According to the World Bank, Europeans spend £6 billion on ice cream each year.

That same figure could fully address the problem of AIDS worldwide.

As Bob Geldof has recently said (via the BBC News website), poverty has a structure. In astrological terms, this is about Saturn and Neptune. Saturn = struture, Neptune = poverty, illness.

It just so happens that this year and next there is an opposition between Saturn and Neptune. This happens once every approximately 36 years. This opposition suggests that those who thought Live8 and Make Poverty History were campaigns for a year ago - they took place in 2005 - are very wrong indeed.

These two planets are building up to a crescendo over the next couple of months. They will then separate again from their opposition, and then re-crescendo twice in 2007. These are opportunities to make poverty history for real.

The opposition is a time when we face a choice, head-on. This is the choice set before us:

We can take seriously (Saturn) our responsibility (Saturn) to realise that we live on one planet (Neptune) and therefore we are one global organism (Neptune), or we can barricade (Saturn) ourselves in, imprison (Saturn) ourselves in an ivory tower (Neptune), block out (Saturn) those who are ill (Neptune) and poverty-stricken (Neptune), deny (Saturn) that we are one (Neptune).

We can't avoid the choice, nor can we get away with choosing one side over the other. If we favour denial over union, or deception over reality, or pretending to do what we can do but in reality just whipping up a smokescreen of rhetoric and fake activity (all Saturn-Neptune issues), we will reinforce a negative pattern of decay, despair, and illness that will circle back around to meet us again at the next crucial phase of the Saturn-Neptune cycle: 2015.

It so happens that the G8 summit of 2005 made promises (Neptune) that have their deadlines (Saturn) set as 2015. In other words, the bubble will burst again in 2015 unless we build a new reality based not on structures of poverty, but on structures of unity, and the reality of interdependency.

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have too much...it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." - Franklin D Roosevelt, (USA President, who was born when Saturn conjoined Neptune in Taurus)

Useful links:
Make Poverty History - http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/
Bob Geldof answers readers' questions - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5177148.stm
ONE - http://www.one.org/
DATA - http://www.data.org/
More info on the Saturn-Neptune opposition - http://www.astrology21.co.uk/