Word: oxfam
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Relief workers are an easy target. To build trust with locals, they typically refuse to carry weapons or seek military protection. "Aid workers cannot sit like soldiers in armored cars," says Brendan Cox, a spokesman for the British aid group Oxfam. "That would undermine the reason we are there." To improve security, many organizations in Iraq are requiring workers to travel in groups and maintain radio contact with headquarters. Red Cross reps in Jerusalem have held secret meetings with members of Palestinian militant groups to ensure the safety of workers. Often, the only option is to scale back operations...
Take the WTO ministerial in Cancun. The long anticipated trade talks were quickly abandoned when developing country representatives marched out en masse. One of their chief objections was the developed nations’ intransigence on the issue of agricultural subsidies. According to a recent Oxfam trade report, Northern governments currently shell out one billion dollars in agricultural subsidies every day. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the subsidies controversy is its failure to conform to any simple ideological mold. By making free trade advocates of the developing countries, it turns the usual caricature of the globalization debate...
...Liberia is dialing 911 and nobody is picking up the phone." Sam Nagbe, An aid worker for Oxfam, in the failing state of Liberia...
...handle, regardless of whether anybody would want to buy them. The harvest that couldn’t be sold domestically was “dumped” onto world markets, driving down the price and devastating the non-subsidized farmers in the developing world. The effect was not trivial: Oxfam estimates that the price of wheat has been driven down to 35 percent of what it cost to produce, while cotton and sugar would see a price increase of 26 and 17 percent respectively if subsidies were removed...
Back in the real world: $200 is a conservative estimate of the cost of saving a child’s life by donating to nongovernmental organizations such as Oxfam or UNICEF. If we can save enough to donate the money but still decide not to, is it any better than passing the drowning girl and failing...