Times) could take a serious toll on the livelihood of many African farmers:

He said that the carbon footprint of peas from Kenya and other airfreighted food was too high and families should not assume that all types of food would be available through the year.

As James MacGregor points out in The Guardian today:

Stopping this trade would make hardly any impact on climate change but would harm over one million people in sub-Saharan Africa who depend on it for their livelihoods, and to pay for healthcare and the education of their children, girls in particular.

He adds that:

Air-freighted fruit and vegetables contribute less than one-tenth of one percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions.

This is one of the great tensions between international development and environmental sustainability.

It’s no recent news, but the EU, China and the USA provide their farmers with subsidies which allow them to compete in a world market. These subsidies mean that the farmers can charge far less for their produce than they are actually worth. Any surpluses are then dumped on developing markets at a much lower price than local farmers can afford.

Are we to continue with these structural injustices and at the same time cut back on consumer spending on African produce?

(Source: The Guardian Online, The Times. Image: Steve Punter)

The vast flow of people across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border has reportedly increased the ease with which child trafficking gangs move their victims between the two countries. It is thought that these children are subjected to forced labor and sexual exploitation.

In mid-April 2009, during a spot check, police found two unaccompanied minors – boys aged about four and five – in a car en route to Johannesburg. “The woman at first said they were her children, but when I interviewed the children separately they said they did not know who she was”

(via The Zimbabwean Metro, photo: Sokwanele )

The Guardian have recently published a series of profiles of African countries, which are great for getting an overview of their current state of development:

• Central African Republic
• Congo (Democratic Republic)
• Egypt
• Equatorial Guinea
• Eritrea
• Guinea
• Guinea Bissau
• Mozambique
• Nigeria
• Sierra Leone
• Somalia
• South Africa
• Sudan
• Swaziland
  
• Rwanda

Carl Medearis has been traveling between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, witnessing first hand the kind of discrimination faced by the Palestinian people:

We noticed as we were getting in that this bus was extremely dirty. Filthy actually. And there was no air conditioning. As soon as we got on I noticed that they were all Palestinians on this bus. Immediately a lady holding her young son said to us in near-perfect English, “This is the bus for the Palestinians. You need to be on that other bus. It’s for foreigners and tourists.” I responded, “Oh that’s okay, we don’t mind coming with you”. She said, “Well, thank you, but you can’t. You HAVE to go on that bus.”

(read more here)

Recently I’ve been reading ‘A Crime So Monstrous‘ by E. Benjamin Skinner. It’s a captivating look into the nature of the modern slave trade (AKA Human Trafficking) around the world.

Skinner’s research is very practical. He travels to places under cover, arranges to meet with a trafficker, and organizes to buy a person. During the book he also meets with various politicians and NGO staff, as well as parents whose children have been abducted.

Some of the things that Skinner discovers as he travels are shocking, especially where concerned with organizations who are perceived to be doing good. He notes that in southern Sudan, where research has shown there are around 11,000 people missing due to slavery, there is a Christian organization called Christian Solidarity International (CSI) who claim to have freed more than 80,000 slaves. It seems that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (who are fighting for freedom from the North) have been using CSI’s ‘redemption’ process as a means to fund their troops through the use of fake slaves.

While in Haiti he comments:

Locals say that the main contribution of the peacekeepers to Haiti’s economy comes via the brothels

In other words those we expect to fulfill roles of integrity: keeping peace, dealing with injustice, tackling poverty; are actually propagating the problem.

Reading this convinces me that we have to do something to fight this injustice. There is nothing noble about celebrating the life of abolitionists like William Wilberforce without addressing the fact that today there are more people in slavery than at any other moment in history.