I’ve been up since 5am writing on Oxfam’s post mortem on the G20 summit (will post on it later today), but have been completely distracted by this email that just came in to alert me that Fidel Castro is citing Oxfam’s work, including our latest killer fact, in his regular ‘reflections of Comrade Fidel’ column in Granma, Cuba’s Communist Party newspaper:
‘OXFAM, a well-known NGO, declares that with the 8.42 trillion dollars of public money committed by the governments of the rich world to the bank bailout plan world poverty could be eliminated for the next 50 years. It also has many arguments on behalf of hundreds of thousand of poor people in the world who will sink even further into poverty and on behalf of women who are among those most severely affected by the crisis’
For the record, the work on the killer fact was done by two ace number crunchers: Richard King (my colleague in the research team) and Jim Henry (who has been doing some work for us on tax havens and the financial bailout). Bethan Emmett wrote the paper on the gender impact of the crisis and Amy Barry the paper on the general poverty impact, all with loads of help from Oxfam staff in numerous countries. Order of Lenin to all of them.