Snap and Pop

Want to mock Mariah Carey's pretentions at philanthropy? Want your poverty statistics served up on a platter? Want provocative commentary? This article by Brendan O'Neill has all three.

First, the snap:

It isn't often that Peter Hitchens, the usually dry, sometimes irate man of letters, makes me laugh. But he did on Sunday, with a newspaper column headlined: 'Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?'

Mariah's in there, too, further along. She has to wait her turn with the Usual Suspects. Then the stats:

In the European Union, poverty is generally taken to mean someone living on 60 per cent of the median income in their country. So in Britain in 2001/2002, the poverty threshold was £187 per week for a couple with no children, £114 for a single person with no children, £273 for a couple with two children aged five and 11, and £200 for a single parent with two children aged five and 11. By contrast, 1.1billion people around the world live on less than $1 a day (the poorest of all, and the main target of the Millennium Development Goals) and 2.7billion live on less than $2 a day. If it is considered unacceptable - poverty - for a single man or woman in Britain to live on £114 a week, why should we see raising wages in the third world from a dollar a day to two or three or four dollars a day as one of the highest global aspirations?

The conclusion?

Some have attacked the Live 8 organisers and participants on the grounds that they take the easy option. If these Beautiful People are serious about eradicating poverty, they say, why don't they sell all their worldly goods, sign up to an aid agency and spend their days helping Africans on the ground? Yet the work of aid agencies should not be beyond contention, either.

Every major third world charity and non-governmental organisation, including OXFAM, supports the narrow campaigning of Make Poverty History. That is not suprising when you consider that some of these agencies have been at the forefront of pushing sustainable development, effectively reconciling poor Africans and Asians to their lot (or, at best, a little bit more than their lot) in the process. Also, some aid agencies now make aid conditional on communities behaving in what is seen as an acceptable manner. We hear a lot about the conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on third world nations; yet some aid agencies insist that communities follow strict guidelines on sexual health or gender relations if they want to enjoy the full benefits of aid. Here, aid agencies effectively try to impose the mores of Islington on to the marshes of Africa.

Never mind Bono, Bob, Robbie and Mariah: those planning to take to the stage for Live 8 are only doing what pop stars have been doing for years - being self-mportant and self-deluded. If you want to make not only extreme poverty but economic need itself history, then it is the low horizons of the politicians and aid workers, who have a real impact in the third world, that you should be most concerned about.