The public face of the Commission for Africa last week was the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, talking about debt relief, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and the moral impetus to create a Marshall plan for Africa.
In August it will be British Prime Minister Tony Blair, assuming he is re-elected, trying to persuade the G8 summit in Scotland to act on the commission’s report. In the meantime, intense lobbying is under way.
Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel is pushing to ensure that a sound plan to fund growth-creating investments in infrastructure and to open Western markets to African products doesn’t get lost in the bargaining process.
Just about every finance minister in the G7 is opposed to agricultural subsidies, he says, but heads of state tend to shift with the prevailing political wind. A crowded World Trade Organisation agenda, and a lack of effective enforcement, make the job even harder.
“The [Africa Commission] report will be definitive in respect of trade by focusing on just how amoral it is to sustain subsidised agriculture, which is largely a G7 phenomenon, spread over Europe from G7 members.”
But Manuel isn’t betting on a deal to dismantle the European Union’s ruinously expensive Common Agricultural Policy, and other subsidy systems that keep African farm products out of rich-country markets.
“You can name and shame, but [the commission] can’t resolve those issues.”
Manuel’s concern is that asking donors to fund massive new programmes to accelerate progress in health, education and infrastrucutre development will give them an excuse to sidestep trade issues. “What I am hoping is that we don’t find ourselves in a position where we need so much from wealthy nations on the other issues, both growth and the aid stuff or debt relief, that we are muzzled even a little bit on the trade issues.”
A similar set of complexities is thrown up by the release last Tuesday of a report by development economist Jeffrey Sachs for the United Nations, which confirmed that at current rates of progress it would take more than a century to reach MDG targets set for 2015, and began to estimate the spending required to get back on schedule.
Manuel says there will likely be considerable resonance between the Sachs report and that of the commission, but he cautions that if poor countries are pressured to spend too much on the most visible UN targets they may have to neglect the foundations of long-term economic growth.
“There are manifest risks. For instance, the MDG’s focus on primary education — important as it is — but if you ask very poor countries to invest sufficiently in primary education then you won’t have a population that is sufficiently educated to assist that country to move from underdevelopment to a higher stage of development. If you aren’t strong on physical infrastructure like roads, you will get distortions later on.”
These are not easy tensions to manage, he says, and “part of the difficulty is that the voices from London and New York are so strong, that this argument is not easily understood”.
The challenge then, is to put all of these issues in play and ensure that wealthy countries commit the most resources possible to development assistance.
Manuel illustrates the argument by discussing the choices France might be presented with as Blair pushes the G7 to act on the commission’s report. It is a particularly pointed example given that country’s role in maintaining European agricultural protectionism, and its spotty development record.
Committing to spending 0,7% of gross national product on development assistance — the amount agreed at the UN’s Monterrey summit in 2000 — would be hard enough, given that France has already breached EU budget rules.
It might also be difficult to commit to the kind of long-term funding mechanism envisaged by Brown’s proposed International Finance Facility, and what’s more, to do it in conjunction with other countries, “which means the emphasis is on development, not flag flying”.
“Politically you might have a responsibility to your own history, your culture, to ensure that you’d rather be spending in francophone than elsewhere. You also have to run the risk of not subsidising your farmers who’ve grown very accustomed.
“The French farming lobby is very strong. But it’s partly cultural, it is about being able to appreciate those things that are distinctly French, like a variety of cheeses, some of them subsidised. And you can get the French to rise up in unison against the idea of featureless food like MacDonalds.”
To come up with saleable plan, Manuel argues, you have to ask: “If I were Jacques Chirac, how would I deal with these kinds of issues? Because if we believe that it’s just a matter of making a few bland statements, he’ll feel shy and unFrench, and not Chirac, and suddenly capitulate, we’ll demonstrate nothing except naivety.”
There will need to be tough choices in Africa too.
Manuel says the policy selection processes of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) Secretariat, and the processes available to enforce governance standards through the African Peer Review mechanism will be taken “very seriously” by the commission, while the African Development Bank should be one of the primary financing institutions.
But the “horrible afribet soup” of overlapping trade-based institutions such as the Common Market for East and Southern Africa, the Southern African Development Community and the Southern African Customs Union needs rationalisation.
“What makes for regional economic communities? What gives effect to what is contained in both Nepad and the constitutive act of the African Union? Once you’ve established those norms and put them up, someone’s got to deal with the egos, but you can’t start with the egos.”
And what about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which are at once central develop-ment funding and urgently in need of reform to reflect radical changes in the world financial and political system?
The United States, Manuel says, will not give up its veto, whoever is in the White House. “I think we can talk into those institutions, but the problem is that the tables remain very heavily stacked.
“But that doesn’t mean that those institutions don’t have a value that we need to engage with and understand and use to the best advantage, but it means you have to work a hell of a lot harder to overcome the politics.”