Conference to Discuss Impact of Make Poverty History on Rural Communities

A forthcoming conference on the Make Poverty History Campaign will focus on the implications of the campaign on rural communities in the world’s poorest countries.

The Make Poverty History Campaign called for the cancelling of debt, increasing and improving aid, and increasing the benefits of trade for the world's poor.

The George Edwards Memorial Event, to be held in Norfolk on 22 October, will be chaired by the Rt Rev Graham James, Bishop of Norwich, with key speaker Kirsty Smith, Director of the Methodist Relief and Development Fund.

After a talk by Ms Smith on the impact of the Make Poverty History Campaign on rural communities, the event will also host an open discussion, chaired by Bishop James, on how achieving the aims of Make Poverty History may affect agriculture in the UK.

The discussion will be led by a panel including Ms Smith, Peter Medhurst of the Transport and General Workers Union, George Frost of the Methodist Rural Chaplain, and Hetty Selwyn of Farmers Link.

Mr Medhurst, a former T&GW union official, said: “Country life has rarely been the rural idyll of popular imagination.” He went on to list among the problems the falling prices and bad harvests that have often caused hardship to both farmers and workers, as well as the dramatic decline in the numbers of full time workers employed in UK agriculture.

Mr Medhurst continued: “Increasingly, however, our industry is employing migrant workers from Europe, China and elsewhere and the drive for profit ensures that low wages and poor working conditions continue to play invisible roles in modern food production systems even in this country.

“In many Third World countries the problems of bonded labour and slave conditions have not gone away. The ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign encourages us to see the problems of our own industry in the context of farming and rural poverty worldwide,” he said.

The event is held once a year to commemorate the life and work of the founder of the National Union of Agricultural Workers (now amalgamated with the T&GWU) and Methodist preacher Sir George Edwards OBE and is sponsored by the Methodist Church and the T&GWU.