CAFOD purporting to speak on behalf of gold-mining communities
CAFOD, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, has a new campaign called Unearth Justice, which is aimed at the gold mining industry.
The slogans of the campaign are:
The campaign has petitions that can be signed and handed in at jewellery shops, “calling on them as a major gold retailer, to act to ensure the highest social and environmental standards in sourcing their gold.”
My concerns about this campaign:
The environmental concerns are valid, but it seems questionable that a British NGO should target a polluting industry in the developing world when so much more pollution are caused by industry in rich Western countries such as Britain.
In fact, the wealth created by industry since the Industrial Revolution is what enabled Britain to be rich enough to to have people whose full-time concern is the environment..
Environmental concerns were not a primary issue during the time Britain became wealthy, and while developing countries should take every reasonable measure to limit pollution, ultimately Western countries cannot expect the developing world to remain poor for the sake of Western environmentalists whose wealthy countries were built on centuries of pollution.
This seems to be another example of a self-serving Western NGO, whose main concern are their own jobs. They only seem to need the next narrative that will release funds from ‘ethically minded’ British people, and don’t seem to care about how many jobs in developing countries they might destroy in the process.
