BABY FOOD | THIRD WORLD NEWS

BRAZILIAN BAN ON STATEMENT OF THIRTEEN BISHOPS

The following text is a shortened version of a statement issued last month by the thirteen Bishops of North-East Brazil. The statement was immediately suppressed by Brazil’s military government.

The New Internationalist is grateful to The Tablet for translating the text from Portuguese and for permission to reprint extracts from it.

At this moment we wish to speak to our countrymen with an invitation to a radical personal and collective examination of conscience, and will not be fobbed off onto a supposedly spiritual plane. It is our duty as pastors to treat human problems, whether these be political, social, or economic, in the measure that humanity is at stake and God is compromised.

The reality of mankind in the north-east
Oppression, misery and injustice, with no likelihood of any immediate help from the government to transform this state of affairs, is the picture in the north-east.

According to figures from the Superintendence of the Development of the north-east (SUDENE), per capita income in the area is a little above 200 dollars, or about half the income per head of all Brazil, and only a third of that in Sao Paolo. People who are unemployed or underemployed add up to 23 per cent of those of working age.

Hunger has assumed epidemic proportions: average consumption of vitamin A, for example, is only 4 per cent of the scientifically recommendable level, and there are serious deficiencies of calories (56 per cent,

protein (81 per cent), calcium (74 per cent), and vitamin C (54 per cent). Children under the age of two are, on the whole, even worse off. Malnutrition, which is particularly acute in the sugar-growing areas, is also the indirect cause of the considerable number of mentally retarded in the region.

Housing deficiency in the northeast is running at 2.3 million units, according to SUDENE (Feb. 1970 issue of Housing), and on the increase. Inferior building materials and deficient sanitary installations make things worse — in 1970, 76 per cent of homes in the north-east had no water supply and 75 per cent had no electricity. In urban centres, only 50 per cent of houses are made from durable materials; the rest show sub-habitation conditions.

According to a 1970 census, 60 per cent of over-fives are illiterate, and there are only enough primary schools to cater for half the children of school age. Primary education is seriously hindered by extremely low rates of pay for teachers. Very many children drop out of school between primary and secondary levels, and only 5 per cent reach higher education. In the north-east between 1961 and 1970 there was no development in secondary education and an actual drop in registration in higher education (from 16 to 14 per cent). Speaking ten years ago, Pope John said: "A share in cultural patrimony is a natural human right, and therefore a right to basic instruction and to a technical and professional training." (Pacem in Terris, 13)

The population of the north-east continues to show low levels of hygiene, a high rate of illness, and a high death-rate. There are abnormally high incidences of equistosomosis, trypanosomiasis and tuberculosis, which last shows a mortality rate of 80 per 100,000 compared with below 20 in developed countries. All these diseases stem from economic factors. Contagious diseases account for 22 per cent of all deaths. Infant mortality is extremely high — in the north-east there is a rate of 180 deaths per thousand live births, compared with 98 in the capitals, where the medical services are concentrated. The death-rate of those under five is 47 per cent. Life expectancy is 50 for women, 47 for men. The north-east health organisation cannot cope with this — there is one doctor to serve 5,000 and only 1.9 hospital beds per thousand.

Some reasons for the origin of this situation
Now that mining and coffee have taken over from sugar in economic importance, the north-east is on the margin of Brazilian development. The area has evolved a subsistence economy helped out with the export of cattle, but colonial structures with landed property as the basis of political and economic power survive.

The use of social savings to bolster elevated patterns of consumption among minorities, or the transference of these savings to other regions where their investment would bring greater profits, are constants in our economic history. These minorities in the more recent past have succeeded in profiting from federal policy for the region — for example, the sugar barons, who, by flourishing the banner of regional poverty, have received privileges and monetary help which is not applied in the region for the benefit of the people there.

The feeling of subservience also survives, preserved by the elites and exploited by those in power. Protectionism and paternalism stem from this, as if injustices were necessary so that the upper crust can show their generosity! This is instrumental in preventing the people taking decisions that affect their existence: they are instruments in the

production of a society of dependents and outcasts. "The Church, for her part, has frequently linked arms with reactionary elements, who have kept political, social and cultural power in their own hands. She has often been identified more with rulers than with the ruled. The symbol has been the minister speaking from a raised pulpit, high over the heads of a passive and attentive people. In this way the Church herself has become paternalistic, thereby arresting the progress of the people in their march towards freedom."

Claude Jacoby / Camera Press

Underdevelopment as destiny?
From 1963-67 the annual growth-rate of the north-east was 6.4 per cent, greater than that of the whole of Brazil at 3.4 per cent. But the government put aside reforms, and resources for industry have become less and less each year. Since 1970 the average rate of growth in the north-east was half that of Brazil —5.2 per cent to 10.4 per cent. These figures, which show a widening gap, might be seen as an invitation to resignation. Must we accept under-development as the destiny of the north-east? But it is incompatible with Christian anthropology to suggest that conditions of oppression result from destiny or supernatural forces. A fatalism that benefits those who stand to gain from a false concept of society, distances man from the ability to distinguish the true causes of oppression.

The inviolability of the home, habeas corpus, respect for the privacy of correspondence, the liberty of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, all these are rights which have been taken away from the people. The freedom of the workers to unite in unions, and the right to strike have been brutally wrested from the working class.

"In order to contain resistance to such conditions of oppression and injustice, the violation of these human rights is exceeded by still greater acts of violence. Official terrorism has taken over control by means of espionage and the secret police, by the growing control by the State of the private lives of citizens with frequent recourse to torture and assassination."

The Brazilian miracle?
Gearing the economy to foreign capital has produced effects that are supposedly proof of its intrinsic value such as, for example, the growth rate of 10 per cent in 1968. But what has really happened is the impoverishment of the people and the further enriching of those who do not need it. Between 1960 and 1970, 20 per cent of Brazil’s population enjoying the highest incomes increased its share of the national income from 54.4 per cent to 64.1 per cent; the richest one per cent of the population even increased its share from 11.7 to 17 per cent, while the poorer half of the population lost ground, from 17.6 to 13.7 per cent. So, in 1970, one per cent of the population was earning more than half of the population put together. The most serious result of all this has been that the purchasing power of the mass of wage-earners has been drastically lowered. Between 1961 and 1970, the decline in real wages was 38.3 per cent, while the increase in production per head was 25.6 per cent. If economic growth affects those on a minimum wage in this way, it is easy to see that the effect on that large group of Brazilians with a below-minimum wage or no wage at all will be much crueller.

The defenders of the system argue that "the cake must get bigger so that we can divide it." What happens, however, is that this concentration of income is caused partially by the need of a market where the goods produced by the foreign enterprises can be sold. These foreign enterprises brought from their countries of origin a technology unsuited to the type of consumption more generalised in Brazilian society, a technology whose patterns of consumption can only be achieved by the rich. Consequently you have a structure of production that inevitably conditions structures of income and consumption. In this way industrialisation becomes an instrument that points more and more towards the production of goods that are capable of satisfying consumer caprices of ever-increasing sophistication, and that turns its back on the needs of the population.

The government actually promotes this in every way, including the use of a taxation system in which the burden falls more heavily on the poor states than the wealthy, and on the poorer people rather than the rich. Smooth propaganda, the use of football as a means of patriotic stimulus, and the utilisation of mechanisms of illusory economic improvement, such as the lottery, will not however still the conscience of those who are capable of checking the true results of the "Brazilian miracle."

The absence of liberty, the violence of repression, injustice, the impoverishment of the people, and the alienation of national interests in favour of foreign capital cannot constitute any sign that Brazil has found her true historical direction.

The confirmation of our true vocation of greatness will only result from our ability to use our vast human and material resources to build a strong society founded on our native traditions and human values that are truly Christian. Only in this way can we forge any credibility that will allow us to play our part in the concert of peoples in the direction of a world structure in which the antagonisms of religion, race, class, and international exploitation are things of the past.

Conclusion
The Church cannot remain indifferent to this human tragedy. The Church must side with the outcast. She will not expect to be understood by the many who can’t or won’t listen, even when they are faced with facts: these complacent advocates of the status quo who form a private corner in religion, telling the Church she must not interfere in politics and social questions: the people who use religion as an ideological weapon to defend groups and institutions that do not serve their fellow men and who oppose the designs of God. The Church is not a ghetto. She is at the service of the world. The spirit of Christ works in the heart of humanity, combating sin, misery, and slavery. Salvation is not something apart from the world, to be achieved after death. Salvation begins here; it is woven into the tapestry of history. Revelation is the process of man’s liberation, and it must include the political, the economic, and the social.

The Church has often failed in her prophetical and evangelical mission, but she now recognises humbly and in penitence that her role is at the side of her people. How often enmeshed in iniquity has she played along with the oppressors, favoured political and money power against the common good, sometimes with ingenuousness. sometimes with sophistry, in sad travesty of the Gospel message. This is the moment however to be faithful to our mission and to be faithful to our people. The price for this is always persecution under guise of "service to God" But our mandate is clear.

RETHINKING GERMAN AID

Photo: Camera Press

West Germany’s programme of aid to the developing nations, set this year at 2,800 million D-marks, has just been given a welcome departmental spring clean. Gone, after 12 trying years, is the bureaucratic nonsense of allowing three ministries (economic co-operation, economics and foreign affairs) to frame and execute development aid policy. Now the lobbyists at the economic co-operation ministry (Bundesministerium fur wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit, BMZ) take over what they have sought since the ministry was formed in 1961 — the overriding responsibility for the hefty German aid programme.

Ever since the balance of payments tilted massively in her favour in the late 1950s, West Germany has shouldered much of the white man’s aid burden. Since 1961 the volume of private and official resources flowing from the Federal Republic to the Third World has been exceeded only by the United States. Unencumbered by a recent colonial past, West Germany could claim that she was dispensing assistance in a spirit of almost totally benevolent disinterest. (France, for instance, directed the vast majority of her resources to her former dependencies in West Africa). The impression also stuck in official quarters in Bonn that it was good politics — pressures from the Western alliance were assuaged — and good economics, with much of the early help given in the form of loans tied to German exports and carrying stiffish repayment terms.

That such realpolitical notions of aid find fewer apologists in Bonn today is largely to the credit of Chancellor Brandt. By dismantling the Hallstein doctrine he has called a halt to an era of diplomatic pique during which an aid programme in Zanzibar, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) or Egypt could be (and was) throttled at the first scent of an East German consulate. By selecting Walter Scheel as nis foreign minister, Brandt has assured the aid administrators that they would get a sympathetic hearing at the highest level of government. Scheel was the first minister of economic co-operation when German aid (as elsewhere) was seen in terms of a series of mini-Marshall Plans and the ministry’s civil service recruits regarded as little short of traitors by the rest of the official community in Bonn.

Scheel’s successor at the BMZ, Dr. Erhard Eppler, is a 46 year-old former grammar school teacher and one of Brandt’s closest confidants. An auto-didact in the impalpable world of development theory, he built his reputation as a brilliant parliamentary spokesman on foreign affairs and has enlarged it with an impressive corpus of written work on the Third World. He has summed up the new scepticism of the German aid programme this way: "Development aid is no longer a vehicle for exporting an ideology that will resolve everybody’s problems but an attempt to help others find their own way, even if it is not our own."

With a new coherence at the centre, more muscle is appearing on the ground in the recipient countries. German embassies in Tunis, Brasilia, New Delhi, Ankara, Jakarta and Dar-es-Salaam have been fleshed out with development attachés, specialists nominated by the BMZ with a somewhat jaundiced view of the ability of career diplomats to assess a country’s development priorities. After the BMZ’s years as a political Cinderella, the jaundice is understandable. This year the ministry intends to send further attachés to argue the case with the embassies in Lima, Bogota, Algiers, Bangkok, and Lagos.

In line with its acceptance of the international strategy for the Second UN Development Decade, the Federal Republic has drastically softened its capital loans policy. Budget credits are now being given over 30 years at an interest rate of 2 per cent with a 10-year grace period where once the interest rate stood at up to 6 per cent. For the world’s 25 least developed countries special credits are available with a maturity period of 50 years at a rate of 0.75 per cent.

For all the earnest intentions, the commitment of official aid will still fall well short of the 0.7 per cent of GNP prescribed as a minimum by the UN. And though the Federal Republic has bowed to international wishes by channelling a steadily increasing proportion of funds through multilateral agencies (25 per cent this year compared with 8 per cent in 1965) a battle still simmers within the EEC over who should benefit from the EEC’s chief source of aid, the European Development Fund. France, almost alone in Europe, wants the flow to be limited to States with an EEC association treaty while the Germans are hoping to enlist British help in campaigning for a genuinely world-wide spread of funds.

Investment by the German private sector in the developing nations (3,100 million D-marks in 1971) keeps a short head clear of the BMZ budget, and is often a dubious ingredient of the German effort overseas. The Federal Government has now been alerted to this but has a limited area of manoeuvre. The BMZ has finally repudiated the principle of tying aid to fat contracts for German exporters and is now hoping to mute the pernicious effects of the vastly complicated "development aid tax regulation" which last year granted half its 200 million D-marks concessions for overseas investors to hotel builders in the Canaries and another 30 per cent to the deeply entrenched German business interests in Sao Paulo.

Tougher criteria are now being devised to grant concessions on a carefully graduated scale and these should go some way towards staunching the flow of misguided tax relief. Little impression is likely to be made for the time being, however, on the ratio of German private to public investment which is anything up to seven to one in Latin America.

Similarly, no free market economy is going to be able to restrain German engineers from collaborating with South African investors in the Cabora Bassa Dam project in Mozambique. And no protocol has yet emerged which will unfreeze the 100 million D-marks already earmarked by the Federal Government for reconstruction in North and South Vietnam (the sum to be divided equally) until Hanoi and Bonn recognise each other. The BMZ has won a domestic battle; a world-wide campaign remains to be fought.

by John Munch

CANE SUGAR - THE BATTLE FOR SURVIVAL

Illustration from: 'Cane Sugar - the Battle for Survival'.

Joe Godber, the British Minister of Agriculture and no less than three E.E.C. Commissioners joined thousands of the general public who visited the Royal Agricultural Show at Stoneleigh, Warwickshire, last month.

Unexpected guests were a group from the World Development Movement who were demonstrating on behalf of Commonwealth sugar producers (see New Internationalist No. 4. June 1973). Despite police restrictions on leafletting and banner waving, they spoke to the President of the E.E.C. Commission, Xanvier Ortoli, and handed him a leaflet headed "Keep Commonwealth Sugar", as he entered the National Farmers’ Union stand.

Later, Petrus Lardinois, the Commissioner for Agriculture and the man responsible for the highly criticised Agriculture Policy in the Common Market, spoke to the Demonstrators. He told them "You are fighting a very strong and good case."

Mr. Lardinois revealed later at a press conference, that the E.E.C. would take part in the next round of sugar talks in Geneva in September, and expected to join the International Sugar Agreement as a net importer. Asked about the expected increase in E.E.C. beet sugar production of 900,000 tons this year, the Commissioner said the E.E.C. "meant business" in its obligation to the Third World Sugar producers. "We will give as fair a deal as the British and perhaps an even better deal", he said. However, he did not indicate any cut back in E.E.C. beet production, and did not rule out the export of sugar by the Community onto the world market. The British sugar beet interests, who stand to profit by squeezing out the cane sugar now imported from Third World countries, have the biggest display area at the East of England show which is held at Peterborough in the heart of beet-growing country.

Members of W.D.M., the action groups in the East Midlands, East Anglia and Lincolnshire, plan to distribute leaflets at the Agricultural Show putting the case of cane farmers in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Fiji, who are the traditional suppliers of most of the sugar eaten in Britain. They also plan to demonstrate when British Government Minister, Mr. Anthony Stodart, visits the Show.

Fears of a sell-out on Commonwealth sugar have been increased by the plans of the British Sugar Corporation to build extra sugar beet refining capacity at Peter-borough, and reports of a planned merger between Tate & Lyle, the cane refiners, and the partly government-owned B.S.C., which refines beet sugar.

A new campaigner in the battle to keep Commonwealth sugar is the General and Municipal Workers’ Union, which is concerned about employment prospects for its sugar cane refinery workers in Britain.

by John Tanner

Crisis point is fast approaching for the hundreds of thousands of people who are dependent on cane sugar-growing in the Third World. "Cane Sugar — The Battle for Survival", a new World Development Movement pamphlet, shows how present European sugar policy will mean economic set-back and increased hardships for the Commonwealth sugar-growers and recommends new policies to safeguard the livelihoods of those who have provided most of Britain’s sugar for the last twenty years.

The pamphlet is timely. For the fate of cane sugar will be decided at the conference tables of Europe and the United States between now and 1975, during which time no less than four major agreements concerning sugar will be coming up for negotiation or renewal.

LIGHT, POWDER, AND CONSTRUCTION WORKS

Namibian captives during the German colonial period. The 1904 Extermination Order: "Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot - I shall not accept any more women and children. I shall drive them back to their people, otherwise I shall order shots to be fired at them. These are my words to the Herero people - Signed: the Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha."

The Light Powder and Construction Works deals neither with cosmetics nor quarrying. It is a new world development action group founded this month in Melbourne, Australia. The meaning of the novel title is — LIGHT on the nature of Australian society and its relationship with the Third World, POWDER to blast away obstacles to progress, and CONSTRUCTION of a viable alternative. ‘The Works’, as it has already become known, is starting with an education centre stocked with information in many media which is being made available to local action groups, teachers. students, and anybody else in Australia who is interested in learning more about rich world/poor world relationships and working for world development.

The initiative for the new centre stems from Trade Action Pty, the highly successful Australian company which sells Third World handicrafts and which is itself a subsidiary of Community Aid Abroad — the largest overseas aid charity in Australia. The very success of the trading venture led to a questioning of the real purpose of the company and the setting up of a three-man research team commissioned to study Australia’s relationship with the developing world and produce an action-oriented programme.

The team took a year to complete their recommendations — plus three days to think of the title for the new agency.

SATELLITES FOR THE POOR

Every hour two hundred people are killed in natural disasters. To cut this appalling death toll, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has made plans for using space satellites to speed up communications between stricken areas and the outside world.

Communications are the key to more effective relief operations. For most disaster deaths occur in the few days after the earthquake, hurricane or flood, when the victims are waiting for effective relief operations to begin. Often communications systems are destroyed and it can be hours, days, and even weeks before the scale of the disaster and the precise needs of the victims can be made known to those who can help. The result is delay and duplication in getting the right kind of help to the scene of the tragedy.

To close the gap between disaster striking and the right kind of help arriving, the ITU plans to use two communications satellites, one in equatorial orbit over the Atlantic covering the area from Western Latin America to Madagascar and one over the Indian Ocean sweeping Asia, Africa, and the Mediterranean. The corresponding earth station, which would have to he

flown to the disaster area, will be small enough to fit the cargo compartment of a jet, tough enough to be housed in a tent, and light enough to be handled by two men. Once installed in a disaster situation, the ground equipment would bounce the story of the tragedy off one of the satellites to a World Disaster Relief Headquarters which would then inform and co-ordinate all the different national relief organisations.

The United Nations Development Programme has backed the idea with a $50,000 grant in the hope that space age technology might be used to help some of the least privileged people on the earth.

A DWELLING PLACE OF OUR OWN

A consignment of West German beer arrived recently in Windhoek, capital of Namibia. "DESTINATION NAMIBIA" was boldly stencilled on the crate. Those words were enough to get it put back on the boat and sent straight back to Munich. For the South African Government refuses to accept any goods not marked "South-West Africa". The incident is just one example of South Africa’s resolve to deny Namibia its name and nationhood.

The story of the Namibians’ struggle for self-determination is told in a new pamphlet "A Dwelling Place of Our Own", published by the International Defence and Aid Fund and available from 104 Newgate Street, London, E.C.1., price 15p. It is a depressing tale. Shilly-shallying by the League of Nations and the United Nations has allowed this former German and British colony to fall into the hands of the South African Government which has now annexed the territory in all but name.

A ‘homelands policy’, similar to the Bantustan system in South Africa itself, has now been introduced — leaving the Namibians with less than 40% of their own territory. Following the familiar pattern, the ‘homelands’ are generally desert strips or unproductive wastes whilst the minerally rich tracts of this agriculturally barren land have been reserved for white South African ownership and investment. Following the old British policy of ‘divide and rule’, the South African Government is deliberately stirring up traditional rivalries and hostilities between the different tribes of Namibia — marking black people’s houses with a large ‘H’, ‘N’, or ‘0’, according to whether the inhabitants are of the Ovambo, Nama or Herero tribes.

The pamphlet traces the buildup of Namibian opposition culminating in the Ovambo strike in 1971 and continuing with increasing guerilla activity under the leadership of the South West African People’s Organisation (S.W.A. P.O.). It also examines Britain’s role in the Namibia question. The U.N. has several times declared South Africa’s occupation of the territory to be illegal, but on each occasion Britain has either abstained or voted on the side of South Africa. And when the International Court of Justice at the Hague gave its verdict that the South African presence in Namibia was illegal, Britain seriously weakened the effectiveness of the decision by denying that the court had any right to pronounce judgement on the matter (this is of course the same Court whose authority Britain is now using to deny Iceland its right to extend its fishing limits).

The pamphlet is as well-written and researched as one would expect from the International Defence and Aid Fund, but appears in a more attractive format than previous publications. The new approach bears the imprint of IDAF’s recently recruited Information Officer, Hugh Lewin, himself a former inmate of South Africa’s political prisons.