Arrested development

Just a few days into the Millennium Development Goals summit and there have already been a number of promising signs that levels of developmental aid will be able to ride the waves of global austerity and the financial crisis relatively unscathed. A quick scan of the Guardian’s new global development site shows the plethora of aid figures seem fairly generous: ‘Government’s pledge £25.5bn to eradicate world poverty’; ‘UK development aid will not be cut, Clegg tells UN’; ‘Ban Ki-Moon to launch $40bn child and mother campaign’; ‘Nick Clegg to tell UN summit Britain will halve malaria deaths in Africa’. At first sight it’s hard to make sense of the figures, but there’s no doubt that they’re impressive as well as being desperately needed.

Just a few days into the Millennium Development Goals summit and there have already been a number of promising signs that levels of developmental aid will be able to ride the waves of global austerity and the financial crisis relatively unscathed. A quick scan of the Guardian’s new global development site shows the plethora of aid figures seem fairly generous: ‘Government’s pledge £25.5bn to eradicate world poverty’; ‘UK development aid will not be cut, Clegg tells UN’; ‘Ban Ki-Moon to launch $40bn child and mother campaign’; ‘Nick Clegg to tell UN summit Britain will halve malaria deaths in Africa’. At first sight it’s hard to make sense of the figures, but there’s no doubt that they’re impressive as well as being desperately needed.

What failed to grab the same attention, however, was a smaller piece of news that came out last week. This was in relation to a report released in the Journal of the International Aids Society which noted that since 2005 the global trade agreement TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) is beginning to have a detrimental impact on the access to cheap anti-retroviral drugs in developing countries. Up until then many varieties of new ARV drugs were being made on a larger scale in India, a country which took the decision not to recognise the patents on the drugs with the goahead from a prior TRIPS agreement in 2001. Since 2005, however, India (which supplies 83% of these widely-available drugs) hasn’t been able to produce the newest ARVs, meaning people have to make do with treatments that are 5 years old while HIV rapidly becomes resistant to them.

It is often argued that developmental aid doesn’t really make much of a difference to developing countries. Yet this is blatantly untrue, especially in periods where natural disasters, such as the recent floods in Pakistan, devastate thousands and set countries back through no fault of corruption or ill-management of funds (entirely reasonable, although slightly exaggerated, concerns about aid transfers in general).

[quote]

In reality, probably the greatest hindrance to faster global development is unfair trade agreements. As complex as these agreements are they more often than not favour the Western nations who hold sway in global institutions such as the World Bank and the WHO. It’s not just voting rights that are skewed, it’s the organisational processes that occur during these kind of summits. In most cases, meetings between nations to discuss trade laws are free and open to all – surely then that’s democratic? One of the problems is that the smaller nations are only able to afford to bring a handful of delegates while the US and the EU bring an extensive set of advisers. This means the richer, more powerful countries are represented at every meeting with experts who know the ins and outs of the complex dynamics of trade. On the other hand, the poorer nations are on the sidelines, struggling to engage with the formal discussions, let alone the impromptu 'corridor meetings' where prelimary agreements are struck. The result is that agreements that are somewhat progressive, such as the 2001 TRIPS, are only short-lived and contentious issues such as the EU Common Agricultural Policy are completely off the cards.

If we really want to help drive forward the development of ‘third world’ countries we need to start engaging with the greatest obstacles to progress: unfair trade agreements. Slavoj Zizek gave a similar talk on this topic at the RSA last year following the release of his latest book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. His take, similar to Gramsci’s views on hegemony early in the last century, is that ‘cultural capitalism’ makes us feel warm about giving money away and that, as he quotes Oscar Wilde, “it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering, than it is to have sympathy with thought.” His point was that giving money through charity and philanthropy is of course a good thing but that concentrating on this alone distracts us from the real underlying issues at hand, storing up problems for the future.

Whether or not you take credence with that viewpoint, there is intuitively some truth in it. What we need is politicians with the courage to initiate an honest debate about the trade-offs we would have to accept if we wanted to tackle the root causes of global injustice and build a fairer system of world governance and trade. The urgency of this becomes clearer in light of recent polling showing that 52% of people in the UK believe aid to be ineffective and that 63% think that it should be cut. With Nick Clegg citing self-interest as at the heart of the government’s plan for aid and saying there will be no “naïve altruism” at play, it appears that real politik, at least for the moment, is winning out. Let’s hope not.