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John Stansfield worked for a number of non-profit organisations including the Problem Gambling Foundation and sustainability projects on Waiheke Island, he even founded and headed a Department of Non-Profit Studies at Massey for a number of years, before picking up his position at Oxfam New Zealand. An international relief and development programme, Oxfam takes a regional approach to hunger and political rights. The New Zealand office is heavily involved in development and sustainability projects around the Pacific, for example. Georgie Fenwicke talked to John about the response to the drought currently plaguing several Pacific populations and his favourite Oxfam Christmas gift.

Talking a bit about the Oxfam projects you're involved in at the moment, can you describe them?
We are doing a lot of work on the Famine Crisis in the Horn of Africa at the moment and rightly so. That's our relief part of Oxfam and that's where pretty early on we realised the need to put the ambulance at the top of the cliff and to become engaged in development. So it has two core objectives: elimination of poverty and injustice. Increasingly, it takes a rights-based approach when it looks at these issues.
 
Our locus of concern is primarily the Pacific and South East Asia. We have a lot of  programmes running in Papua New Guinea which I am happily to be going to visit pretty soon. I last went in 1976 to a little town called Wewak. I was 18 years old and had come of youth and took a bet.
 
Really, what were you betting about?
It was in the pub and I said, someone give me a real change job and I'll do it. Then someone called my bluff and said they're looking for a volunteer to run a motor mechanics workshop in this remote part of PNG.
 
How was that? They've been in the news a bit recently I understand.
Yeah, it has always been a challenging place. Like many parts of the world, the further you get away from easy access to food, the more volatile it becomes. The people closer to the coast tend to be a little more peaceful and I worked in coastal areas.
 
In PNG, we have a livelihood project which is about improving people's lifestyles through better water quality. There is predicted to be a drought across the Pacific so we're looking at what crops are drought resistant. We have a big programme in Bougainville in what we called Water, Sanitation and Health that's going into communities where there is no running water and there are no toilets. We aim to solve problems collectively and work with the community. The sanitation technology is not groundbreaking, but the social technology is because we sit down and talk to them. The first thing we do is draw a poo map.
 
I have to ask, what is that?
You draw a map of where you live and ask everyone where they shit. Not everyone knows where they shit. As you draw out the map, it becomes more and more apparent that the way we're doing things is not working. Then we work with them to build waterless toilets because water is such a precious commodity and the way we, the Europeans, do it by taking perfectly good water and using it to flush our shit a couple of metres, it's not state of the art.
 
How does Oxfam go about creating these partnerships?
Very gently and over a significant period of time. But what it does is that it enables you to work in very, very difficult areas, in wartorn areas where others are not able to work. We sometimes appear invisible. We're there but we're working with partners on the ground.
 
In the Pacific, you're helping to put together a small arms treaty is that becoming a greater issue in the Pacific at the moment?
Absolutely, there are a lot of guns in PNG [and] Fiji as well. Fire arms were also evident in the Guadalcanal crisis in the Solomon Islands, and in Melanesia.
 
Has there been a shift in PNG from the use of knives and machetes to fire arms?
Oh yeah, there were quite a number of fire arms coming in at one point in exchange for dope.
 
But also coming back to that, GROW campaigns is a big one. It is symbolic of the shift that has taken place from when it was just the Oxfam Committee on Famine with the blankets and preserves. Today, Oxfam looks at hunger and it says that hunger is a very complicated problem; if you stand too close to it you could say people are hungry because their land has been stolen, their plants have been patented or poisoned, or because women don't have access to agricultural land and yet they're the ones most likely to grow it or because there isn't a safe place to store food. What we have is a systemic failure of the system that produces and distributes food and we need to deal with it at a systemic level.
 
As a final question, which Oxfam gift do you most like giving?
I like goats, but I really like duck, so I'll probably go with some of those.