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Get Stuffed

Are we too late to the table?

Dinner’s on for some; off for many

We Canucks may be late to the table in more ways than one. I’m referring to the July 2 nd Live 8/Make Poverty History initiative.

Irish rocker Sir Bob Geldof announced no sooner than two weeks before the hallowed event that indeed there will be a Live 8 concert for Canada after all. Kind of like being asked to be a bridesmaid two days before the wedding.

The series of Live 8 concerts was hatched by Sir Bob – former Georgia Straight reporter and Boom Town Ratter who was obviously cast for a much grander destiny, including his seat on the African Commission – to raise awareness of poverty and the need for trade justice in Africa prior to G-8 leaders meeting July 6 to 8 in Gleneagles, Scotland (just in case you wanted to show up and bear witness). The general gist of Live 8: double aid to Africa; rich nations cancel African countries’ external debt (which G-8 nations have already done for some nations) and trade reform (right now Africa accounts for only two percent of world trade).

But we’re really late to the table because one of the noble ideas Geldof, I mean Sir Bob, espouses is one that Canada has never made good on, despite it being hatched some 35 years ago by one of our finer statesmen, Lester B. Pearson. The concept: rich nations double, that’s right, double their foreign aid by donating 0.7 per cent of their national wealth to help poorer nations. Sir Bob’s goal is to achieve this by 2015, some 45 years after the fact. Good idea. Late to the table.

So what’s all this doing in a food column? Sir Bob’s focus is poverty but I can think of no better indicator of that than hunger, malnourishment, undernourishment, famine, lack of food – call it what you will, and I know there are technical definitions of all these states – but it all comes down to not enough food on the table. If you even have a table.

If you check out the UN’s World Food Programme’s website you’ll find a Hungermap that shows the level of "undernourishment" in areas of the world. A morbid deep blood red indicates the worst-case scenarios, countries where 35 percent or more of the people are undernourished. About half of Africa is blood red (the other big red blob on the map is Afghanistan). Most of the rest of the African continent is deep gold, indicating "undernourishment" in the 20-34 percent range.

Lets take a moment and look at some bare bones facts about just a couple of these African nations not making many headlines in Canada these days.

The DRC or Democratic Republic of Congo: about 50 million people; 71 percent undernourished. After five years of civil war a nation that should be one of the richest in Africa because of all its natural resources is a mess. More than half of those who die in the country do so because of causes related to lack of food. More than 3 million people are displaced because of conflict. Livestock is decimated. Farmers are terrified by combatants who routinely destroy anything in their paths.

Madagascar: the poor island nation off Africa’s east coast that Disney has seconded in name only for a cutesy summer fantasy blockbuster. Consider this while you’re munching your popcorn and watching the celebrity-voiced animals frolic about "Madagascar." More than 70 percent of the total population lives below the poverty line. About 50 percent of children under three years of age suffer retarded growth due to chronically inadequate diets. The country is disaster-prone, frequently at risk from cyclones, droughts and locusts.

Tanzania: more than 35 million people, comparable to Canada’s population; 43 percent of the population is undernourished. Home to civil strife, thousands of displaced people and the fiasco steeped in Lake Victoria where an introduced species, Nile perch, has virtually eliminated 28 native fish species and brought everyone living on the shores of the lake to poverty. All this while tonnes of the snow-white fillets of Nile perch are flown to Europe to feed overfed Germans and Britons.

You can check out the full Nile perch fiasco in the award-winning documentary, Darwin’s Nightmare, and if you’ll allow me a bit of a segue here, there’s one line in the film that keeps looping through my head. A visit to one of the lakeside villages of impoverished fishers shows graffiti on huts: one message reads "Being poor is like being old."

The converse to that, I suppose, is being rich is like being young.

And this is where all of us Canucks, all of us rich, "young" overfed North Americans and western Europeans are really, really late to the table.

The black irony is that while Africa and scores of other nations – North Korea, Haiti, Iraq, Yemen, the list goes on – slip into chronic poverty and "undernourishment" we are pretty much eating ourselves to death.

If you track the obesity barometer in Canada it reads something like this: The overall national prevalence of obesity increased as follows: 5.6%, 9.2%, 13.4%, 12.7% and 14.8% for the years 1985, 1990, 1994, 1996 and 1998 respectively, according to a report by Dr. Peter Katzmarzyk at York University. As of 2001, 20% of boys aged 7-13 were overweight; 9% were obese. For girls, those numbers were 17% and 10% respectively.

There’s not enough room here to get into all the moral, medical, health and cost implications of the fact that worldwide, 10-20 per cent of people in "rich countries" are obese. But if you’re watching Live 8 on July 2 you might want to ponder all this.

Consider that what Geldof is suggesting (and Pearson once suggested) Canada, the U.S. and Japan do – the only G-8 nations not already doing so – is to pop 0.7 per cent of their national wealth into the pot to help poorer nations. That’s the equivalent of dropping a hundred bucks for dinner out and leaving seventy cents into a cup at the door for those who didn’t dine so well that night.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winnng freelance writer who thinks the international aid percent should be seven, not point seven.