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MONTERREY,
Mexico -- Politics and money-what a heady combination!
Each has an irresistible attraction for the other,
even though whenever they get together it usually
spells trouble. And there are few areas where
that kind of trouble crops up more regularly than
that
of development assistance (sometimes known as
foreign aid), the central subject of the International
Conference on Financing for Development currently
under way in Monterrey. There are some people
who
talk about development assistance as if it were
a form of investment, a partnership between rich
and poor countries aiming at growth that will
ultimately benefit everyone. To others it is more
akin to
charity or to humanitarian aid, an obligation
of the "haves" to extend a hand (and
a handout) to the "have-nots."
There
is a debate currently raging in some academic circles
over whether such aid has been effective in alleviating
poverty in the poorer countries. Various studies
and analyses have sought to identify which conditions
or types of aid are the most effective.
But
they all really miss the point. Providing
or receiving
international development assistance
is not a scientific experiment; it is a political
activity. Likewise, the Monterrey conference
is a political event. That is, it is concerned
not with determining the ultimate truth about
financing for development (whatever that might
be), but rather with reaching a consensus among
participating countries about what they want
to do about it. It is a negotiation between
the rich and the poor countries, and its outcome
will depend not on which side is "right" but
rather on the amount of leverage that each
side can bring to the bargaining table. It's
as that ad in the airline magazines keeps telling
us: We don't get what we deserve, only what
we bargain for. In political terms, in democracies,
that generally means we get what the majority
of voters want us to get. In the UN, where
consensus rules, it means that we get only
what virtually everybody agrees that we should
get-and not a penny more.
Earlier
this year, UN Secretary General Kofi A. Annan
called upon the world's richer nations
to bolster the promise they made at the Millennium
Summit-to cut extreme poverty in the world
in half by 2015-by doubling the amount of official
development assistance (ODA). As of now, it
doesn't appear as if this is going to happen.
To borrow a phrase from the late Everett McKinley
Dirksen, onetime Republican leader in the US
Senate, "One hundred billion dollars here,
and one hundred billion dollars there, and
pretty soon you're talkin' real money."
At the final preparatory committee meeting
before the conference, the US delegation made
sure that language calling upon donors to double
their ODA levels was dropped from the conference's
draft document. Late last week, President George
W. Bush announced plans to raise the US foreign
aid budget-currently the most niggardly of
any of the rich nations-not by 100 percent
but by roughly 15 percent. Specifically, he
proposed spending an additional $5 billion
over three years.
Bear in mind that the development assistance
that the US provides is about 0.1 percent of
the country's total economy (GDP), or roughly
one-tenth the level provided by little Denmark.
Total development assistance provided by the
governments of the rich countries has been
declining steadily since 1992-ironically, the
year of the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro,
at which the donor nations agreed to increase
their ODA levels.
Where has all that money gone? Why do the
rich countries keep making promises they have
no intention of keeping? Alas, for the answers
to such questions you'll have to ask the politicians-although
it's not at all certain that you'll be satisfied
with the explanations they'll give you.
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