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Global Citizenship
Global Advertising
Global companies like Coca-Cola, Nike and Vodaphone invest vast sums of money
in advertising their products all over the world. Big name celebrities can earn
up to £50,000 a day to advertise these products.
Women who sew Nike ski jackets in Bangladesh earn 51 pence per jacket. The
jackets sell for £100 in the UK. A short TV ad costs over £100 000 to produce -
and thousands more to broadcast around the world.
Global Communications
Many of us in rich countries enjoy the benefits of cheap and quick
communications technology. Meanwhile, eighty per cent of the world's population
has no access to reliable telecommunications. And 1.1 billion people have no
clean water and 3.4 million die each year from diseases caused by dirty water.
In 1930, a one-minute phone call from UK to New York would have cost more than
£10. In 1990, it cost about £1 a minute. Today it costs as little as four pence.
Four pence may not seem much - but for a worker in Haiti, making clothes for
sale in the US, it is ten per cent of his or her daily earnings.
Global Environment
In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, another 165 football pitches
of rainforest will have been destroyed. 70 per cent of all sea fish stocks are
over-fished or depleted.
Poor countries contribute least to environmental problems. The US - with five
per cent of the world's population - has a yearly waste that would fill a convoy
of garbage trucks long enough to wrap six times around the Earth. Britain has
more than 25 million cars on the roads, pumping out carbon dioxide, which
contributes to climate change. A middle-income child born in Britain will use 30
times more of the world's resources in its lifetime than a poor child born in
Afghanistan.
In August 2002, world leaders met in Johannesburg, South Africa, for the
World Summit on Sustainable Development. This should have been a chance to
address the links between poverty and environmental damage. But the Summit was a
big disappointment. The leaders failed to agree strong commitments to tackle key
issues like the need for renewable energy to replace fossil fuels like oil.
Global Food
Up to 80 per cent of people in sub-Saharan Africa depend directly on
agriculture for a living - it's about 2 per cent in the UK. Bananas, rice, tea
and coffee travel halfway round the world to reach you. In Uganda in 1997,
coffee farmers could expect to receive more than 600 shillings (24 pence) for a
kilo of their sun-dried Robusta coffee beans. In 2001 they got 100 shillings,
just 4 pence a kilo. World trade in bananas is dominated by five large
companies: Chiquita, Dole, Del-Monte, Fyffes, Geest. Fairtrade bananas have a
small - but growing - share of the market. While there has been a tenfold
increase in trade in the last 30 years, hunger in Africa has doubled.
Global Media
Through the internet, television, films, radio, newspapers and magazines, we
can learn about people and events all over the world.
But not everyone has access to the media. A garment worker in Bangladesh
would have to save eight years' wages to buy a computer. More than a billion
people have never used a telephone. In the developing world, 125 million
children have no chance to go to school and a further 250 million children aged
five to fourteen years are victims of child labour - 80 million are in Africa.
The International Community has agreed a set of ‘Millennium Development Goals'.
These include ‘universal primary education in all countries by 2015’. CAFOD and
our partner organisations are campaigning to make sure that these goals are
achieved.
Global Poverty
800 million people are chronically malnourished and a third of the world's
population does not have enough to eat.
In 1990, a Tanzanian farmer harvested ten sacks of cassava and eight sacks of
maize per acre. Today, he or she will be lucky to harvest three or four. This is
due to drought, the decline in soil fertility, and the low prices farmers
receive for their crops, which means they have no spare cash to invest in their
farms. Scientists predict that yields of rice, wheat and maize in the tropics
could fall by 30 per cent over the next 50 years, as a result of climate change.
Global Trade
One way that poor countries can lift themselves out of poverty is by selling
the goods they produce. But unfair rules make it much harder for poor countries
to get a good deal when they trade with rich ones. The World Trade Organisation
was set up to make the rules for trade between countries. The idea was to make
it fairer for everyone. But the rich countries make sure that the rules are
designed to benefit them, rather than the poor countries. Half of the poorest
countries can't afford a single representative at the WTO headquarters in
Switzerland. As a result, the rules are skewed in favour of the rich. These
unfair rules mean that poor countries lose out on £1.3 billion a day. This is 14
times what they receive in aid.
Global Travel
Travel is cheaper, faster and more convenient today than ever before. Travel
can bring lots of benefits. By visiting other countries, we can make friends and
learn about other people's lifestyles, cultures and customs as they visit
different places. Tourism brings money and jobs and local people in areas where
tourists visit can sell their produce, crafts and services to tourists. But too
often, big companies benefit more than local people. The big tour operators that
own airlines, retail chains, cruise ships, hotels and car rentals take most of
the profits.
For every pound spent in a Third World resort, only 35 pence stays in the
country. This means that local people are not getting a fair share of the wealth
that tourists bring.
For example, in a Safari park hotel in Kenya, a two-litre bottle of mineral
water costs 120 Kenyan shillings (the equivalent of £1.20). In the same hotel,
the chambermaids are only paid 240 shillings a day.
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 These stories and the
worksheet appear on the CAFOD website and are used with permission. For
access to the CAFOD website and their excellent resources please click on
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