by Tiina Mustakangas-Laukka
In a good partnership, everyone is equal and everyone has the same amount of rights and responsibilities. No one is alone and people work together. Poor countries are responsible for their own development, but they need an opportunity to improve it. Rich countries need to give poor countries the kind of support they need and abolish the obstacles that hinder development. This means that development aid must be increased. Rich countries have decided to give 0.7% of their GDP to development aid. But there are only five countries that have reached this goal: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Luxemburg and Holland. Do you think your country will reach the goal soon?
Did you know that many developing countries use more money on taking care of their debts than on health and education? And did you know that cows in Europe get bigger financial support a day than what half of the people of the world earn? It is also true that UN Millenium Development Goals could be fulfilled if all the countries of the world would use one tenth less money on weapons and invested the saved money on development aid. Would you buy fair trade fruit even if they were more expensive than other fruits? What are fair trade products? What makes them fair? How can we promote equal and global partnerships?
(The Ministry for Foreign Affairs. http://www.vuosituhattavoitteet.fi/)
3 comments:
By Ilmari Kinnunen
Crystal-clear tap water is a self-evident truth for Finns. It is not realistic for us to bottle our water and haul it all the way the the areas that need it. We must pursue local resolutions, such as tapping the local aquifers to create artificial oases, build plants to remove salt from seawater and condense morning dew on plastic surfaces to gather water where it naturally doesn’t exist. In developing countries many rivers and lakes are too polluted to drink from and water purification technology in Finland his highly developed, so maybe we could create solutions adaptable into developing countries (cheaper, that is).
It’s great that they have those fair-trade products in our store. I think that’s one problem in third world counties because planters get only couple of percentages of the profit. Then many of the rich western countries don’t give much development assistance to poverty countries. I think every rich country should give at least one percentage of their GDP to third world countries. Lots of those countries also have huge depth problems. I think rich countries should give them lots of time to pay their depths or forget all depths. Those third world countries don’t have modern technology. Some people have lots of old computers and calculators. I think they should send them to third worlds school. We think its those antic, but its hi-tech to them.
I sometimes buy fair trade things.And i do that because it makes me more happier than buying other things.It`s not good thing if richs people gets more money and power and poor people become more poor than ever and that is the reason why fair trade is better choice.
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