Sir, - Your Editorial "Slaughter in Uganda" (March 3rd) about the killing of eight tourists and four game park wardens concludes: "This tragedy should ensure the region attracts the greater international attention it deserves as it struggles to make its way through instability and turmoil." All Africa watchers and wishers will hope you are correct.
The fact is that Africa is still remote in people's minds and only the wealthiest layer of tourists bother to visit it and find out for themselves, as the planes fly fully laden to Disneyland and California. This latest tragedy will reinforce many fears and prejudices and deter even more.
Yet in a world of fast-shrinking distances Africa and the so-called Third World generally are getting closer to our doorsteps and will begin to affect us much more.
European "dumping" of surplus beef in West Africa and now in Namibia and Southern Africa is crippling the livelihood of local producers in these places who cannot compete with the low prices. The new South Africa's inability to get across tariff barriers and sell its fruit and vegetables, both tinned and fresh, in Europe means large-scale unemployment and closures in Western Cape.
As Third World countries struggle to achieve even a fraction of the standards of health, education and development prevalent in the "North" they are undermined by the debt owed to financial institutions. OECD figures show that between 1982 and 1990 total resource flows to Third World countries, including charities, grants, aid and trade credits, amounted to $927 billion. During the same period developing countries remitted in debt service alone $1,345 billion (interest and principal) to the creditor countries. Who is aiding whom?
One result of this is that not only are the developing countries forced into environmental damage (pollution, forest clearance) but they understandably resort to cash crops which pay hard dollars, resulting in cocaine and cannabis on our doorsteps. This inevitably creates corruption, misery and crime, so the instability and debt hits back at us.
The people who feel the guilt most keenly about this are the people least responsible, the ordinary working class, teachers, factory workers, civil servants and building workers.
We must be careful to put the blame where it belongs, with the IMF and World Bank, the trans-national companies, our own governments and the European Union and demand that changes be made for a fairer, safer, more humane world where none of us has to live off the exploitation of weaker section of the human race. Our joint survival depends on action now.
Debt cancellation might be a beginning. - Yours, etc., Jim Blake,
Grosvenor Mews, Douglas West, Cork.