How greed has starved millions

At the Gleneagles summit in 2005, under massive public pressure, the G8 leaders produced a Third World aid package worth a total of $50 billion.

It was supposed to make poverty history. It failed. Today, according to the UN, 963 million people are starving. And the number living in starvation is rising at rate of a million a week.

In 2005, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair told us that the aid package of $50 billion was as far as the world’s wealth could stretch.

Now we discover it was just crumbs from the table. Last year $50 trillion of wealth was gambled away by the bankers and speculators on the world markets.

That’s exactly 1000 times more than the total Third World aid package promised at Gleneagles.

With just a fraction of the wealth squandered away by the rich, our world could have been transformed. Fresh water could have been available to everyone. Malnutrition could have been ended. Millions of dead children would still be alive today.

Instead the politicians let the greedy rich run riot.

The lesson of the last few years is stark. Before we can make poverty history, we first have to make greed history.

And that means changing the economic system worldwide.

To find out more, download a free copy of Two Worlds Collide – a 60-page booklet published by the Scottish Socialist Party at the time of the Gleneagles summit.