Three projects led us to take the journey along the main highway through Zambia and Tanzania – the TanZam highway. It’s the main trade route linking landlocked Zambia to the major Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam.

Because we already had contacts in towns and villages along the way, as well as in both capitals, we were able to get some East African views on climate change, energy, economics, food and what comes next  . . . Views from the TanZam Highway.

(See the video trailer here )

The headlights picked out two tall woven sacks on wheels wobbling along the verge of the dirt road in front of us. As we passed we could see that they were cyclists, carrying bags as big as themselves; presumably to the market in the town. It was seven thirty on a Sunday evening. The simple injustice of people cycling with huge loads after dark on a weekend evening, just to survive, struck home. People work hard – very hard. Dotted along the highway are people walking, cycling, trading, farming . . . all the time. The towns are warrens of workshops, offices and shops. Slow moving smoking trucks haul raw materials like copper from Zambia, cattle for the markets, and imports and exports to and from the coast. Too often they don’t complete their journeys, Littered branches on the road warn of a breakdown ahead – or worse. The straight road invites speed and that leads to spectacular and disastrous crashes; steel skeletons litter the verges.

The ‘truckers route’ carries an even deadlier traffic, as we discovered at all the villages we visited. The truckers away from home, the truck stops and guest houses along the way and the desperate need to earn cash all conspire to a trade in sex which has been responsible for much of the spread of HIV/Aids along routes such as this, and then out to the communities that serve them.

Back home the news is of credit crunching, energy prices inflating, food and basics getting costlier by the day, and the shadow of climate change. The story is very different here . . . isn’t it?

Christine Kilipamwambu is in the market buying bananas for our visit to a village. She says that the price of bananas and other basics in the market has quadrupled in the last year. Where it used to be the poorer people who ate beans rather than meat, now the escalating prices mean wealthier people are joining them. While Christine bemoaned the cost of food – and of fuel – in Tanzania (and the diesel price hiked yet again in the few days we were there) the situation is even worse in Zambia. My own budget, based on prices a year ago when I last visited, was blown right out of the water. Diesel (and we used a lot along the route) now costs the same as in the UK. Compare that with a typical income a twentieth of that in the UK, and ask yourself if you could afford £20 per litre for fuel?

Our addiction to cars in the west combined with popularised paranoia about climate change has driven the rush to biofuels; but these serve to drive up food prices still further, as production is diverted away from crops such as wheat. Climate change is a real threat – and maize crops right along our route have been devastated by early unseasonal rains, leaving stunted and yellowing plants and the promise of a poor harvest. However the reality of finding enough money for basics bites harder and the lack of ‘joined up’ or global thinking which drives knee-jerk reactions in the west consistently harms the most vulnerable in the South.

Since my return I’ve heard from a researcher that the global economic downturn is driving companies and corporations back to what they see as ‘basics’ – they are retreating from their flirtation with fair trade, their token concern about climate change and their fleeting embrace of ethical trade. Customers are turning away from the more expensive products (and retailers) who tip a nod in this direction. As the West battens down the hatches the South counts the cost.

Answers? Many, inevitably, are at the macro level. We were surveying the impacts of debt remission (see ‘Journey to Justice’) and there’s good news there – access to primary schooling; access to basic healthcare. But almost everyone we met, from rural village to national capital, said that there has to be sustained pressure for international organisations, big business and governments to be ‘joined up’, responsible, and to act globally in what they do, otherwise the successes of campaigns like ‘drop the debt’ will evaporate as the south continues to suffer from ‘business as usual’ in the North.

Journey to Justice? See a video trailer base on material we gathered on the TanZam highway