Should rich nations give to poor nations? Put bluntly like that, the question of international aid demands the answer ‘yes’. Anyone who tries to qualify the ‘yes’ is liable to be criticised as selfish, unfeeling and inhuman. In his The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs sharpens the question. Should very rich people in very rich nations give to very poor nations, especially to the nations of sub-Saharan Africa? His answer is an unqualified ‘yes’.
He urges all the leading industrial nations and, in particular, the USA to raise official development assistance to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals proposed at the United Nations by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in September 2000. Many of these goals are rather general (‘eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education’, a reduction of two-thirds in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015, a halving by 2015 of the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water) and their statement amounts more to a wish list than an agenda. But Sachs’ own concerns are quite specific. He wants the focus to be on the control of disease — notably malaria and AIDS/HIV — in sub-Saharan Africa so that the nations there can get on the first rung of the development ladder.
Sachs is far from being a stereotypical anti-American, anti-globalisation groupie who wears his heart on his anorak sleeve. On the contrary he is an internationally respected economist who strongly supports privatisation, trade liberalisation and globalisation, and was a rigorous fiscal disciplinarian in his advice to the governments of Bolivia in 1985 and Poland in 1989. His plea for extra-official assistance carries more weight because of his sound-money, free-market credentials.
Moreover, Sachs does not favour blanket donations to all relatively poor countries. In his moving opening chapter, ‘A global family portrait’, he recounts personal experiences in Malawi, Bangladesh, India and China, and he acknowledges that India and China, and even Bangladesh, are on the pathway of continuous economic development. They may benefit from their interaction with the advanced nations of the West in all sorts of ways, but more aid to them is not a priority. The matter is quite different with Malawi and, by extension, virtually all of the nations of sub-Saharan Africa. The trouble with these nations is that poverty is so extreme (‘the hunger-disease-poverty nexus’) that they are not even at the starting line of economic growth. As Sachs sees it, that is why aid could be so beneficial. He tellingly compares Bush’s tax cuts, from which the American rich have gained, with the financial requirements of the UN Millennium Project.
In his words:
If one added up the GDPs of Botswana, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda, they came to $57 billion, whereas the top 400 taxpayers in the USA had a total income of $69 billion. Sachs used the occasion of the Bush trip to write in the New York Times advocating that the top US 400 donate a tenth of their incomes to ‘the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria’.“As President Bush prepared to visit Africa, I made a back-of-the-envelope calculation … to confirm that the 400 richest US taxpayers had a combined income in 2000 that exceeded the combined incomes of four of the countries on Mr Bush’s tropical tour.
Sachs’ case is difficult to resist. He is surely right that a small amount of well-directed money in sub-Saharan Africa could give huge returns in terms of disease control. If his allegations that donor governments cut funding to an AIDS programme for Malawi so that it would help only 25,000 people are true (and the allegations aren’t referenced), something is wrong somewhere. Unfortunately, he presses his argument too far, and he makes so many mistakes in history and geography that one has to wonder whether he really understands the origin of the problems about which he is so passionate.
The standard reply to advocates of more aid is that the donor governments cannot control its distribution at the national level. In those sub-Saharan Africa countries now afflicted with civil war or military action of some kind, such as the Congo/Zaire, Sudan, the Ivory Coast and Eritrea, the difficulties in implementing aid programmes are of course extreme. But in many other nations with a degree of stability Western governments cannot be confident that the hand-outs will go to the right people. Moreover, a repeated finding in development economics is that economic growth is not correlated with the level of aid per head of population. Tanzania is now doing quite well, but in the long period of Nyerere rule it received disproportionately large amounts of foreign aid and got nowhere.
Sachs is rude to colonialism, particularly British colonialism. But the blunt truth is that malaria, one of the health scourges of sub-Saharan Africa, was coming under control in the final decades of colonial rule. However uncomfortable the fact may be to American do-gooders like Sachs, incomes per head in such nations as Nigeria and Kenya in the 1950s, as the British were on their way out, were similar to those in South Korea at the time. Sachs makes a great fuss about the incidence of famine in imperial India. (Probably about 40 million died from famine between 1800 and 1950.) But he fails to note that in this 150-year period the population of India was rising, whereas in the 100 years to 1750 it fell. And he is so ignorant of the basic historical record that he gives the start of the British Raj as 1600.
Some of the comments on Africa are astonishing. What is one to make of the proposition that ‘Africa lacks navigable waterways with access to the ocean for easy transport and trade’? Has Professor Sachs never looked at an atlas and noticed that Nigeria and the Congo took their names from immense waterways? According to the 1951 Encyclopaedia Britannica, when the Congo was under Belgian control and achieving some economic progress, ‘the Congo and its affluents have more than 5,000 miles of navigable waters’, the most important of which was ‘a water highway of 1,073 miles from Leopoldville [now Kinshasa] to Stanleyville [which may or may not still be habitable, but will in any case have changed its name, probably more than once]’. Sorry, Professor Sachs, the problem here really is governance, not geography. Has the man never seen The African Queen or read Heart of Darkness?
Of course everyone would like to help sub-Saharan Africa. If money can be channelled to the deserving, excellent. But the problem is control, making sure that the money is spent properly and gets into the right hands. And, as soon as one is talking about ‘control’, one is also talking about Western superintendence of what the various local politicians and officials are doing. The lesson of history is that this escalates, easily and rapidly, into a new form of colonialism. Sachs has performed a service by bringing attention to the relatively small sums of money that are needed to tackle the hunger-disease-poverty nexus in sub-Saharan Africa. But he would have been more convincing if he had got his history and geography right, and if he were a little more subtle in his interpretation of what has gone wrong since the end of the old form of colonialism. Many sceptics will recall Professor Bauer’s dictum that aid goes from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.