Dear Editor,
‘How should we respond to the world’s poorest?’, asked Justin Hall (en September). We should ‘give and continue to give’ was his answer, and he has a point, since, as Jim Wallace, put it in relation to Matthew 25.31-46: ‘People will be stunned to discover they will be judged, not on the basis of right doctrine, personal piety or sexual ethics, but on how they treat the poor.’ But unhappily, as I stated when Tearfund took me to Tanzania and Zambia in 2011: ‘We have these great injustices, that are grinding down entire generations, across whole continents. The idea that we can rectify [extreme poverty, etc.] without getting major ‘structural’ changes, is delusion.’
‘Structural injustices’, such as unfair trade rules, tax fiddles by big corporations, and repayments of historic debts, cost poor countries far more than they get in aid, and then there’s our habit of ‘poaching’ many of their best trained people. The effects amount to nothing less than economic terror. As Aminata Traori, the former Malian government minister, put it: ‘Hypocrisy. They are killing us while they say they are developing us, but they are lying.’
But that isn’t even half of it, since there is now overwhelming evidence of ‘environmental terror’ resulting from the climate crisis, for which we are mainly responsible. ‘People are suffering, people are dying… how dare you?’, asked Greta Thunberg, at the UN in September 2019. And she’s right – according to the Red Cross, 2 million people each week need emergency aid: ‘This is intolerable’, said its President, Francesco Rocca. Similarly, Christiana Figueres concluded that ‘Hundreds of millions of people are already suffering health impacts’ (The Lancet, October 2017). And the situation has deteriorated since then – think of the floods last year in Pakistan, for example.
So, yes, each of us has a responsibility to give sacrificially for the relief of suffering, both here and overseas – not to do so constitutes gross hypocrisy. But to be content with that is ‘delusion’, sentimentality, a ‘sticking plaster’ approach. We all need also to ‘speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all the destitute…’ (Prov.31.8-9), and in this way to each play our part to ‘rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed’ (Jer.21.12).
Yours sincerely,
David W. Golding CBE PhD DSc DCL Whitstable, Kent
