Just think about it. The $700 billion rescue package that the US Congress approved for the financial crisis is equal to seven times current yearly aid levels, or the equivalent of global aid flows between now and 2015, the year that marks the target for the Millennium Development Goals. It will be spent within a few months in a single donor country, and might not do much to avert the crisis.
2008 held great promise for people interested in foreign aid and development, and for poor countries more in general. Three important appointments were scheduled to follow up on some key agreements and commitments in the struggle to promote development and fight poverty across the world. The first one was to be held in Accra (Ghana) in early September, to check progress on the commitments made in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness signed in 2005, and aimed at changing the nature of donor-recipient relationships, enhancing donor coordination and reliance on recipient country policies and systems. The second one was held in New York in late September, to mark the mid-point of the MDGs, between when they were introduced by the UN General Assembly in 2000 and their target year of 2015. Finally, the third took place last week in Doha (Qatar), to follow up on the Monterrey Consensus on Financing for Development, a global compact aimed at ensuring that adequate resources were put to use in eradicating poverty, achieving sustained economic growth and promoting sustainable development.
Accra was well attended, and generally hailed as a moderate success, with participants agreeing on sticking to their existing promises, and committing to more transparency and ongoing monitoring of aid effectiveness. At the New York meeting, world leaders not only renewed their commitments to the MDGs, but also subscribed new commitments worth 16 billion dollars, of which 4.5 billion for education and 3 billion for malaria. Then the financial crisis exploded. In Doha, only France among the rich countries sent its head of state, and the heads of the World Bank nor of the IMF did not show up either. The outcome document shows increasing reluctance to take bold action in a number of areas, and the promises to live up to aid pledges sound increasingly less credible. As rich countries turn inwards to address the impact of the crisis, the spirit of shared vision and responsibility that characterised previous statements seems to have evaporated.
Where are we left then, by the end of 2008? Rather than following up on the host of declarations, commitments and consensuses that had been put in place in the past decade or so, it seems that the rich world is giving up, or passing up on the opportunity to re-think the global order in ways that make it more equitable and sustainable. That would be a terrible loss, not only for the incredible energy that went into pushing for existing initiatives, but most of all because of the impact that it is likely to have on the billions of people still living in poverty. What is needed is a new vision, one that recognises, in the words of John Berger, “the unity of all unnecessary suffering taking place in the world”.
