[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
. 22On every issue, Powell and Rice facilitated the administration s misleadingand detrimental policies toward Africa.This includes reluctance to address thecauses and resolutions to African development, access to Africa s oil resources,the AIDS crisis, and the conflicts in Darfur and Zimbabwe.An examination ofhow the administration approached these issues gives rise to concern and ap-prehension about its Africa policy more so than the so-called positive agenda that Rice raved about and that thus far has failed to make an appearance.Justice, Not Charity: Ending Africa s Debtand Pursuing DevelopmentAs the writer George Monbiot points out, the rich owe the poor far more thanthe poor owe the rich. 23 Global poverty, including that in Africa, has its legacyand continuing existence in the economic, political, and military histories of therelations between the global North and the global South, histories in whichthe exploitation of southern resources and the accompanying human costs werethe priority.Contemporary efforts at ending African poverty remain low on thelist of Western agendas despite recent declarations to the contrary.In 2004, theworld s richest countries spent $1 trillion on arms while providing, in the sameperiod, $78.6 billion in aid to the developing world.The United States, whichbought $455 billion worth of weapons, increased its arms budget by 12 percentover 2003.A report from the Congressional Research Service documented thatfive Group of Eight (G8) members United States, Britain, France, Germany,and Russia provided 89 percent of the arms sales to developing countries.24Meanwhile, U.S.foreign aid funding constitutes a paltry 4.1 percent of its armsbudget.And in terms of the African continent, Only one-hundredth of onepercent of the entire U.S.budget (that is, $1 billion) is spent on aid to sub-Saharan Africa. 25 Furthermore, MCA or not, the United States ranked at thebottom of all donor nations with only 0.1 percent of its GNP just over $10billion in 2004 being spent worldwide, and half of that goes to Israel andEgypt.26 With Bush, as writer Ann-Louise Colgan dryly points out, it was more compassionate showmanship than real effort on the part of the administration.27These despairing figures help to put in perspective an agreement reached bythe G8 in June 2005 to cancel about $40 billion worth of debt owed by eighteendeveloping countries.The G8, representing the top industrial nations in thejColin Powell and Condoleezza Rice132 West plus Japan and Russia, agreed to cancel the debt of eighteen eligiblecountries almost immediately and another twenty others eventually who owemassive and unpayable debts to the World Bank, IMF, and the African De-velopment Bank.Of the first eighteen countries, fourteen are in Africa.28 Forthese countries, they will save a total of about $15 billion in debt payments overthe next ten years if the deal holds.29 The need for debt cancellation is painfullyobvious and urgent.African states are spending millions on interest paymentsalone while unable to fund education, housing, and health care needs.It isestimated that African countries spend about $14 per person on debt paymentcompared to less than $5 per person on health care.Overall, sub-Saharan Africaowes a staggering $333 billion in foreign debt.30Debt cancellation has long been a demand of African activists and govern-ments.U.S.-based organizations, such as TransAfrica and Africa Action, andinternational NGOs, such as Jubilee 2000 and Oxfam, helped to lead globaleducation campaigns to end debt for states that realistically had little hopes ofever paying off what they owed.However, the debt cancellation deal constructedby the G8, while resolving some issues, has severe limits as well.First, theagreement only covers a small number of countries that need debt cancellation.The agreement also did not include many poor countries, such as Kenya andNigeria in Africa and Haiti and Indonesia elsewhere, which are all on the brinkof economic collapse.Aid advocates argued that at least sixty-two countries needdebt cancellation and increased aid to have a ghost of a chance of rising out ofpoverty and meeting the MDGs.31 The eighteen countries constitute only 5percent of the population of the developing world, and, even if the other po-tential twenty or so countries are included, the figure only rises to about 11percent.32Second, as in the past, the G8 agreement came with a number of condi-tionalities.In the Structural Adjustment Program loans forced on the developingworld during the 1970s and 1980s by the international finance institutions, therewere a number of conditions that nations had to meet in order to qualify forfunding.While all contracts entail some degree of conditions and requirements,more often than not the conditions imposed by the IMF, in particular, on de-veloping countries had more harmful effects than helpful ones.These often in-cluded downsizing the public sector, opening local markets to foreign goods,ending or reducing local subsidies (while foreign subsidies are maintained thatprovide an unfair competitive advantage to U.S
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]