QUOTES
I
want a different world. One where I don’t wake up thinking I’m so lucky to be
able to feed my daughter, and able to give people a clean drink of water. I don’t
want images of starving babies at the breast in my mind. I want that to change.
And if I want that, I had better do something about it.
When
you buy Fairtrade products you can guarantee that the farmers who have worked
hard to grow them get a minimum price. Fairtrade is a way of giving regular support
– and enjoying delicious high quality foods at the same time.
It's
only when we imagine for ourselves what it would be like to run from state terror,
torture, rape, the destruction of our homes and families that we can understand
how vital it would be to find a place that welcomed us and tried to heal our wounds.
“It’s
not funny at all that we do all that advertising for children. Why is advertising
for children allowed? What possible reason can there be for having those effing
adverts on TV for all this crap that’s made by poor people in poor countries that
we sell our children who have too much?
I
think it's [the AIDS fight] the most important and most pressing one - I think
it's a global emergency and I think in a way we all have to address it and engage
with it because I think it's the biggest threat to the human race that we have
ever faced.
NGOs
... really do take the work of moral and social responsibilities that ought to
be taken on by governments. I think if you took charities and NGOs out of the
mix, certainly in developing countries, you would find that there would be huge
trouble immediately.
I
think we're creating a situation that's incredibly dangerous. There's a lot of
chat at the moment about the war on terror and whilst there are many causes for
acts of terrorism, what kind of society are you creating if you allow civil society
in Africa to die and create millions upon millions of orphans? Where are they
going to go? What kind of cults, what kind of militias, what's going to happen?
The accession of violence in those countries, the possibility of that, to me is
very terrifying.
I
think the statistics of AIDS are so terrifying, so overwhelming that it makes
you think that I can't act. But actually you can. You can write letters, you can
activate yourself and other people. You can be aware, you can educate yourself
about it and you can talk about it. And all of those things are extremely positive,
even within your group - of your family and your friends. Merely raising the issue
is a hugely important social and political act and people mustn't think that just
because they're not shifting the world slightly to the left every time they pick
up a pen. The way, I think, anything has ever really changed on this planet is
through large groups of very ordinary people saying something finally.
There's
an awful lot of misunderstanding here about what being poor actually means. I
don't think people understand that being poor means you have to work from dawn
until dusk just to survive through the day. I think there's some notion that poor
people lie about all day not doing anything. It is remarkable how many misconceptions
there are here about life in the developing world and I think that that knowledge
gap has done a lot to contribute to the imbalance quite frankly.
