[PEN-L:5221] Foreign Aid/International Govt Spending -Reply

[Patrick Bond <PBOND@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If anyone's interested I recently penned an article for African
Agenda, a progressive new magazine out of Accra/Jo'burg, on how US
Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs) are viewing the aid cuts. I
don't actually know Food First's latest position, but there are
certainly many good folk in outfits like Development Group for
Alternative Policies, Oxfam and the like who argue that the
`quantity' debate is distracting when we haven't made any real
progress on the quality of AID. (Except for their rhetoric about
participation, perhaps.) The main problem remains the extremely
orthodox financial and development parameters within which US AID
operates, and their tying of aid and loans to structural adjustment.
Indeed in some cases their conditionality is worse than the IMF and
WB.

But there indeed are some confusing aspects to this debate, given
that no one wants to see State Dept bureaucrats having access to more
money (which they get through collapsing AID into State), and also
that several African NGOs have called for a replenishment of the
World Bank's IDA (soft-loan division). However, there's no doubt that
a good many of the larger US NGOs involved in lobbying for increased
aid to Africa - through the `Constituency for Africa' - are merely
opportunistic, with pro-AID rhetoric that matches those pathetic
World Bank ads we've been seeing in the NYT and elsewhere the past
fortnight:  aid is a good investment for US companies... aid is
imperialism, in short.

Let me know privately if you want a copy of this article. An
excellent contribution to this issue of the magazine, by the way,
comes from Joe Hanlon, a London journalist whose book Who Calls the
Shots is required reading for anyone interested in Mozambique or in
the profoundly corrupting role of AID, the Bank and other `donors.'
Subscription info for African Agenda is available from Gwen at
AFAGEND@xxxxxxxxxxx