A burning issue. Article by Victoria (our co-president)...

https://www.cartooningforpeace.org/

Tuesday, April 16th, 2019: the date of the fire that partially burned the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Notre-Dame was built between 1163 and 1345 next to the Seine, in the French capital. One of the most important symbols of the Catholic Church, it is a major French monument and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1991.

Just a few hours after the fire started, donations from families, companies and individuals started being received in order to restore the monument. The luxury group Kering and the Pinault family donated €100 million. It was followed by a donation of €200 million from Bernard Arnault, the world's fourth richest man, and his LVMH company. The Bettencourt family and its L’Oréal cosmetics firm chipped in €200 million. Oil giant Total gave €100 million and advertising firm JC Decaux put up €20 million. Business concerns including French banks (BNP, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, BPCE), insurer Axa, and the pharmaceutical firm Sanofi have made pledges totalling tens of millions. La Française des Jeux, the national lottery company, is allocating its share of the proceeds from Saturday’s Easter lotto. The City of Paris (€50 million) leads the flurry of donations from assorted levels of government across the country. In Hungary, the city of Szeged, population 160,000, said it would donate €10,000 in gratitude for a donation from the City of Paris after a flood devastated the city south of Budapest killing 160 people in 1879. The International Olympic Committee said it would give €500,000 to boost the chances of meeting French President Emmanuel Macron’s five-year rebuilding goal, with Paris slated to host the summer Games in five years’ time. “The objective of completing this reconstruction in time for Paris 2024 will be extra motivation for us all,” IOC President Thomas Bach wrote in a letter to the organizers. Donors had, by Thursday, pledged €850 million to rebuild the 856-year-old heritage site.

March 14^th, 2019: cyclone Idai caused the death of more than 1000 citizens and 2 million casualties in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The UN donated €250 million to help these two countries.

January 25^th, 2019, a dam collapsed at an iron ore mine in Brazil, resulting in the death of more than 10 workers and nearly 300 people missing. Little money was was donated.

Indonesia, Madagascar, Haiti and Cuba, among others, have suffered catastrophes, sometimes even worse than that caused by Idai, and never have any of them received as much money as was donated for the reconstruction of Notre-Dame…

It is wonderful to see how people are mobilizing in order to help and support the French rebuild an important building, but it is shameful to see what humanity’s priorities are… Disasters in poor countries do not get so much media attention. Disasters make the poverty and inequality there even worse. The aid going to disaster areas is totally inadequate (though the UN’s first Sustainable Development Goal is: “NO POVERTY”).

The firemen said things could have been worse: no lives were lost, no injured, and more than half of the cathedral was saved. Almost a billion euros has so far been collected to restore the structure; how many lives could have been saved if the same people had donated the same amount to fund teams of aid workers and  doctors, and to (re)build vital infrastructure in disaster zones?

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