Stephen Chan :
Should foreign aid continue? It’s a complex question. There are so many types of aid, and different countries have different models. The Chinese, for example, are committed to vast infrastructural programmes, particularly to do with transport and communications. Other countries take other approaches.
No one is suggesting humanitarian aid should end. Catastrophe evokes a human response to help fellow creatures. When help is not possible, for example in ending the carnage in Aleppo, we feel frustration and despair that people suffer without respite.
But the debate over the extent of aid and whether it should continue is concerned with wastage, corruption and dependency. It recognises that while much of western aid cultivates markets for exports, the overall effect appears to be enrichment of an elite.
Poverty has been greatly reduced over the last decade, but the discrepancy between rich and poor seems to be growing. And, in many countries, the rich seem still to be committed to accumulation rather than to the circulation of capital and its investment in new enterprises that would generate employment. Where a proportion of aid leaks, it facilitates an elite that is not economically dynamic, merely rich.We want to help the developing world, preferably to our advantage. But we do not want them to rise above us
Critics, such as the global economist Dambisa Moyo, have long accused aid regimes of retarding rather than developing. Her critique is that aid creates dependency, and the sub-text is that this is precisely because western donors prefer it that way.
An Africa, for instance, that develops through the vibrancy of its trade – in particular its manufactured products – would threaten western industries and the voter base of governments from both left and right. Aid is expressed in terms of a pious commitment, but is in fact a long-term selfishness.
This is a powerful critique, but not every developing country has something to trade. Some are merely impoverished.
Others are the site of intense competition for resource extraction: west and east seek Africa’s mineral resources for future industrial capacity. Africa sells those resources because it has been discouraged from developing industrialisation of its own.
This discouragement has perverse and arcadian aspects – forms of romanticism. If Africa industrialised, it would add to world pollution. But this ignores the possibility of a generation jump in technologies.
Africa as a leader in vast solar energy plants, for instance, requires a leap in imagination, and often involves skills not plentiful even in the west.
The debate on aid comes down to this kind of lack of imagination.
We have cemented in our minds the idea of a hierarchy in the world’s nations: the developing world is below us and we need to help them, preferably to our advantage. But we do not want them to rise above us. How many new Chinas can the west bear? Aid to this extent becomes a solidification of the current status quo.
But if the mantra of “trade not aid” took off, the left would complain as industrial workers lost their jobs because of cheap imports from new manufacturers, while left and right would complain as new economic centres of power reduced our international capacity to influence others. It is we who would then become dependent.
This is a debate worth conducting. No transformation will occur overnight. Certainly, Britain’s aid contribution seems set to diminish as it leaves the EU – and the multilateral funding schemes that have delivered quantities of aid to the outside world. But humanitarian aid should certainly not diminish. Here, the public can sometimes lead the governments of the west.
I remember in 1991 walking by the Red Sea in front of the bombed-out ruins of the entire city of Massawa in Eritrea. As part of Ethiopia, the region had suffered greatly from the terrible famine of 1984.
A young boy came to walk with me. In broken English he asked where I came from. When I replied, he said: “My father tells me that when I was born, we had terrible famine. He said a singer from your land tried to help us.” Bob Geldof’s name had disappeared, but a memory of him remained.
If aid is often fearful of the future, and selfish, it is not always so.
(Professor Stephen Chan will be one of a panel discussing this issue tonight, at a discussion co-hosted by the Guardian’s Global Development Professionals Network and the London International Development Centre).
Courtesy: The Guardian
