THE United Nations has come out fighting over the failure of rich countries to fulfill promises they made to boost the amount of aid they would deliver by 2110 as part of the Millennium Development Goals. According to Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a 52-page UN report published this week sounds “ a strong alarm”.
If donor nations are going to meet their solemn pledges within the next two years, they will have to find no less than $18 billion a year. The main offenders, according to the UN, are America, Japan and the EU, which far from hitting their committed target giving of 0.7 percent of their combined national incomes, have actually so far only produced 0.28 percent. Only five countries, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden actually met or exceeded their promises.
This shameful situation is the worse because aid giving has actually declined since 2005, the peak year when $107 billion was given to the world’s poorest nations. A significant portion of that sum was actually not new money but the writing off of existing debts. Given the recessionary pressures now facing all the developed economies, it seems most unlikely that this deplorable shortfall is going to be made up by 2010.
As governments struggle busily to feather-bed their own electorates, they will be calculating there are few votes in giving their taxpayers’ money to the world’s poorest countries. But, in fact, this is a serious misjudgment. Poverty and deprivation in the Third World breed political and social instability, give impetus to illegal economic migration to the First World and form a breeding ground for extremism and terrorism, the results of which could well be visited in future on rich countries.
And even if wealthy nations really do not have the budgets to honor their aid pledges, there is another significant way in which they are shortchanging the world’s poor. The collapse of the Doha Round of world trade negotiations has perpetuated the disadvantages under which developing economies are having to operate. As the UN report reminds us, the Doha Round, launched in 2001 was designed to establish “an open, equitable, rule-based, predictable and nondiscriminatory multilateral trading and financial system”. The talks collapsed in large measure because Washington and Brussels were unwilling to surrender their protectionist measures, not least on agriculture.
Yet the irony is that a liberated trade system such as that envisaged by the Doha Round would actually enable many Third World countries to earn themselves a reasonable living, pay their way in the world and so reduce the demand for aid money. But the First World is not prepared to risk its economic and commercial dominance, even at a time when China and India are beginning to beat it on its own distorted terms.
Responding to the UN report’s criticism, a US diplomat averred: “The US is certainly committed to the core issues, reducing poverty and hunger and improving health and education and combating disease”. That will be such a comfort to the starving and sick of the Third World.
