G8: Missing the point

George Bush has responded to the growing pressure surrounding the upcoming G8 meeting in Gleneagles by promising to double US aid to Africa. But while welcome, this is fundamentally missing the point. Bush's increase follows the same old path of making aid conditional on "better governance" - code not just for reduced corruption, but also for the "Washington Consensus" of open markets, privatisation, and user-charges for basic services. And these are the problem, rather than the solution, because they make the basic education and health which are the prerequisites for any sort of economic development unreachable for the vast majority of Africans.

It's also missing the point because it ignores the key component of the Make Poverty History campaign: trade. One of the reasons Africa remains mired in poverty despite a half-century and more of aid is because the rules of global trade are stacked in favour of the rich and against the poor. Through the World Bank, IMF, and aid conditionalities, the rich have forced the poor to systematically open their markets, while keeping their own closed. As a result, poor countries cannot develop export markets, while their internal markets are devastated by cheap imports. The result is joblessness and poverty.

Reforming world trade rules to create a level playing field would produce far more benefit to the poorer countries than increasing aid budgets. The poor world already gains thirty-two times as much revenue from exports as it does from aid. Oxfam has estimated that increasing their share of world trade by only 5% would deliver them an extra US$350 billion a year - seven times more than they currently receive in aid. And the effects would be dramatic: it is estimated that every 1% increase would reduce the number of people in extreme poverty by 128 million.

Strangely, though, the G8's dialogue on this has focussed on aid and debt-reduction (again, with strings attached), rather than trade. And the reason is obvious: the rich countries profit from the present inequalities, and are perfectly willing to see the poor continue to die of hunger and disease in order to continue to do so. And the only way this will end is if we stand up and tell our governments that we are no longer willing to tolerate it.