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... The American government is notoriously stingy with its foreign aid, giving just 0.2% of GDP to poor countries every year. Even when Americans’ ample private donations are added in, America still falls near the bottom of the rich-nation pack in generosity to those abroad. Yet American voters believe they are absurdly generous. A 2001 poll showed that they think 24% of their federal budget goes on foreign aid, a figure that would amount to more than 4% of America’s GDP. ... On June 8th, the UN Development Programme released a statement showing that progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), which were supposed to cut extreme poverty in half and improve social indicators such as education and health care, has been pitifully slow. At the current rate of progress, by 2015 the number of deaths of African children under five will have fallen only to 5m a year, rather than the 2m target set by the MDG. Other indicators look just as bleak. AIDS, in particular, is devastating the population. Life expectancy has dropped by more than ten years in many countries. And with the deaths concentrated in the working-age population, each new case adds to a widening circle of economic hardship.

It's farm subsidies, stupid

Yet there is one step that rich countries could take that would help Africans in both well-governed and poorly-governed states: curbing the agricultural subsidies and health-and-safety regulations that keep African products out of rich-country markets. The current structure of agricultural protections not only hurts poor African farmers, but also, by levying disproportionate tariffs on many processed goods such as ground coffee, helps keep poor countries selling low on the value chain. This leaves their already-weak economies extremely vulnerable to swings in raw commodity prices. ...

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... This is what keeps Africa poor: not a lack of political will but the tremendous profitability of the current arrangement. Sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on earth, is also its most profitable investment destination: It offers, according to the World Bank's 2003 Global Development Finance report, "the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world." Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are so unspeakably rich. ...

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http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0610-20.htm

http://tinyurl.com/9h28w

[ 15 June 2005: Message edited by: VanLuke ]

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You are waiting for me to say but, and I will not disappoint you. The but comes in paragraph 2 of the finance ministers' statement. To qualify for debt relief, developing countries must "tackle corruption, boost private-sector development" and eliminate "impediments to private investment, both domestic and foreign".
These are called conditionalities. Conditionalities are the policies governments must follow before they receive aid and loans and debt relief.

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[ 15 June 2005: Message edited by: Bobolink ]

Why Africa by Bob Geldof published some time ago in the Georgia Straight:

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America still falls near the bottom of the rich-nation pack in generosity to those abroad. Yet American voters believe they are absurdly generous.

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America still falls near the bottom of the rich-nation pack in generosity to those abroad. Yet American voters believe they are absurdly generous.

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The American government is notoriously stingy with its foreign aid, giving just 0.2% of GDP to poor countries every year.

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In fact, the Bush regime is blocking use of foreign aid money to be used for fertility clinics in Africa, even though little or none of the money comes from the U.S.. Half of African women in Kenya will be pregnant by the age of 19, and many will have backroom abortions. Many arrive at UN-sponsored clinics with infected wombs and in shock. The world-wide consensus is that women want fewer children.

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Originally posted by swallow:
The UN target is 0.7%. It used to be 1% (Brandt commission) but they lowered it ...

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I've always considered this to be disgusting because 1 percent is already a pittance.

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Originally posted by Bobolink:
I guess we prefer them to the corrupt Marxixt-Leninist dictators (Robert Mugabe, Kim Jong Il, etc)

[ 15 June 2005: Message edited by: Bobolink ]

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... a coalition of British aid agencies and environment groups warns today...

...Aid needs to be targeted in a new way, they insist, and what will be vital in the future will not be big development projects, such as industrial-scale agriculture, so much as steps to make small communities more resilient in the face of potentially devastating rises in temperature or drops in rainfall.

The report, Africa - Up In Smoke? ...

...Above all, it says, there must be a new flexibility, and not a one-size-fits-all approach to development. "Just as an investment portfolio spreads risk by including a variety of stocks and shares, so an agricultural system geared to manage the risk of a changing climate requires a rich diversity of approaches in terms of what is grown, and how it is grown."...

...The 18 charities, which together form the Working Group on Climate Change and Development...

...The charities say they emerged from a private seminar with Mr Blair's officials feeling disillusioned about the failure of Downing Street to grasp the Africa-climate change agenda.

"The most depressing thing about it was that they took the view that it is simply not possible to talk about the two issues in the same breath. They said the media couldn't take it in and that it was too complicated," said one source. "We were flabbergasted. They just don't seem to get it."...

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