West's hypocrisy adds to Africa's misery

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BY-Gary Duncan

GORDON BROWN is a man with a mission. Tomorrow the Chancellor will fly off on a whirlwind tour of southern Africa as he pursues his personal, political and moral crusade for what he calls a new Marshall Plan for the world’s poorest continent.
Mr Brown’s mission is a timely one. At a moment when global attention has been rightly focused on tackling the plight of the nations ravaged by the Asian tsunami, the Chancellor’s trip should help to remind the nation and the world of the equally pressing cause of Africa.
The case for action in Africa is compelling. The grim state of that continent remains a scar on the conscience of the world, and of the West in particular. Despite decades of development efforts, the lives of millions remain blighted by the scourges of poverty, hunger, disease, conflict and ignorance.
The scale of the continued human suffering is captured by the bleak statistic that last year 191,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa died each month from Aids-related illnesses alone — a death toll that makes the appalling consequences of the tsunami appear almost slight. More than half a billion Africans meanwhile survive on less than two dollars a day. And since 1981, living standards in the sub-Saharan region have actually deteriorated, with national incomes per head dropping by 13 per cent.
In the aftermath of the present Asian disaster, there is, perhaps, a genuinely enhanced opportunity to tackle this melancholy catalogue of human misery. With luck, this year could well mark an important turning point for global development.
But it will require courage, determination and conviction if Britain’s development agenda for its presidency of the Group of Seven leading economies is not to turn into another wretched display of squabbling, hollow gestures, and empty rhetoric.
There are some big questions to be asked, too, about the potential effectiveness of Mr Brown’s three-pronged Marshall Plan strategy for Africa: to write off the debts of the poorest nations, drastically increase aid budgets and open up trade by reducing or eliminating the barriers of tariffs and subsidies.
The case for eradicating much of the onerous burden of debt facing the poorest countries remains a potent one, although there must be reservations over the removal of one of the West’s few sources of real leverage over some of Africa’s worst governments. The sheer scale of the continent’s problems is also a powerful argument for Mr Brown’s objective of raising substantial extra resources for aid.
Yet none of this is likely to deliver the hoped-for transformation unless there is progress over two even more challenging objectives.
The first of these is Mr Brown’s goal to remove trade barriers and open Western markets to the developing world. The second, and hardest of all to achieve, is to bring about a radical improvement in the governance of African countries.
Far more than extra aid, free trade is the most effective available weapon in the fight against global poverty. Despite decades of lip service to the causes of both free trade and development, however, the industrialised world continues to cower cravenly behind an iron curtain of protectionist barriers in the form of swingeing tariffs on Third World goods, and scandalous subsidies to its own industries.
While mouthing platitudes about free trade, Western leaders have preserved — indeed, have expanded — a global trading system that often imposes tariffs on the exports of developing countries as much as four times those for rich nations.
The steepest duties tend to be imposed on the sorts of goods that the poor world can most benefit from selling: agricultural produce, labourintensive manufactured goods and commodities. Worse still, tariffs escalate as raw commodities and produce are processed into higher value-added goods, so that Third World nations are deterred from building up manufacturing capacity at the simplest level.
Europe and America are the prime culprits in this scandal. Reports this weekend of how Brussels was busily pressing ahead with the imposition of penal tariffs on Thai exports of cumarin, a plant extract, only days after that country was devastated by the tsunami, are testimony to the West’s hypocrisy.
The case for an end to these practices is overwhelming. The global benefits of significant liberalisation of agricultural trade alone could be as high as $350 billion (£185 billion) by 2015, with the bulk of these gains flowing to the developing world.

A study cited by Johan Norberg, the free-market campaigner, suggests that a 40 per cent cut in tariffs worldwide would produce gains of $70 billion a year, with three quarters of this benefit being reaped by the Third World.

Mr Brown has, to his credit, been at the forefront of highlighting these telling facts. But if his mission in Africa is to be a success, Britain must now battle for a pro-development deal in the continuing world trade round due to culminate in December. The UK should also show a lead by using its EU presidency to return to the fray in the battle to end the disgrace that is Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy.
Under this discredited regime, Europe’s taxpayers pay millions to subsidise its farmers not to grow food, and we face higher prices for produce in the shops as a consequence. Meanwhile, African farmers face tariffs on exported crops as high as 100 per cent.

But neither extra aid, nor freer trade will transform the fortunes of Africa’s people unless something can be done about its governments. The stark reality, made plain in a World Bank report last autumn, is that Africa is blighted by incompetent rulers and endemic corruption. This is the simple reason why billions in aid already funnelled into the continent have failed to make a difference. The money has simply disappeared into the Swiss bank accounts of dictators.

In the shocking case of Zimbabwe, it has taken Robert Mugabe, the country’s ruler, just five years to wipe out a third of his nation’s wealth, while poverty has escalated and agricultural production has collapsed, facing six million people with starvation.
Mr Norberg notes, too, how Nigeria, a country blessed with abundant natural resources, saw numbers in absolute poverty surge from 43 per cent to 66 per cent of its population in just four years from 1992 to 1996 after it scrapped structural reforms.
Across Africa, this tragic pattern is repeated. Yet the contrast provided by Botswana, a country that has prospered through enlightened government, proves that there is nothing inevitable about this ratchet of misrule and misery. A study by Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist, estimated that if Africa had followed the same liberal, free-market policies of East Asian governments, its average growth per head between 1965 and 1990 would have reached 4.3 per cent, tripling incomes. The actual figure is a shocking 0.8 per cent.
The resources Mr Brown hopes to raise for Africa might well make a difference. But if this is to be the case, he must also help to find ways to ensure they are not simply squandered. The scale of that challenge is truly daunting.