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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Island mentality
By Gamal Nkrumah
The three-day Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit meeting that took place from 3 to 5 July in the Togolese capital Lomé is far more than a peg on which to hang a news story. African heads of state meet with monotonous regularity to produce final communiqués and churn out some warm, maybe even heated, words -- and nothing else. But I must say at once that the OAU's very survival, against all odds, is a triumph in its own right -- the thread of contextual, historical continuity is an important theme too.
The world's richest nations have a moral responsibility to lend a helping hand to the world's poorest. A failure to do so would be an abdication of responsibility and an affront both to humanity and common sense -- this much seems clear.
But when it comes to debt relief for the world's poorest nations, the Group of Eight (G-8) summit meeting scheduled to open tomorrow on the Japanese island of Okinawa is certain to be yet another showcase for the ominous signs of moral cowardice. The abhorrent assumption by the rich is that poverty itself is somehow suspicious and shameful.
The G-8 is the toothless tiger that oversees international politics and the world economy in an age of unbridled global capitalism. After a series of abortive and half-baked attempts to appease the poorest and most indebted countries in Africa -- culminating with the unfulfilled promises of debt relief made at the last G-8 summit in Cologne -- it has become abundantly clear that G-8 leaders have no intention of changing the status quo. The leaders of the world's richest nations display an arrogant "let them eat cake" attitude toward the world's poor, and like Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, they should suffer the guillotine.
And if that sounds unduly bellicose, then consider this simple truism: if the G-8 pledges made last year at Cologne had been honoured before this round of meeting and greeting in Okinawa, the plight of the poor around the world would have been bettered. "By redirecting $70 billion to $80 billion a year in a global economy that is more than $30 trillion, the world could ensure access to the basics for everyone," claims a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report on the state of the world's children published earlier in the year.
Africa's challenges cannot be wished away on a shoestring. At the very least, implementing strategies that would arrest, rather than exacerbate, the alarming rate at which the debt burden on the developing world is accelerating should be made a G-8 priority. The World Bank's involvement in Africa has directly led to the continent's growing indebtedness. By the WB's own estimation, over half its projects in Africa have been total failures. What better proof is needed to see that WB policies harm the poor?
US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has prepared a report on the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) debt relief programme for the Okinawa summit, which will go from 21 to 23 July. But not long ago, Summers -- a former chief economist at the World Bank -- revealingly, and callously, advocated dumping toxic waste in Third World countries (one wonders how his plans sat with US human rights advocates). The fact that Summers left his job at the WB for a plum Washington post perhaps foretells the kind of policy directives we can expect from his summit report.
Last week, G-8 finance ministers in Fukuoka, Japan drew a radical plan of reform for the lending facilities of the IMF. The reforms, which coincide with the blueprint drawn by the US government earlier this year, clearly show Wall Street's influence (ostensibly there to "assist" the IMF tackle financial crises around the world). The G-8 plan proposes to enhance the IMF's surveillance role and encourage the use of private capital. It also stresses the deterrence of "inappropriate large-scale access to IMF resources, thus contributing to their more efficient use." This Wall Street agenda must not be allowed to ruin the lives of billions of the world's poor.
The aptly-named Island Mentality, a recently-released report published by the international debt relief organization Jubilee 2000, extends frantic appeals to rich nations to replace empty words with consequential action. Jubilee 2000's immaculately marshalled evidence lays bare the pressing problems of poverty and indebtedness and shows how little the world's rich would have to forfeit to alleviate the so much suffering. Hitherto, G-8 summit communiqués have been, at best, cynical and hypocritical about the world's poor. At worst, they are heartless, ill-judged and short-sighted.
"Statistics are a less dramatic weapon than demonstrations, strikes or mass lobbies," claims the Human Development Report 2000. Perhaps that is why the Japanese government conveniently consigned the G-8 leaders to the remote island of Okinawa -- home to half of the 47,000 US troops stationed in Japan. Evidently, the Japanese government does not relish a re-enactment of the chaotic scenes at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meetings in Seattle last year.
But, as the UNDP report illustrates, "numbers have an important role to play in the struggle for human rights." Indeed, 100 million children live and work on the streets and there are some 250 million child labourers. The 48 poorest countries account for less than 0.4 per cent of global exports and some 1.2 billion people, mostly in Africa, subsist on less than a dollar a day. The combined wealth of the world's 200 wealthiest individuals hit the $1 trillion mark in 1999, while the combined incomes of the 582 million people living in the 43 least-developed countries is $146 million. Surely, the statistics speak for themselves.
The Japanese seem to realise more than their G-8 partners that helping the world's poor is also in the best interests of the industrially-advanced nations of the North. Improved economic performance in the emerging markets of the South have tangible economic benefits in the North. The beggar-my-neighbour policy hitherto championed by the North, is not a wise one. At a time when most G-8 nations are cutting back aid to Africa, the Japanese are fast emerging as the most generous donor nation.
At the G-8 foreign ministerial meeting in Miyazawa last week, Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono announced increased donations to a UN fund to help police and customs officials crack down on illegal shipments of small arms. Japan intends to increase its overall aid budget and has graciously insisted on switching some of its major aid programmes into controlling firearms as part of a comprehensive conflict prevention effort. Over 500 million small firearms are in circulation around the world. In the past decade, armed conflicts have cost the lives of five million people worldwide and led to the injury of another six million.
No one expects Africa's debts to be written off in Okinawa over the weekend. The issues that are likely to dominate are those entrenched in a system that furthers unequal transactions between the technologically-advanced North and the underdeveloped South.
One topic that does not feature prominently on the G-8 summit agenda is the so-called brain drain of high-tech and highly-skilled workers from the South. The US recently announced that visa restrictions will be eased so that more high-skilled workers can enter the US to meet the technology industry's insatiable demand for new blood. Eight million Filipinos work abroad and with the critical shortage of engineers, mathematicians and computer software designers in the US, more skilled labour will move from India, China and Southeast Asia -- not to mention Africa and South America -- to the US. With over 1.2 million high-tech jobs created in the past decade, it is estimated that some 300,000 work positions are unfilled in America today because of a lack of qualified workers.
The European Union's own new strategy to "become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world," will no doubt further accelerate the exodus of high-tech workers from the South and compound the brain-drain disaster. It seems that the North is more than happy to take the best, but is only willing to give the worst.
