In 2005, at the Gleneagles G8 meeting, world leaders promised to increase annual aid levels by $50-billion by 2010, half of which would go to Africa.
To meet this target, G8 governments would need to give just more than $1 per citizen per year. This is the equivalent of what Americans spend on nail polish each year; a quarter of what Canadians spend on video gaming; less than Italians spend each year watching films and going to art and music shows; and less than half of what Germans spent on pet food in 2005.
However, new figures show that aid actually fell in 2006, for the first time in 10 years. Based on current trends Oxfam calculates that the G8 will miss its aid promise by a staggering $30-billion. The price of this broken promise is high. Oxfam has calculated that this money could provide the vital healthcare for mothers and children with HIV/Aids, save five million lives and reverse the spread of HIV/Aids.
At the same time aid figures are substantially inflated by some nifty accountancy on behalf of some G8 countries which continue to the include debt relief in their aid figures. The size of the debt-cancellation deals for Iraq and Nigeria means that aid figures for 2006 are falsely exaggerated by about 15%.
In the meantime, there is a lot being done with the aid that is already in the pot. Oxfam’s experience in the poorest countries clearly demonstrates that aid from rich countries is playing a vital role in keeping people alive, getting children into school, providing clean water and giving people the opportunity to work their way out of poverty. Yet a lot more could be achieved, and a lot of damage halted, if donors stopped attaching economic policy conditions to their support.
In 2005 the G8 promised to enable recipient countries to “decide, plan and sequence their economic policies to fit with their own development strategies”, but G8 countries continue to attach harmful economic policy conditions to aid and debt relief.
Rich countries have the right to expect their aid to be clearly accounted for. What they are not entitled to do is use their aid to push economic policy reforms such as privatisation and liberalisation on poor countries. Economic policy conditionality undermines national decision-making, vital for successful development. And we have seen that it stops aid working.
Jo Walker is the advocacy and campaigns coordinator for Oxfam in Southern Africa
Climate change: wealthy nations must pay
Last week United States President George W Bush did a spectacular U-turn on climate change. It is good to see the US finally joining the debate on cutting carbon emissions. All countries need to be involved in negotiations on climate change, including the poorest, as they are the most vulnerable to its likely effects.
We are seeing first hand the harm that climate change is already causing poor people, particularly farmers. This mirrors the consensus of the world’s leading scientists. Food production is predicted to drop, and as many as 250-million people could experience water shortages by 2020. Increased flooding is forecast in Asia, especially in the delta regions that are home to one billion people.
There is a deep injustice in the impact of climate change. Rich countries have caused the problem with many decades of greenhouse-gas emissions (and in the process have grown richer). But poor countries will be worst affected, facing greater droughts, floods, hunger and disease.
Given their historical role in causing the problem, rich countries now have two clear obligations: to stop harming, by massively cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions, and to start helping, by providing compensatory finance so that poor countries can adapt, before they suffer the full effects of climate change.
Tackling climate change requires an unprecedented level of global co-operation. The G8 summit brings an important opportunity for rich countries to demonstrate their commitment to achieving such cooperation. The task of G8 leaders at Heiligendamm is clear. They must set a target to keep global warming less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and commit to reducing emissions in their economies by 2015.
Rich countries must also demonstrate their commitment to generating the global cooperation needed to tackle climate change by living up to their obligation to finance adaptation in developing countries. When donors to the Global Environmental Facility meet in Washington, DC later this month, to pledge contributions to the international funds set up for adaptation, it will be their ideal opportunity to start providing that finance on the scale needed.
Oxfam estimates that the costs for developing countries of adapting to climate change will be well above the World Bank’s estimate of between $10-million and $40-billion annually. Based on new approaches to scaling up costs, we estimate the cost will be at least $50-billion each year, and far higher if greenhouse-gas emissions are not cut rapidly.
Who should provide that finance? An approach rooted in equity and justice suggests that countries that are both responsible for producing excessive emissions, and capable of providing assistance, should bear the costs.
Funding just the most urgent and immediate adaptation priorities of the least-developed countries is likely to cost between $1-billion and $2-billion. Among donors, the mood is anything but urgent: they have so far delivered $48-million to the international fund set up for these countries — less than 5% of what’s needed: enough for Haiti, Samoa and Kiribati, but no more.
This is an extract from Adapting to Climate Change, an Oxfam International report written by Kate Raworth
A case in point
Mali is extremely poor and chronically under-aided. Ninety percent of the country’s population lives on less than $2 a day, yet it receives less than half the amount of aid of its neighbour, Senegal. The World Bank has prevented the Malian government from accessing more aid because of its failure to privatise the cotton industry.
The privatisation of the Malian electricity company, an aid condition that Mali agreed to, has provided a minimal expansion in coverage, but dramatic price increases.
And liberalisation of the cotton sector has exposed Malian cotton farmers to the heavily distorted world cotton market price. Prices have been in severe decline as a result of huge rich-country subsidies to their own farmers. The result: three million Malian farmers saw a 20% drop in the price they received for their cotton in 2005.