Monterrey looks like an enormous scam, anyhow. The two co-facilitators are Camdessus and the neolib SA finance minister, Trevor Manuel (responsible for fin.liberalisation and capital flight, such that our currency - my salary and savings! - are down 50% in US$ terms over the past two years). The host is the ghastly Zedillo. The thinker is John Williamson, the man who coined the phrase Washington Consensus. A creepier crowd would be hard to find...
----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: "lbo-talk" <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2002 6:22 PM Subject: US blocks aid increase to poor countries
> [from the WB's daily clipping service]
>
> U.S. REJECTS BID TO DOUBLE FOREIGN AID TO POOR LANDS
>
> The Bush administration has rejected an international proposal to
> double foreign
> aid in the wake of the war in Afghanistan, contending that poor
> countries should
> make better use of the assistance they now receive, the New York Times
(A11)
> reports diplomats said Monday.
>
> The United States insisted at a weekend meeting in New York
> on global
> development that specific targets for increasing foreign aid be
> deleted from a
> declaration on fighting poverty. At one point during the heated
> negotiations the
> United States threatened to cancel plans to have President
> Bush attend a
> conference in March, scheduled for Monterrey, Mexico, about how
> to help poor
> countries, diplomats said.
>
> The declaration released Monday, intended to be the main
> communique for the
> Monterrey meeting, includes no mention of a campaign over
> several months by
> European nations, the United Nations and the World Bank to
> persuade wealthy
> nations to increase their aid by $50 billion annually, double the
> current level.
> Instead, it calls on rich countries to make "concerted efforts" to
> increase aid.
>
> Though administration officials declined to discuss their
> negotiating position,
> they said that Bush has focused for months on improving, rather than
> increasing,
> foreign aid. "We were pleased with the way the communique turned
> out," one White
> House official said Monday. The official added that an
> announcement of Bush's
> plans to attend the Monterrey meeting could come on Tuesday.
>
> The Monterrey meeting was called to find new ways of helping
> poor countries
> reduce poverty, cut infant mortality and expand access to
> education. Some
> development experts also hoped that wealthy nations would pledge
> to adopt a
> longstanding United Nations goal of transferring 0.7 percent of
> their total
> economic output to poor countries. Only a handful of
> countries, including
> Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden, spend that much on aid,
> though most
> European nations have promised to do so. The United States would
> have to devote
> seven times as much money to foreign aid to reach the target, the story
notes.
>
> Also reporting on the Monterrey communiqué, AFP says the text
> noted "with
> concern current estimates of dramatic shortfalls in resources
> required" to meet
> targets agreed by more than 150 heads of state and government
> at the UN's
> Millennium Summit in September 2000.
>
> "Developing countries were all hoping there would be a firm
> commitment on the
> part of the industrialized world," Pakistan's ambassador to the
> United Nations,
> Ahmad Shah, said, adding: "The language has certainly been diluted."
> But Shah, who co-chaired the negotiations, told reporters that "ODA is
> just one
> of the six areas being addressed as a means of financing
> development." As far as
> developing countries are concerned, removing tariff barriers and
> establishing an
> equitable trading system is the most important way of reducing the
> gap between
> the haves and the have-nots, he said.
>
> In a related commentary, Michel Guillou, director of the
> Institute of
> French-speaking communities and globalization of the Lyon III
> University, writes
> in Le Figaro (France, p.14) that France is in peril if its
> universal ideals of
> freedom, humanism and solidarity are to fade.
>
> French official development aid (ODA) fell from 0.5 percent of
> GDP to 0.32
> percent in five years; in the meantime, its cooperation officers
> are half less
> numerous than they were.
>
> Obviously, global and regional international organizations
> failed in
> implementing both dialogue and solidarity, which tend to be raised
> within each
> geo-cultural area built on the sharing of a main international
> language, Guillou
> writes. France must react by bringing back, as of 2003, the 1996
> level of ODA,
> giving back to the unilateral effort all of its place. Moreover,
> ODA should be
> spent with priority in a special solidarity area of France's
> South and
> French-speaking countries, Guillou adds.
>
> The Washington Post (A18) further comments in an editorial, that
> the President
> Bush's State of the Union address this evening presents an
> opportunity to
> reiterate his commitment to the war on terrorism. The question
> Bush needs to
> address is what kind of action the war on terrorism now requires.
> Difficult
> questions loom on military challenges posed by other regimes
> that harbor
> terrorists. But there are also two types of effort from which Bush
> has shrunk.
> He has not supported the idea of a broad peacekeeping effort in
> Afghanistan. And
> he has refused to back a British initiative to increase development
> assistance
> by $50 billion a year.
>
> The administration offers a confused mixture of reasons for these
> omissions.
> Officials argue that global development assistance should not
> be increased
> because its efficacy is unproven; yet at the same time they make a
> great show of
> pledging aid to Afghanistan. They say that poverty is not what
> causes terrorism
> -- just look at the size of al Qaeda's bank account -- yet they
> implicitly
> acknowledge that poverty can create sanctuaries for terrorists when
> they argue
> that Afghanistan must be reconstructed. They claim that a renewed
> commitment to
> development would be prohibitively expensive. But $50 billion a year
> represents
> a fraction of the $300 billion-plus that rich governments spend on
> subsidizing
> their farmers annually.
>
> He should also accept that some governments are too poor and
> feeble to evict
> terrorist cells, and that in these cases development aid is a tool
> worth using.
> In unstable settings, moreover, development aid needs to be
> supported by a
> peacekeeping effort that stops the aid from being stolen. Today's
> warlord-run
> Afghanistan is one example.
>
> Bush was right when he promised a sustained war, one that requires
> the United
> States to use all the tools available. Sufficient support of
> peace and
> development should be in the tool kit.
>
> The Christian Science Monitor (p. 6) meanwhile reports that
> European leaders
> sent Israel a sharp note of complaint Monday, protesting damage
> worth more than
> $15 million that Israeli troops have inflicted recently on
> European-funded aid
> projects in Palestinian-ruled territories.
>
> Since the current Intifada began in September 2000, the World
> Bank estimated
> recently, the Palestinians have lost some $2.5 billion in gross
> national income
> because of the closures, which prevent Palestinians from leaving
> their towns and
> villages in search of work or business.
>
>