For all the blubbering Western powers, such as the EU and the US, do over aid and development, they show their true colours when it comes to trade. Western trade policies with developing countries are designed to increase their own markets, increase their supply of cheap raw materials and labour, destroy anything that may create even the smallest bit of competition and, in general, retain their position of dominance and exploitation.
The EU is currently trying to push India into signing a trade agreement that will threaten the supply of cheap and affordable antiretroviral (ARV) medications to developing countries. India is one of the few countries in a position to produce generic equivalents of branded versions that demand extortionate prices. The issue is, ostenibly, over whether India should be allowed continued access to the data they need to produce the drugs cheaply.
The EU is happy to spend enormous sums of money on this kind of pursuit, far more than they spend on 'aid'. And even though EU and US money is going towards the purchase of a lot of ARVs used in developing countries, they seem content to pay more for, presumably, a lot less of an identical product in the future. And this is at a time when all sorts of crazy policies are being discussed to increase the number of people on ARVs to several times present levels. (There is some discussion of these policies on my other blog, which deals with Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis and other technical 'fixes' for HIV.)
The apparent contradiction in vastly increasing the cost of products that their own funding will be used to purchase in ever increasing quantities is not really a contradiction at all. So called 'aid' money is mainly used as a subsidy for their own industries, especially the pharmaceutical industries. And compared to the amount of money that goes into promoting the interests of Big Pharma, aid money is little to write home about, anyway.
Despite claiming to have the interests of developing countries, including India, at heart, the EU seems intent on destroying the Indian generic drug industry. If developing countries, especially African countries, cease to be a market for these affordable drugs, there will be no other viable markets large enough to sustain the sector.
You might think that this would mean the EU is scoring an own goal but it is just what Big Pharma would like. They have never really wanted a supply of affordable generic drugs, why would they? They couldn't care less who buys their drugs as long as they pay a price that keeps their profit margins at levels they are accustomed to.
A few million Africans may die but that's just collateral damage to the pharmaceutical industry. And the thought of millions of Africans dying could make for a great publicity campaign to increase the amount of money the EU and the US are willing to pay for overpriced drugs. With competition out of the way, top prices are guaranteed. That's how the free market works, it appears.
Just in case you thought all that free market (for developing countries), anti-subsidy (except for wealthy countries) liberalism had been entirely discredited by recent global financial crises, think again. Those who gained from the policies of the past are doing very well, thank you, it's ordinary people who are, as always, paying the price. According to an article by War on Want, the deregulation that has caused so many problems is to continue. Clearly it didn't cause any problems for some people.
And talking of maintaining policies that have caused devastation up to now, the EU is busy pushing biofuels as a 'green' alternative to fossil fuels. Not only is biofuel production not a green alternative in any sense, production of biofuel in large quantities requires even greater exploitation of developing countries than is seen at present.
Vast tracts of land in developing are currently being used to produce food and raw materials for Westerners. But these tracts of land are nothing to what is being grabbed to supply Western cars with cheap fuel. The question of whether there will be land enough left over for developing countries to grow enough food to survive is not really being asked by the land grabbers. Water, in short supply in many countries, will become even scarcer in the pursuit of 'green' biofuels.
Production of biofuels will involve large scale destruction of environments to make way for factory production methods needed to produce 'cheap' fuel. The process of grabbing land is already underway, has been for several years. Perhaps the EU hopes that any increase in carbon emissions will occur in countries too poor to measure the pollution or to do anything about it.
The extent to which Western powers exploit developing countries should never be forgotten when the subject of 'charity beginning at home' comes up. Rich countries may be looking for ways to reduce spending but what they spend on development is a mere pittance, much of it never reaching the supposed recipients. The best thing rich countries could do is reduce their levels of exploitation. Then, whether they continue providing aid and how much they provide may cease to be relevant.
Showing posts with label aid money. Show all posts
Showing posts with label aid money. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Aid is But a Tiny Fig Leaf
While the Icelandic volcanic cloud means that people in Europe are having to cancel or postpone trips or find alternative ways of returning from trips, Kenyans are worrying about what is going to happen to their perishable produce, such as flowers, fruit and vegetables. Europe is their biggest market. Although owners of these industries make huge profits when things are going well, the employees, who make a pittance, make nothing at all when something prevents produce from getting to market.
At the same time, the BBC comments on a report that finds that the UK imports a lot of its water from other countries in the form of produce such as flowers, fruit, vegetables and other goods. Much of this imported water comes from developing countries, such as Kenya, where clean water and sanitation problems are responsible for high rates of avoidable mortality, especially among infants and children, and numerous treatable and curable illnesses. The report estimates that two thirds of the UK's water use is imported.
The mass production of non-seasonal food and non-food crops by developing countries results in much of the starvation that the UK and other rich countries seem to see as 'natural disasters', to be remedied by a sticky plaster, some handout or even a 'deal' of some kind that is calculated to do more harm than good (it benefits the donor, of course). Yet the industries that claim to be such a great source of foreign currency, fruit, vegetable and flower industries, are mostly foreign owned, British owned, in fact. They pay little or no tax in Kenya and, being offshored, little in Britain either.
When a country like Kenya starts to realise that their 'cash crops', such as tea, sugar or coffee don't make them much money, they seem to reach for another cash crop. The Kenyan cotton industry (along with that of many other developing countries) was wrecked many years ago by the US cotton industry successfully lobbying for subsidies to support them so that no developing country could compete. Subsidies are bad, according to the US, except when they are US subsidies. Sadly, Kenyans are calling for their government to help them return to cotton production. But this is unlikely to fly because US cotton is still subsidised to such an extent that no developing country can produce it as cheaply. And this is despite Kenya having pay and working conditions that would make Bill Gates proud.
But cash crops have always made very little money. Many of them here are grown as part of a kind of agreement that was formed with British land 'owners' after independence. They were allowed to keep their land and those Kenyans producing their (the colonial's) crop, tea, for example, were bound to go on producing tea. The law is slowly changing so that people may be allowed to stop producing tea and produce some food instead (God forbid!). But with sugar, the factories are demanding that even more land be given up to it so they can produce biofuel. Never mind that those whose land the sugar cane is planted on make little or no money from it.
It may well be wondered why farmers produce a non-food crop when they are starving and these crops don't make any profit for them. Well, aside from the promise to keep producing crops that only profit foreign companies, such as Unilever, farmers can't afford the inputs to grow food. They could make a lot of money from growing food and feed themselves at the same time. But as the government does little to support subsistence farmers, only being able to help the rich industrialists with tax breaks and other preferential conditions, farmers have to accept the generous offers from the likes of sugar companies to meet some of the costs involved. In the end, the farmer does all the work and gets little remuneration, if any. And they and their families starve.
Biofuels, like all the other luxury and non-food crops produced in developing countries, effectively export unthinkable amounts of water, along with vast tracts of land. The 'natural' disasters of flooding, drought, famine and the rest, are not as natural as they are painted. Rather, they result from explicit policies and agreements that keep things cheap for people in rich countries, profitable for foreign companies, and if any of those people in developing countries start complaining we can always point to the aid money we send them, whatever aid money even reaches the majority of people.
It's no secret that rich countries steal water from developing countries, preferring to feed ourselves luxuries and run our cars than allow undernourished and starving people to eat. But we steal a lot more than that. The majority of people in Kenya are subsistence farmers or workers. Even those who have jobs usually work for very little so that those in rich countries can afford cheap raw materials and goods. Many people have next to nothing, and that seems to be the way we in the West like it. And in return for extracting what we can, we send a little money every now and again and think of ourselves as very philanthropic indeed.
There is an alternative to rich countries sending ever increasing sums of money to developing countries. That is to identify some of the ways they extract even larger and faster increasing sums of money. That way, Kenya could be assisted to develop its own flower businesses. They could produce and process fruit and vegetables, thereby making more money from them. They could choose what crops to grow and in what quantities, especially crops that could be used to produce high value goods. In fact, the list of things that constitute extraction of wealth by rich countries from countries like Kenya is very long. Then Kenyans will be in a position to tell us what to do with our aid.
At the same time, the BBC comments on a report that finds that the UK imports a lot of its water from other countries in the form of produce such as flowers, fruit, vegetables and other goods. Much of this imported water comes from developing countries, such as Kenya, where clean water and sanitation problems are responsible for high rates of avoidable mortality, especially among infants and children, and numerous treatable and curable illnesses. The report estimates that two thirds of the UK's water use is imported.
The mass production of non-seasonal food and non-food crops by developing countries results in much of the starvation that the UK and other rich countries seem to see as 'natural disasters', to be remedied by a sticky plaster, some handout or even a 'deal' of some kind that is calculated to do more harm than good (it benefits the donor, of course). Yet the industries that claim to be such a great source of foreign currency, fruit, vegetable and flower industries, are mostly foreign owned, British owned, in fact. They pay little or no tax in Kenya and, being offshored, little in Britain either.
When a country like Kenya starts to realise that their 'cash crops', such as tea, sugar or coffee don't make them much money, they seem to reach for another cash crop. The Kenyan cotton industry (along with that of many other developing countries) was wrecked many years ago by the US cotton industry successfully lobbying for subsidies to support them so that no developing country could compete. Subsidies are bad, according to the US, except when they are US subsidies. Sadly, Kenyans are calling for their government to help them return to cotton production. But this is unlikely to fly because US cotton is still subsidised to such an extent that no developing country can produce it as cheaply. And this is despite Kenya having pay and working conditions that would make Bill Gates proud.
But cash crops have always made very little money. Many of them here are grown as part of a kind of agreement that was formed with British land 'owners' after independence. They were allowed to keep their land and those Kenyans producing their (the colonial's) crop, tea, for example, were bound to go on producing tea. The law is slowly changing so that people may be allowed to stop producing tea and produce some food instead (God forbid!). But with sugar, the factories are demanding that even more land be given up to it so they can produce biofuel. Never mind that those whose land the sugar cane is planted on make little or no money from it.
It may well be wondered why farmers produce a non-food crop when they are starving and these crops don't make any profit for them. Well, aside from the promise to keep producing crops that only profit foreign companies, such as Unilever, farmers can't afford the inputs to grow food. They could make a lot of money from growing food and feed themselves at the same time. But as the government does little to support subsistence farmers, only being able to help the rich industrialists with tax breaks and other preferential conditions, farmers have to accept the generous offers from the likes of sugar companies to meet some of the costs involved. In the end, the farmer does all the work and gets little remuneration, if any. And they and their families starve.
Biofuels, like all the other luxury and non-food crops produced in developing countries, effectively export unthinkable amounts of water, along with vast tracts of land. The 'natural' disasters of flooding, drought, famine and the rest, are not as natural as they are painted. Rather, they result from explicit policies and agreements that keep things cheap for people in rich countries, profitable for foreign companies, and if any of those people in developing countries start complaining we can always point to the aid money we send them, whatever aid money even reaches the majority of people.
It's no secret that rich countries steal water from developing countries, preferring to feed ourselves luxuries and run our cars than allow undernourished and starving people to eat. But we steal a lot more than that. The majority of people in Kenya are subsistence farmers or workers. Even those who have jobs usually work for very little so that those in rich countries can afford cheap raw materials and goods. Many people have next to nothing, and that seems to be the way we in the West like it. And in return for extracting what we can, we send a little money every now and again and think of ourselves as very philanthropic indeed.
There is an alternative to rich countries sending ever increasing sums of money to developing countries. That is to identify some of the ways they extract even larger and faster increasing sums of money. That way, Kenya could be assisted to develop its own flower businesses. They could produce and process fruit and vegetables, thereby making more money from them. They could choose what crops to grow and in what quantities, especially crops that could be used to produce high value goods. In fact, the list of things that constitute extraction of wealth by rich countries from countries like Kenya is very long. Then Kenyans will be in a position to tell us what to do with our aid.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
The Pretence of Aid
Some of the issues this blog is particularly concerned with include unfair trade policies that aim to keep developing countries in their current state of underdevelopment, the use of developing countries to produce low value goods and raw materials, but not high value goods, which they have to import from rich countries, and the use of developing countries for growing monocultures and single resources that are often processed in rich countries, earning poorer countries very little.
Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) are, to a large extent, behind these and other issues. Rich countries have been busy for a long time trying to persuade African countries to sign up to these EPAs, without much success, yet. But as the number of poor people in African continues to rise, mostly as a result of the 'pro-poor' policies of rich countries, it should be possible to persuade more countries to put the noose around their neck in return for some short term handouts that they need for an emergency.
Perhaps Kenyans think there is no alternative, perhaps there is no alternative for them, but they seem to be getting further and further into the noose of producing cheap primary goods for export. Huge areas of land are being diverted to use for biofuels and other things that people here are not in great need of. At the same time, small farmers, who produce the bulk of what Kenyans eat, are slowly losing access to land as they are pushed off by rich industrial scale agricultural interests and as the prices rise to levels they will never be able to afford.
Rich countries used trade tariffs to get to the position they are in today. Now they want poor countries to remove their tariffs so that the rich countries can expand their markets and compete, under completely skewed conditions, against the poor countries' markets. EPAs are dressed up as being advantageous to African countries but so far, most African leaders have not been fooled.
The East African press generally seem uninterested in non-national matters, so I was surprised to come across an article that discusses the difficult area of EPAs in simple language for a non-political economist like myself to understand. This article sees EPAs as the wrong kind of development model and discusses a number of key points. One of these concerns EPA provisions that are highly detrimental to African countries' development. The EU claims that dismantling tariffs will promote growth, despite the fact that this has never been the case, in any country, or at any time in history. On the contrary, tariff cuts have taken countries in the oppostie direction, leading to stagnation and de-industrialization.
Kenya is typical of the countries who will suffer if they sign up to an EPA. They depend on a handful of low value primary goods that are often produced by farmers at an extremely small profit, even at a loss: sugar, sisal, coffee, tea, fruit, vegetables and the like. It would be extremely advantageous to Kenya to use those primary goods to supply an industrial sector, if they had an industrial sector. But much of the industry they do have is owned by foreigners from rich countries, who are effectively subsidized to be here. They get tax breaks and other incentives so that Kenyan industrialists have no chance of competing with them.
Of course, the EU would not want Kenya to develop an industrial sector, not an indigenous one, anyhow. Their economies depend on cheap goods and cheap labour from developing countries. So they dress up their policies and 'contributions' as 'aid' and they talk the talk of development. And for the EU and other rich parties, African countries are not just sources of cheap goods and labour, they are also important markets, where very expensive goods, often made with cheap African raw materials and labour, are either sold or dumped on the African market.
It's a disgusting thought, but all the land that has long been used to produce non-food or non-essential food products in developing countries could have been producing food for starving people here in Africa. Instead, starving Africans get a pat on the head and a hand-out from the rich world. Now that some rich countries are unable to produce enough food for themselves, they are buying up African land. Others are buying up African land to produce biofuels. Africans can expect more pats on the head and more hand-outs whenever enough Western attention is drawn to some drought, flood or other 'natural' disaster.
And don't be fooled into thinking that most of the disasters that strike poor countries are wholly natural. Many are not in any sense natural. People starve, become sick and die during what are referred to as disasters, usually, because they don't have access to the food or the water that is being extracted by foreign interests. The 'shortages' of food that Kenya has experienced recently and will continue to experience into the future have been manufactured. The bulk of land, and therefore water, in Kenya is devoted to producing goods for export. Even those goods that consist of food items are destined for Europeans who can afford it, not Kenyans, whose buying power is undermined by various agreements with the EU and other rich countries and zones.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Donor Funding: Pseudo Worries About Pseudo Aid?
The parabolic solar cooker, made from an umbrella lined with tinfoil, works well when it comes to heating up water. I'll try cooking with it when I have found a suitable pot with handles and painted it black. Meantime, I wish to demonstrate the 'Cookits' that I bought from Solar Cookers International to an audience that could turn out to be as many as 20 people, far from ideal. I'd prefer very small groups of people but I've agreed to it.
As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.
Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.
When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.
Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.
Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind.
As I am trying to win people over to solar cooking, I'm concentrating on things that people here like to eat. Thankfully, that's quite a small range of fairly basic foods. Tomorrow I hope to cook githeri, a mixture of beans and maize. It will take some time to cook so I'm hoping for 4 or 5 hours of uninterrupted sunshine. I'll have to cook something else that doesn't take so long or my credibility could be open to question.
Actually, the credibility of some Westerner lecturing people in a developing country about renewable energy and sustainable cooking techniques is pretty questionable as it is. Someone recently claimed in an email to me that people in the US have shown great interest in his solar cooker. It's a pity they couldn't show a bit more interest in reducing energy and resource consumption on a national level. And if every American family purchases one of those particular solar cookers, the amount of plastic needed to manufacture them will be phenomenal.
When people ask me if we all use solar cookers in Ireland, I tell them there is not enough sun. This is true, but does everyone there use wind, wave or tidal power? I don't think so. Come to think of it, one of the more dubious gems of wisdom sent from rich countries to poor countries recently is biofuels. In addition to using up scarce land, water and other resources, people here are very unlikely to make much money from such activities. They need food, not biofuels and they need to grow food for themselves, not accept handouts in return for biofuels. Enough land in developing countries has already been destroyed in order to produce cheap raw materials for rich countries.
Questions are now being raised about jatropha production, a biofuel crop that is said to grow in marginal land. Well, they say that about all biofuel crop production. Unsurprisingly, people at the Nairobi Trade Fair last week were promoting jatropha even for farmers with as little as one acre to spare for cash crops. Perhaps just about anything being hawked as good for small farmers by rich countries should be viewed with great suspicion. We in developed countries don't have a great reputation for telling the truth.
Questions are also constantly being raised about the effectiveness of aid, especially now that so many wealthy countries are feeling the pinch from the current financial crisis. Personally, I'm not against all aid or all aid agencies. However, much of the money that is called foreign aid is spent on furthering the economic, strategic and political interests of wealthy countries and corporations. The most important questions should be about how much 'aid' money even leaves the donor country and what (and whom) the money that does leave is being spent on. The idea that developed countries bestow lots of goodies on developing countries and get nothing in return is pure bullshit, but sadly not the biodigestible kind.
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