August 2008

It is not every day that 600 bishops hold a demonstration in London! But that is what has just happened. We took a day off from the Lambeth Conference to remind our Government and others of the importance of the Millennium Development Goals. Why? Because they are still vitally important for our world. In fact, they are even more important now for us to work on and achieve, than they were.

Each year the problems get worse. They also become more complicated. The issues of rising food prices internationally, global warming, greatly increased oil prices, and threatened recession, all make it more imperative and harder to act.

But we need to act for the sake of those 2 billion (2,000,000,000 - what a horrendously massive number!) poor people who are threatened with hunger or starvation, with major diseases, and terribly high child mortality rates. Indeed, combating these are three of the eight Millennium Goals. So too, is the hugely crucial issue of achieving universal primary education which is so basic but still a long way from happening.

As always, these problems are inter-linked. If you are living in a Tanzanian village and as the mother of a family are unwell, one or more of your children has to collect the water, walking may be a mile or more. Another has to gather the wood for the fuel to cook what little food you can grow or find. It is the girls more than the boys who are kept home from school to help.

Working to promote gender equality is another of the Goals. Poor women suffer indoor air pollution, the burden of collecting water and fuel, and unequal access to land and natural resources.

Food and fuel prices have risen for us, but that is nothing as compared with the significance of the rises in somewhere like Haiti where the 50% increase in rice prices means that over 90% of poor families' income now goes on their one meal a day. Small wonder that there were riots.

We have to keep alert to working on these issues ourselves, encouraging our Government to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, doing what we can to reduce our carbon foot-prints, increasing aid, not using a disproportionate amount of the world's resources, and not becoming insular or parochial in our own concerns.