From a pastor-friend:

Sunday we watched a DVD in church where Australian school children told us how poor the children in other countries were because they don’t sleep on beds, they have to do chores all day and have limited access to education, which problems we could address with child sponsorship.

I just wonder whether we are imposing Western dreams on non-Western children. The campaign about children having the same right as our children to dream of various careers worries me.

I wonder if in fact many of our children who sleep in comfort and never do chores, live in fact, in awful poverty because they have no chance to participate in communal food-growing, they never learn how to make their own toys and games, they can’t play on the streets, they don’t sing and dance together, don’t live with their grandparents, aunts and uncles all around them, and have no idea what edible plants grow in the forest or roadside.

I reckon the only way to eliminate poverty is to see most of the world happily engaged in communal subsistence farming.- which after all is God’s dream for the renewed earth (eg Isaiah 65:20f) The Western economic dream is unsustainable, destructive of community and voracious of world resources. Pentecostal preachers find a huge response in Africa and their gospel is often tinged with the possibility of ‘receiving God’s financial blessings. The people think life will be better with a mobile phone, a car, and cash to eat at KFC. We are urged to provide sewing machines or rickshaws but maybe that will just lock people into the sweaty fringes of a cash economy deprived of the dignity of growing their own food.

We just had a world expert on Food Plants – over 17800 edible plants in this world, including 4000 in Australia (only one of which we eat – the macadamia nut). We swamp our own markets and the poor countries abroad with a handful of high starch low nutrition plant products – such as wheat, potatoes and rice – when a full nutritional spectrum is available in the forests and swamps around about which get cleared out to plant these imports.

I just reckon we need to be careful that the history of Western blind ignorance and clumsiness which we have tried to improve in our mission work doesn’t continue in our aid work.