27 November 1997 Edition

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Have a shop-free Saturday

By Martha McClelland

This Saturday, 29 November, is ``Buy Nothing Day.'' A clever attempt by your Ma to hang on to the housekeeping for one more week before Christmas? No, although she might support the idea.

Buy Nothing Day has been organised internationally by a coalition of green, environmental and development groups to highlight the injustice and unsustainability of today's global consumer culture.

Buy Nothing Day makes direct links between the exploitation of Third World countries - forced to grow ``cash crops'' to service IMF debts at their expense of feeding their people - and the ``shop till you drop'' consumer culture of Western capitaliam.

It comes to Ireland for the first time this year, having been organised very successfully in other countries last year. Organised in Ireland by the Foyle Green Party with the support of Friends of the Earth, Northwest Community Network, the Campaign for Decent Wages, Foyle Homeless and Foyle Basin Council, Buy Nothing Day calls on people to buy nothing on this one day of the year.

Organiser Andrew Grannell of the Foyle Greens said ``Buy Nothing Day is becoming an international celebration of resistance to the cult of consumption. With skyrocketing debt and humiliating wages for the working class here, paralleling the crippling economic policies forced onto sisters and brothers in Third World countries by the global consumer economy. this is an opportunity to stop, think and act. The commercial exploitation of Christmas has become a truism, yet few of us do anything about it.

``150 years after the Great Hunger here, Third World countries are still experiencing similar fates. In recent years, during a famine in Ethiopia, Ethiopians were forced to use their only arable land to grown cash crops instead of food, to service debt to First World banks.

In Derry, the Day of Action will be marked by guerrilla theatre and other imaginative (and humorous) consciousness-raising actions in Derry. Families experiencing life on the bread-line, environmentalists, supporters of people in the Third World - most of the above should include republicans! - and anyone with a sense of humour and conscience will be joining local musicians, actors and poets on the streets of Derry this Saturday.

An Phoblacht
44 Parnell Sq.
Dublin 1
Ireland