authors in action

Crumbs from our table

By JoAnn Dionne

In Delhi, feverish with flu, I checked into the Hotel Furama to recuperate. I opened the curtains of my beautifully appointed room and, there, below, were dozens of people, mostly dark-skinned women in bright saris, picking through a field of garbage. The urge to close the curtains, to shut out such a disturbing and unsightly view, was strong. Believe me. But, instead, for a long while I stood and watched them from my window. “Why you down there and me up here?” I asked out loud, leaving a small circle of fog on the air-conditioned glass.

The answer: Sheer dumb good luck.

The sheer dumb good luck of having been born in Canada in a world where 1.4 billion people – that’s one in every six people on the planet – live on $1.25 a day or less.

Back in 2000, in a spirit of turn-of-the-millennium good will and pre post-9-11-paranoia, my rich country, and twenty-one of the other richest countries in the world, decided to share a bit of their good fortune. That was the year they pledged 0.7% of their Gross National Incomes [GNI] toward the Millenium Development Goals [MDG] of, among other things, cutting world poverty in half by 2015.

Well, it’s now the tail end of 2008, over half way to that deadline, and the lucky countries of the world aren’t even contributing half that amount. Last year the twenty-two richest countries in the world gave an average of only 0.28% to the poorest. Thankfully, a handful of more generous countries, like Norway and Sweden, which each contributed over 0.9% of their GNI, kept that number from being smaller. The United States gave only 0.16% last year – the smallest percentage of all twenty-two countries.

The U.S. argues that, while it might give the lowest in percentage of its GNI, the country contributes the most in terms of actual dollars. This is true. In 2007, the United States gave nearly 22 billion dollars to development assistance – almost double that of second place Germany’s 12 billion.

But then I think of the THREE TRILLION DOLLARS the US government has spent on the war in Iraq since 2003, or the 700 BILLION DOLLARS it spent last week bailing out Wall Street fat cats, and 22 billion dollars starts to look like pocket change. Peanuts.

Crumbs from our table.

I want to scream or cry or puke when I think how much good that THREE POINT SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS could have done in the world. Instead of destroying homes, that money could have been building them. Instead of killing people, that money could have been feeding them, educating them, immunizing them, protecting them from mosquito bites. Instead of bailing out Wall Street, it could have, oh, I don’t know, bailed out the entire continent of Africa!

And, I hate to break it to you, my fellow Canadians, but our rich country was not among that handful of more generous countries like Norway and Sweden. Last year, Canada contributed only 0.28% of its GNI to the MDG. So, while we like to think our country a paragon of benevolence in the world, it turns out we are pretty average (and stingily so). As the former UN envoy to Africa for HIV/AIDS, Stephen Lewis, recently put it, “If we’re not prepared to [give 0.7%], just forget it. It means that Canada’s position is completely without substance. It’s all rhetorical nonsense.”

The good news is that, despite falling well short of the 0.7% promised, the 0.28% has made a difference. Over two million people in Africa are now on AIDS medication, up from only 50,000 in 2002. Between 2001 and 2006, 29 million kids in Africa went to school for the first time and 26 million were immunized against life-threatening illnesses. The purchase of 59 million bed nets has considerably reduced the number of malarial deaths — in a world where a child dies every 30 seconds from the disease – in the poorest of the poor countries like Rwanda.

This is all good. But just think how much better it could be, how much more things could change, if we just kept our promise of 0.7%. This is what United Nations’ secretary general Ban Ki-moon wanted to remind world leaders when he invited them to a meeting in New York City on September 25th. The goal of the meeting was to reinvigorate the world’s commitment to the MDG, to get that number up closer to 0.7%. (You’d be forgiven if you didn’t hear about it, though. That was the same day investment bankers on the other side of town were running around like Chicken Littles with their heads cut off.) Rock star Bono was there. Economist and humanitarian Jeffrey Sachs was there. Bill Gates was there. Seventy-five world leaders were there, including British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who made an impassioned, inspirational speech, and new Japanese PM, Taro Aso, who flew all the way from Asia, stayed for ten hours, then flew back.

Guess who wasn’t there? Canada’s own Stephen Harper.

Sure he had an election campaign to run, but you’d think the guy could have at least put in an appearance, if for no other reason than to not incur the wrath of Bono. Or at least to show that, even if Canada isn’t willing to pony up the cash, we still care.

In his speech to the UN, British Prime Minister Brown said, “…throughout the ages the fate of the hungry, the homeless, the deprived, and what we do to help, has been the touchstone of compassion, the crucible in which our morality is tested.”

Well, Canada, our compassion and morality are being tested.

And some days it makes me feel terribly helpless. What’s an individual Canadian to do? The numbers – often closer to astronomy than economics — are staggering, the inertia of politicians and governments frustrating. But why wait for politicians and governments? Individuals have done more to change the course of history than any government ever has. And while we can’t all be Nelson Mandela, we can each do something.

“Live simply so others may simply live,” Ghandi once said and (ironically) bumper stickers tell us. But there is something to this tailgate wisdom. Perhaps it’s time we rich folks learned to cultivate a bit of poverty in our own lives, because, as we now see, the uncontrolled greed we have been practicing for decades has done nothing but deplete the environment and bury us in debt.

In 2007, the average Canadian income was $38,400.00. Divide that by 0.7% and you get $268.80. All by itself, $268.80 looks like a lot of money. But, really, that’s less than the cost of two tall coffees a week at Starbucks for a year. That’s what I paid for my room at the Furama in Delhi. That’s the cost of 38 anti-malarial bed nets at seven dollars each. That’s what it costs to save 38 lives. And I get to keep 99.3% of my money.

I think I can afford that.

Excuse me. I’ve got to go. It’s time to quit blogging and cut a cheque …

Medecins sans Frontieres, Malaria Bites, Make Poverty History …

JoAnn Dionne has lived in Japan, Mexico, China, and more recently, Hong Kong — her home of five years, where she worked for a time as an editor at Oxford University Press. Little Emperors is her first book. Currently she lives in Victoria, B.C., but she grew up in Salmon Arm in the province‘s interior.

© 2008 Defining Canada.