Kevin Watkins writes in The Guardian that Africa needs G8 leaders to follow Gordon Brown and fulfil their aid pledges. But the signs aren’t good.
It’s easy, what with the duck ponds, ministerial hissy fits, and media hysteria in the Westminster village, to see how events in Africa can slip under the political radar – events like a few million people dropping below the poverty line, surging child malnutrition, and parents struggling to keep their kids in school.
A ‘surge’ in Afghan aid won’t solve the big problems facing international reconstruction efforts. More aid is needed, but so are fundamental reforms to its delivery. Opportunities are being squandered by wasteful donor practices and a military strategy that overlooks humanitarian needs.
The announcement of a new Afghanistan strategy by President Obama and his NATO allies brings with it the promise of more resources for reconstruction. Encouraging news, given that the financing shortfall stands at around 48% of estimated needs. Efforts to date have been ‘laughably insufficient’, wrote Paddy Ashdown and Joseph Ingram last week: while reconstruction efforts in Bosnia and East Timor received $580 and $400 per capita respectively, Afghanistan today receives about $57 (though the lack of census data makes this figure hazy).
So, will renewed international commitment to Afghanistan help?
With a budget of US$3.8 billion for 2009 the Gates Foundation has great ambitions and a big war chest. But will their technology-based approach deliver health solutions? Ana Arroio argues that the Foundation needs to ensure that technology promotes development.
The G20 leaders’ communiqué today has provided a vital boost for global trade, but several important trade-related commitments – to developing countries, to sustainable development and to multilateralism – were disappointing or missing. With a further G20 meeting scheduled before the end of the year, leaders must now deepen and expand their trade agenda to address these shortfalls. At the same time, they must acknowledge the democratic deficits of the G20 and explore more inclusive alternatives for global economic decision-making – in particular those that would ensure greater representation of the world’s poorest countries.
Despite all the statements and rhetoric to the contrary, there is little doubt that foreign aid from rich countries will contract as a consequence of the global financial crisis. Averting such further impact of the global crisis calls for urgent and innovative solutions to both the quantity and quality of foreign aid. Proposals to increase aid in times of crisis require important institutional reforms aimed at addressing the shortcomings of the existing aid system. While political appetite for such reforms may not be high at the moment, extraordinary times require extraordinary solutions. The G20 and other development actors need to step up to the plate.
In good times or bad, there is one commodity which Africa always enjoys in abundance: namely, advice on fiscal responsibility. The real scarcity today is the flow of finance needed to prevent the economic downturn from turning into a human development reversal.
The establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions in 1948 was intended to forestall the sort of crisis that had afflicted global economic and political governance structures in the preceding periods, and which have a striking semblance to the current world economic recession. The weaknesses of the skewed governance configurations built into the institutions charged with coordinating and managing the aftermath of the pre-1948 catastrophe have spurred copious criticisms, particularly from the developing countries whose interests have frequently been threatened by the ways in which these institutions have implemented their respective mandates. For the rest of the twentieth century and in the advent of the new millennium, the developing world has been preoccupied with resisting the current and potential impacts of global economic power relations biased against their sustainable development interests. If not immediately restructured, the status quo could have pervasive, damaging consequences for both the developed countries that now exercise economic and technological supremacy, and the weak, almost totally helpless, developing countries. Only a few developing countries have managed to escape the harsh effects of such distorted power relations.
The London G20 Summit is an opportunity to tackle urgent issues related to the impact of the global crisis on international trade and the multilateral trade system. On the trade front, the Summit should show that G20 countries are prepared to avoid protectionist measures and practices, and that they will continue working together to strengthen the WTO system. But at the same time, it is important for G20 participants at the Summit to recognize that effective cooperation on trade-related issues can only be achieved through the collective capacity and mobilization of as many countries as possible. As is true for the EU members of the G20, it should be assumed that other participating emerging countries are, at least to some degree, expressing points of view that stem from consultations with non-participating developing countries from the same region. This would contribute to the international legitimacy of the G20 and strengthen its capacity to impact global realities.
When the latest efforts to close the Doha Round ended abruptly in December 2008, entrenched negotiating positions were a factor; but underlying systemic issues, ignored in many accounts of the stop-and-start history of the Round since 2001, were of greater significance: these include countries trading more but earning less; the dangers of premature deindustrialization; a growing technological divide and diminishing policy space. While addressing these systematic challenges will be key to the future stability of the multilateral trading system, the immediate threat to international trade comes from a deeply dysfunctional system of unregulated finance. Fixing that should be the urgent priority of the international community.
In the FT today, Harvey Morris quotes GEG Senior Visiting Fellow Kevin Watkins on the grave humanitarian crisis facing the world’s most vulnerable people, resulting from the global economic downturn. As Kevin has written previously, the global financial crisis is already draining development aid. The effect on the world’s poor is emphasised again in Morris’s article.
