Jane Drapkin's Speech

at the Trade Justice Lobby, 2nd November 2005

Today, you have done a wonderful thing. You have shown that you care, you have shown solidarity with poor people around the world, you have taken action and you have used your democratic right. And you have done this as ordinary people, as citizens of the United Kingdom, and as Jews. For all of these reasons, you should be proud, very proud.

I have been asked to share with you some of my personal experiences, to reinforce to you how important your action today has been, and how much of a difference it can make.

I have been working in relief and development for nearly 12 years, both overseas and in this country. My first overseas experience was as a VSO volunteer, working with disabled war veterans in Eritrea to help them reintegrate into their communities after 30 years fighting for independence from Ethiopia. My next assignment was with Merlin, the medical relief agency, working to provide health care to refugees, displaced people and local populations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, countries ravaged by war, and to victims of an earthquake in north eastern Afghanistan. In between these overseas assignments I spent time working for some of the large NGOs in their campaigns teams, working to promote fair trade and debt relief, and for the past few years I’ve been working on economic justice and governance issues, focusing on the structures that keep people in poverty.

I have been privileged to meet and work with people from many countries across Africa, Asia and most recently the Caucasus. All have their own stories, their own cultures and their own hopes and aspirations, but there are many commonalities too. All aspire to have a safe environment in which to bring up their families, for their children to survive beyond their fifth birthday and to have the chance of a good education, to have access to health care when they need it, to get a job or to run their own business, to earn enough money to have enough food to eat and clothes to wear, to pay for the weddings of their children and the funerals of their nearest and dearest, and to be able to vote for the government they think will best provide these things for them. These basic needs, these fundamental human rights, are not a lot to ask for, and are things we take for granted.

But for many of the people I’ve met or heard about during my time overseas, this is not the case.

For the Eritrean who has spent his entire adult life as a freedom fighter and has lost a leg or an arm in the process;

For a mother with five children living in the jungles in eastern Congo, whose husband is dead and who frequently has to run into the forest to hide from soldiers who get their make their living from looting local villages and use rape as a means of warfare;

For a member of Merlin staff in Goma who was late for work one day because the police shot dead a suspected burglar in front of his eyes, with no lawyer, fair trial or option of a prison sentence;

For the survivors in Afghanistan (and now of course in Pakistan) whose houses, livestock, land and maybe entire families have been destroyed by an earthquake;

For the family member in Malawi who has buried all their adult relatives who have died from HIV/AIDS and is now bringing up all of their relatives’ children – 17 in total;

For the Nepalese mother who does not send her 5 year old son to school, even though it is free, because she cannot afford to lose the 50 cents a day that he can earn carrying slabs of slate down a steep mountain side to be sold to a passing trader;

And for the Azeri journalist who dared to criticise the government, shot dead outside his flat, with his wife and parents just inside;

For all of these people, these basic human rights are a lot to ask for. The symptoms of their poverty are numerous and diverse, and the reasons for it are equally as numerous and complex. An earthquake is a natural disaster, but its impact is made worse not only by the strength of the quake, but by the poor quality of the construction of the buildings, the lack of basic infrastructure – not only heavy equipment to search for people buried in the rubble, but clean water, basic health care, communications, and, above all, political will to build communities and not divide them by war.

Congo would be a hard place to live at the best of times – hot sticky climate, a range of tropical diseases and nasty bugs and snakes. But with a war that’s been raging for many years involving a range of neighbouring countries, funded and supplied with weapons by rich countries in the west, following on from 30 years of neglect and plunder under President Mobutu, life is very, very difficult.

Losing relatives to any illness is tragic, but when so many die from HIV/AIDS, a condition that can be treated with drugs, if only they were affordable, and when each individual’s resistance to this condition is lowered due to hunger and malnutrition, brought on in part by the ending of government subsidies to support farmers to produce affordable food for the local population, and there is no welfare state to provide support to the deceased relative’s children, the tragedy is even worse.

So poverty, whether its symptoms are poor health, vulnerability to natural disasters, hunger, lack of freedom of speech, lack of rule of law, civil war and conflict, - poverty does not just happen by accident. It happens because of decisions that are made – decisions to sell arms to corrupt regimes, to charge too high a price for medical supplies, to prevent freedom of speech, to end subsidies to farmers. It is not only the bullets or the diseases that kill people, but the policies, and the people that make them, also have blood on their hands.

So when we think of the phrase “all it takes for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing” – evil is not only planning and executing genocides, or pointing a gun at someone, it can be the evil that is caused, knowingly or unknowingly, by making decisions and setting policies that condemn hundreds, thousands, even millions to suffering and often a slow undignified death through hunger and illness caused by poverty. We have a duty, as good men and women, as ordinary people, NOT to do nothing. We have a duty to prevent this.

I am often asked what people in this country can do to help. Many people give generously to charities that run programmes similar to the ones that I worked on, and I can honestly say, yes, these help. But this is not all that you can do – and that’s why we’re all here today.

In all the countries I’ve visited and from all the people I’ve met, I have never come across an attitude that the rich countries, or rich people, owe them charity. What I do here, again and again, is that people want justice. They want a fair chance to build their own lives, to earn a living, look after their family and live in peace. And they want to be able to decide for themselves, in their own country, how to do this.

I spent some time working with organisations based in southern Africa working on economic justice issues – mainly trade and debt. Whenever I asked the question “what is the most effective thing we can do in the UK to help you achieve economic justice?” the answer without fail was to end the double standards of the West. To stop our governments imposing conditions and standards on their countries that our governments do not follow, or have not followed in the past. They want their governments to have the opportunity to make decisions that are best for their country not what best suits rich countries, and in particular rich companies in rich countries. They are not anti trade or anti globalisation, but they want to take part in a way that will lift their populations out of poverty, not condemn them to it for even longer.

So they are asking us to use our democratic rights as citizens of this country, to request our government to provide justice to the poor. And this right is in itself a symptom of our wealth. I have met with people from Nigeria to Bangladesh, from Sierra Leone to Azerbaijan, countries that ostensibly have some form of democracy. But the groups I met in all of these countries complain that they have no access to their government or their parliamentarians – they have a vote, but this counts for nothing in countries with high levels of corruption, and even in countries that are less corrupt, ordinary people have no access to the decision makers – freedom of the press is severely restricted, and members of parliament often only visit their constituencies just before election time in order to make promises of improvements that they will deliver if elected again. To be able to access our members of parliament without paying a bribe, to stand in the street and lobby them without harassment from the police, to use our vote to try to influence policy without the election being rigged, is not only a democratic right, but a privilege that many people in the world just do not have. We have a moral obligation as a citizen not just of this country but of an interconnected world, to use this right, and to act on behalf of those that are prevented from doing so for themselves.

And as Jews we also have an obligation. There is much in Jewish tradition and teaching that compels us not only to pray, but to act in order to bring about justice and to end poverty. The late Rabbi John Rayner in his book on ‘principles of Jewish ethics’ has identified 110 Jewish ethical principles, one of the themes of which is freedom - that Judaism prizes freedom almost above everything: for individuals from oppression and for nations from domination. Domination does not just mean military domination, it can be political and economic too. Every year at Passover when we celebrate our escape from slavery, we could equally be praying to bring about freedom from the slavery of poverty.

And every year over the High Holy Days we read much that reminds and challenges us to act on behalf of the poor, not only in our own community but around the world. In the Avinu Malkeynu we pray specifically to “help us to conquer sickness, war and famine” – a direct obligation to do something. During the Al Chet we repent for “The sin we have committed against You consciously or unconsciously” – we may not have committed the sin purposefully, but somehow we have been implicated – perhaps the sin has been committed by others on our behalf, politicians who have made decisions on behalf of the electorate, businessmen who have made decisions on behalf of their shareholders… Rabbi John Rayner again – number 17 of the 110 Jewish Ethical principles: “No Looking the other way. ‘You shall not stand idly by when your neighbour’s blood is being shed’ (Leviticus 19:16). This principle forbids not only indifference to the fate of the fellow human beings in mortal danger, but also silence when we are able to testify on their behalf.” As Jews therefore we have a duty to not stand idly by, to not be ignorant of the plight of others in the world, to not pretend it has nothing to do with us or is beyond our control.

Another question I am often asked though, is does it make any difference? Does it really matter if we lobby our MP, buy fair trade goods, go on marches to demand debt relief and fairer trade rules? The answer, most emphatically, is yes.

11 years ago I worked with Oxfam during the launch of the fair trade mark. I wrote press release after press release, hounded newspapers and journalists, to try to get coverage for this amazing initiative, something that would directly help poor people – and not by donating money, but by buying chocolate – the first product to carry the fair trade mark was Maya Gold chocolate. But there was virtually no interest. It got a few fractions of column inches in the less important pages of some minor local papers. No one was interested in trade. A couple of years later I was working for another of the large NGOs working on a campaign to get customers to send their till receipts to the supermarkets with a note saying ‘this is how much my custom is worth – I want to buy fair trade goods. Please stock them.’ At the time you had to have very good eye sight and a lot of perseverance to find the corner of the supermarket shelf in which Maya gold and Café direct had been stashed. Now, just a few years on, trade issues make it to the front page of the national newspapers, supermarkets stock a wide range of fair trade goods, and, for a short time, world poverty has become a front line political issue. None of this happened overnight, none of it happened because one day a decision maker woke up and thought “I’m going to suddenly change my ways”. It has happened as a result of lots and lots of ordinary people taking lots and lots of small actions – sending till receipts to supermarkets, sending postcards to politicians, joining hands in Birmingham to end world debt, wearing white in Edinburgh to make poverty history, coming here today to lobby your MP. I have heard first hand that Pepsi withdrew from Burma, many years ago, due to sustained campaigning from the public – it wasn’t so much that the company changed their minds, but they realised that it did not make business sense to stay – too many potential consumers were against it. Similarly, a colleague who works as a parliamentary officer for one of the large NGOs has often been told by MPs that they cannot act unless they know they have the backing of their constituents to do so – lobbying, campaigning, meeting your MP – these area all ways to demonstrate this backing.

When I set off from Heathrow for my first overseas assignment as a VSO, I thought I was single-handedly going to save the world. When I left Liberia five years later after seeing much of the healthcare programme I’d been working on destroyed by fighting, I felt that nothing that I as an individual could do would make a difference. Now, a few years on, I realise that neither view point is accurate – of course one person can’t change the world, but of course each person can make a difference, however small. And it is the culmination of lots of people each making a small difference, that make a big difference.

But it is easy to get disheartened, to feel that change is happening too slowly. But whenever I go overseas and speak to people who are living in poverty, I am not only reminded of everything that they lack, but of what they possess – they possess a sense of humanity, dignity, and above all, hope – a hope that things will get better, that life will get easier, and that they will move out of poverty. And this is refreshing for me – if they have not given up hope – what right have I to do so?

I’d like to finish by reading you a quote from Jonathan Sacks’ earlier book – The Dignity of Difference:

“Hope is a human virtue, but one with religious underpinnings. At its ultimate it is the belief not that God has written the script of history, that He will intervene to save us from the error of our ways or protect us from the worst consequences of evil, but simply that He is mindful of our aspirations, with us in our fumbling efforts, that He has given us the means to save us from ourselves; that we are not wrong to dream, wish and work for a better world. In the end, great systems of thought are self-validating. To one who believes that the human condition is essentially tragic, the human condition will reveal itself as a series of tragedies. To one who believes that we can rewrite the script, history reveals itself as a series of slow, faltering steps to a more gracious social order.”

Today we took one of those steps – let’s keep walking!

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