There are two signs of hope against the background of this ghastly experience of a young woman in Sierra Leone. One is the skills training program run for such victims. Though this will take a long time to seep down to combatants, it will be a position that can be used to punish rapists, and we hope, to stop rape as an official policy of terrorizing groups, and an unofficial practice of some armies. We are in the age of globalisation. World-wide cultural and commercial exchanges are leading to unprecedented developments and consequences which could hardly have been imagined as recently as ten years ago.
Goods coming from the four corners of the earth are available for our use.
We make use of them in another sense also, for our prosperity is often the cause of misery for the people in less privileged countries. We may consider how this comes about. Take the case of agriculture in the world at large. The liberalisation of currency exchanges is a deadly menace for half the peasants of the world, that is to say, for one thousand million cultivators and agricultural workers. Yet these peasants, in themselves, have the capacity both to survive and to contribute to the eradication of hunger and to the protection of the environment.