The Ancient Third World

Among all fake topics about poverty, one of the most recurring ideas is that poverty is inevitable. And too often this argument goes hand in hand with other prejudices: poor countries are to blame for their own poverty, their people do not like working, it is part of their culture, they have always been poor and they will always be, etc. To deconstruct these myths, it is very useful to take a look at the ancient Third World: things were much different and they can change again.
Let’s get started. Romans, for instance, had the same prejudices about poor countries, but applied to other places. By the end of the 1st century AD, Cornelius Tacitus, one of the greatest Roman historians, wrote a book about the traditions of German people. Despite defending their moral superiority over the “degenerated Rome”, he would describe German people as backward and miserable, without any of the comforts of modern life. Things have changed a lot since then, but by that time, people from the former Roman province Cyrenaica (currently Libya) would regard the people from the British Islands in the same way as a Parisian regards an Ethiopian today.   
Another interesting example comes from the British writer Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first feminist thinkers and Mary Shelley’s mother. By the end of the 18th century she published a fascinating book about her trips around Sweden, Norway and Denmark. It is a travel narrative in the form of letters where the author depicts very different Scandinavian countries as we know them today: very poor, without any kind of industry, shut off from outside influence. The writer reproduces many of our current topics about poor countries: it was and it will always be a miserable country, people do nothing to get out of poverty, it is due to their character because Scandinavian people do not have the guts to change their situation… But eventually their situation did change, didn’t it?
With these precedents in mind, it is easy to make political fiction and imagine a future in which Bolivia, Mali and Bangladesh are the countries where people live better. You may give a hint of a smile but bear in mind that one hundred years ago no-one would bet a penny on good future prospects for Brazil, India or China. And at present, it does not seem extravagant to think that these countries can become the three main world powers.

Sources:

1. Cornelius TACITUS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus
2. Mary WOLLSTONECRAFT. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_Written_in_Sweden,_Norway,_and_Denmark

Can peace be measured?

For centuries, it has been considered that peace is just the absence of war. In fact, most current dictionaries provide this same definition. But little by little we came to understand that the peacefulness enjoyed in Finland is not the same as the peacefulness in Ethiopia or Haiti, just to set two examples, because there are countries with “more peace” than others. Therefore, peace is not just the absence of conflicts but also the values, attitudes and behaviours by which societies solve problems, renouncing to any kind of violence. 
Since 2007, some peace institutes and think tanks, in collaboration with the University of Sydney and the English weekly newspaper The Economist, draw a list (the Global Peace Index) ranking countries according to their level of peacefulness. This index takes into account 24 factors: the first is the absence of internal or external armed conflicts, but it also includes such issues as its relations with its neighbouring countries, the level of distrust among citizens, its political instability, the number of homicides or jailed persons, its military expenditure in relation to its GDP, or the ease of access to arms, just to name a few. According to this index, in 2011 the most peaceful countries were Iceland, New Zealand, Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic, and the least peaceful countries were Northern Korea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq and Somalia. Spain ranks number 28 out of 153 listed countries, after Hungary and Taiwan and before France and the United States, which is ranked as number 82.
Therefore, we can reach three very interesting conclusions:
- Peacefulness is directly linked to income, education and regional integration levels.
- In the most peaceful countries, transparency levels are very high and corruption levels are very low.
- Small, stable countries belonging to regional blocks have higher marks.
We are making good progress towards a new culture of peace, but we are still far from ending up with violent conflicts. And in this enterprise, we should take into account Gandhi’s words: “There is no road towards peace; peace is the road”.

Sources

1. Dictionary definition of “peace": http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/peace?show=0&t=1308067315
2. Global Peace Index web site: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/info-center/global-peace-index-2011/
3. 2011 report: http://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/2011-GPI-Results-Report-Final.pdf

Living in a dump site

Many Third-World cities do not manage waste and refuse properly --they are just dumped in large stretches of land in the outskirts of the city. Very often, these waste-disposal sites containing urban refuse, industrial residues and debris from buildings are not prepared to manage so many tonnes of residues every day. Waste piles up, methane and other decomposition gases are released into the atmosphere in grey clouds visible from miles away, and sewage and toxic fluids from the industries are leaked into nearby rivers, lakes and aquifers, which get fully contaminated. When nearby towns grow, these dumping sites are swallowed up and become another suburb of the town. And, as expected, the poorest people among the poor end up living and working there. Landfills like Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro, Bantar Gebang in Indonesia or La Chureca in Acahualinca, a suburb of Managua, are just examples of dump sites turned into neighbourhoods.
In La Chureca, for instance, which is the largest landfill of Central America, there are 2,000 tin and cardboard houses built on the refuse. They have no running water, electricity or basic services. La Chureca inhabitants live in and from the landfill because they spend the whole day rummaging through the waste to find something to sell or something to eat: 70% of its population works in garbage collection, including children. The lack of education and the lack of future prospects trigger a high consumption of alcohol and drugs among young children and teenagers. The situation is dramatic.
When mass media report images of extreme poverty like in La Chureca, we often feel that we cannot do anything to solve it, we cannot end up with poverty because it is too widespread and all the resources in the world would not be enough. But needless to say, this is not true: there are enough resources and we only need political will to change things.
For instance, the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation approved a project to solve La Chureca problems in 2008. It is an international cooperation project in which the Spanish government vested more money: 30 million euros. The outcome: in 2012 the current landfill will be sealed, a new controlled dump site will be built, including a modern residue treatment plant (which will grant stable, decent job posts to the neighbours) and 260 subsidized houses will replace the current tin shacks.
You may think that this is only an isolated project among many others, and you may object that the costs are high. But, as always, this perception depends on our priorities: the Spanish army pays 517 million euros for each frigate F100, which is the budget to reform 17 dump sites like the one in La Chureca. With these figures in mind, now it is neither expensive not difficult to solve this problem, isn’t it?

Sources:

1. Dump site Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janeiro: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/feb/20/worlds-largest-rubbish-dump-brazil
2. Dump site Bantar Gebang in Indonesia: http://www.demotix.com/news/267000/collecting-survive-bantar-gebang-waste-landfill
3. Dump site La Chureca in Nicaragua: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Chureca
4. Aerial view of La Chureca landfill: http://maps.google.es/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=ca&geocode=&q=+12%C2%B0+9%2756.07%22N++86%C2%B018%2722.94%22O&aq=&sll=-22.713484,-43.259438&sspn=0.101026,0.220757&ie=UTF8&ll=12.163359,-86.314709&spn=0.006691,0.021973&t=h&z=16
5. The project of the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation: http://www.envio.org.ni/articulo/3749
6. How much is a frigate F100: http://www.deliveringdata.com/2010/07/spanish-navy-frigate-f100.html

I'm not racist, but...

It is obvious that racism is based on ignorance: only by fighting ignorance can we end up with racism. Recently, in Europe, blatantly racist parties are rampant thanks to the ignorance of their voters, who accept far from reasonable arguments. Their speech not only promotes hatred and exclusion, but it is based on false premises. In general, their speech reproduces false rumours, which are widespread because people just want to believe them, because it is easier to think that most of our problems are immigrants’ fault, so that by expelling immigrants from our country everything would be wonderful.
Hopefully, some people try to fight these false rumours to disarm racism. One of the most interesting projects in this sense is the Anti-Rumour Agency of the Town Council of Barcelona. Its web fights against the most widespread rumours about “the evils of immigration” by means of data and blatant arguments not based on moral questions but on evidences, to prove that our perceptions on immigration are often wrong, based on false premises.
Here you have some examples of rumours refuted in this web site:
"Immigrants are invading us"
"Immigrants take all social assistance programmes"
"Immigrants do not pay taxes"
"Immigrants abuse health services and obstruct emergency units"
"Immigrants have no restriction of opening times in their businesses"
"We are loosing our identity"
Besides all these arguments, this initiative also counts on free sessions to train “anti-rumour agents” (last March 2011, more than 250 people had already attended these training courses), a handbook to combat rumour and stereotypes and a didactic comic strip illustrated by Miguel Gallardo. 
Currently, in times of crisis, demagogic arguments against immigrants are not only heard from openly racist parties, but also from other parties which did not use to play so dirty. Just remember the arguments used by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s party Front National to become the third major political powers in France: there are two million unemployed people in France and two million immigrants, so let’s expel immigrants and we will all have a job post (literally: “two million unemployed, that is two million immigrants we don’t want”). Sadly enough, such arguments are more and more present in our media and in our coffee chats. Therefore, anti-rumour campaigns like this initiative in Barcelona are very positive to provide citizens with solid arguments against demagogy, and it is even more interesting because it comes from the public administrations themselves and not from NGOs and human right activists. Fighting racism is fighting for democracy and a harmonious coexistence and we all, especially our elected politicians, should play an active role in this enterprise.

Sources:

1. The web page of the Anti-Rumour Agency is not translated into English yet, but we have been told that this translation is in process and it will be available soon. Therefore, on due time, we will update this link, but for the moment you can enter the Catalan site: www.bcnantirumors.cat
2. Blog of the European Council about the Anti-rumour Network of Barcelona: http://www.interculturalcities.com/blog/16494/Barcelona_s_anti-rumour_strategy