Art Action in Galway

galway | anti-capitalism | news report Thursday October 23, 2003 21:05 by Buy Fair Trade - autonomous kareneliot at yahoo dot com 086 399 5756

Aid Busness = Poverty and dependancy

Last Sunday in Galway, we (a small bunch of people not especially affiliated with anything), built a food mandala on Shop Street to commemorate UN eradication of Poverty Day… with not really any intention of singing the praises of foreign aid policies or programs.

We felt we had to do something to raise awareness about the absurd neo-liberalist policies of the IMF, and World Bank in a way that would reach a lot of people who weren’t already involved in discrediting and resisting the global AID BUSINESS. Effectively while such organisations are managing poverty reduction and aid, actually nothing is being done about poverty, ‘aid’ and poverty reduction programmes have become ‘new speak’ for exploitation, theft, and dependency, which equates with more business for multi-national corporations. In the face of the ‘aid business’ and the current world debt UN strategies and goals for the eradication of Poverty seem like token gestures, and even worse like a stale kinda bureaucratic hypocrisy. As one of the organizers said,
“Why pretend to be just when you have full knowledge that no justice is truly being served or done… this is the face of evil…this seduction of our national, global, and individual consciences.”

Sunday is a quietish day on Shop Street but people massed around as we built the mandala. There was much commentary jokes and discussion, and everyone, including a lot of kids seemed happy to take our flyer. Questions flew around like wild fire, and in general there was a lot of warmth and support for what we were doing, and a fair bit of anger vented about injustices in Ireland and globally.

The food we used to make the mandala came from dumpsters around Galway. We
had a helluva time finding food, as much of the waste from the gargantuan,
warehouse, supermarkets is thrown into truck size incinerators and compacters. The
amount of organic waste supermarkets accumulate over the course of a week is
indeterminate, but from discussions with supermarket mangers it has been implied
that ‘waste stock would take up all the space’ if it were not disposed of weekly.
(There is a warehouse just for waste behind Eyre square shopping centre fitted out
with a few of those truck size compacters.) While smaller businesses could account
for no, to very little waste . The moral of this discovery: Support small local
businesses. (But I guess you knew that any way).

If you would like to use our flyer for your own action please contact [email protected].