Oxfam

ALTHOUGH OXFAM is now closely associated with development programs in Third World countries to fight gender inequality, encourage fair trade, and provide emergency relief work, it was in the beginning an organization for the relief of poverty and hunger in Europe. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, which was later to become known primarily with its abbreviated telegraph address (OXFAM), was set up during World War II, after Nazi Germany had invaded Greece. The Allied forces had declared a blockade in 1942 and, as a result of this, Greek civilians suffered from severe shortages of food and medicines.

Committees were set up throughout Britain appealing to the Allies to let essential supplies through the [Page 804]blockade. They also started to raise funds for refugees across Europe. The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief first gathered on October 5, 1942, and, in December, Cecil Jackson-Cole, a London businessman, was appointed honorary secretary. The committee was officially registered as a charity in 1943 and its first appeal, Greek Week, raised £12,700 for the Greek Red Cross.

While many of the relief committees throughout Britain disappeared after the war, the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief intensified its activities to alleviate the suffering caused by the war. Offices were opened in Oxford in 1947 and a gift shop was established a year later, becoming the first permanent charity shop. When the Marshall Plan made most European relief committees superfluous, the Oxford Committee once again enlarged its field of action to relieve “suffering arising as a result of wars or other causes in any part of the world.”

Under the direction of Howard Leslie Kirkley starting in 1951 and lasting for 24 years, the Oxford Committee attracted wide public attention for its campaigns whereby Third World poor were not stereotypically represented as passive victims but as human beings with dignity. The 1960s witnessed the expansion of the organization, which, in 1965, adopted OXFAM as its official name. OXFAM programs in developing countries increasingly focused on the support of self-help programs.

The organization played a major role in Freedom from Hunger, the United Nations campaign to fight famine through plans to allow people in Third World countries to grow their own food rather than receiving food aid. In 1964, OXFAM started its first fair trade branch, the so-called Bridge Programs, which initially marketed handicrafts produced by local communities in developing nations. The mid-1960s were also characterized by the rise of the OXFAM network of shops, which became an important source of funding for the organization. OXFAM shops sold donated items or fair-trade products and their success made them common in every main street in Britain. Throughout the United Kingdom, there are now 750 OXFAM shops.

In the 1970s, the self-help strategy inaugurated during the previous decade led to the decision to let local people run the relief programs. The decade also saw OXFAM engaged in difficult campaigns, such as those to reduce the disastrous humanitarian effects of the civil war in Cambodia and of the war of independence in Bangladesh. The organization also started its own center for recycling, the Wastesaver Centre in Huddersfield, United Kingdom.

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