Liberals and progressives alike tend to dwell on how stingy U.S. development aid to the third world - particularly Africa - has become. And they are right - for a nation as wealthy and militarily strong as ours, we can and should do more. Particularly when you factor out foreign policy bribes to Third World governments, our contribution of money is small, and the creativity and intellectual energy devoted to solving the immense problem of economic development is even smaller. And you don’t have to think, like the anti-globalization folks do, that the World Bank and IMF are simply tools of capital extraction in order to see that the international development institutions have a poor track record.
But two problems keep more aid from flowing. The first, of course is political; not only is the Republican party eager to starve federal spending to make room for tax cuts (or is it the other way around?) and the Democrats hemmed in by their twin goals of domestic spending and fiscal responsibility, there isn’t a general sense among the American citizenry that ANY of their tax money should be going to humanitarian or development aims in Africa. The second, perhaps related, is strategic - to whom do we give aid? Mugabe’s regime? And how do we make sure the aid is leveraged into sustainable development, not simply serving as stop gaps in dire shortages of food and medical care (however needed these both are)?
No easy solution on either front, but Victor Keegan of the Guardian offers a practical, if hardly new, response:
Aid, debt relief and improving governance must be part of any rescue strategy. But the truth is that the biggest single factor that would help developing countries would not cost the west anything at all. In fact, developed countries would gain by doing it.
And what is this elixir? It is simple: abolish agricultural subsidies. Not some of them, but all of them, so that there is no scope for wriggling out of it.
…What is needed is a global campaign, utilising the latest internet and blogging techniques, to shame the governments of rich countries into doing something that they should, in their own interests, be doing anyway.
So I’ll use the latest blogging techniques to join in on the campaign. Americans may be relatively hard pressed to let go of aid money, but there’s too much at stake for us to keep protecting the economic interests of our agricultural sector.
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