The G8 leaders meet next week to discuss world poverty while spending 10 times the global aid budget on subsidies that drive third world farmers out of business. That's like a gang of burglars emptying every house in the street and then using their final victim's front room for a neighbourhood watch meeting.posted by syzygy at 5:28 PM on July 2, 2005
Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [less-developed countries]?... I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that...I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City...The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand...The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.from the report Impoverishing a Continent: The World Bank and the IMF in Africa
– Lawrence H. Summers, chief economist of the World Bank, in an internal memo dated December 12, 1991. Summers went on to become the U.S. Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration as well as president of Harvard University.
The two musicians are genuinely committed to the cause of poverty reduction. ... The problem is that they have assumed the role of arbiters: of determining on our behalf whether the leaders of the G8 nations should be congratulated or condemned for the decisions they make. They are not qualified to do so, and I fear that they will sell us down the river.Yet more unforgivable cynicism:
Take their response to the debt-relief package for the world's poorest countries that the G7 finance ministers announced 10 days ago. Anyone with a grasp of development politics who had read and understood the ministers' statement could see that the conditions it contains - enforced liberalisation and privatisation - are as onerous as the debts it relieves. But Bob Geldof praised it as "a victory for the millions of people in the campaigns around the world" and Bono pronounced it "a little piece of history". Like many of those who have been trying to highlight the harm done by such conditions - especially the African campaigners I know - I feel betrayed by these statements. Bono and Geldof have made our job more difficult.
I understand the game they're playing. They believe that praising the world's most powerful men is more persuasive than criticising them. The problem is that in doing so they turn the political campaign developed by the global justice movement into a philanthropic one. They urge the G8 leaders to do more to help the poor. But they say nothing about ceasing to do harm.
They say the message is justice not charity, trade not aid, but that's not what we saw on our screens. Show not tell, guys, as any novice novelist knows. You could have shown us the talent, the experience, the beauty, the variety. "Africa" is not just one tiddly little homogenous place, you know - Mali is not Uganda, Zambia is not Nigeria, and if there's one thing Africa is not short of, it is outstanding musical talent. But the image we were given, the non-verbal message coming over loud and clear, was this: African people - starving, dying, grateful, in the background; white people: generous, sympathetic, pleased with themselves, showing off. Oh, and feeding off black talent, as ever.posted by funambulist at 11:55 AM on July 3, 2005
Shortly after Bob Geldof called for a million people to converge in Edinburgh for the opening day of the G8 summit, Midge Ure, the co-organizer of Live 8, was asked if he was worried about the events being hijacked by anarchists. His response was that Live 8 was, in fact, hijacking the anarchists' event. There is more than a little truth in this statement. What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that Blair and Brown, in turn, are trying to do something similar with the Live 8 and Make Poverty History campaigns.Also, for those without a short memory, during the 2001 G8 in Italy, Geldof and Bono dismissed hundreds of thousands of protesters by tarring them all with the brush of thugs responsible for the riots, and they were having drinks and caviar with the G8 leaders, including a fresh-out-of-razing-Grozny-to-the-ground Putin, in the no-entry zone, while dozens of people who had not participated in the violence - which was done only by a "select" few that the police left well alone - were being rounded up, beaten up, detained unlawfully for days. Not a peep from Saint Bob on this, not only, he ignored the police abuse and blamed the whole mess on protesters. So endearing.
For the past six months, some of the UK’s leading development and environmental NGOs have expressed their unease about a campaign high on celebrity octane but low on radical politics. One insider, active in a key MPH working group, argues there is a divergence between the democratically agreed message of the campaign and the spin that greets the outside world: ‘Our real demands on trade, aid and debt, and our criticisms of UK government policy in developing countries have been consistently swallowed up by white bands, celebrity luvvies and praise upon praise for Blair and Brown.’And here's an interesting exploiration of the question "Isn't it better to do something rather than give in to cynicism and do nothing?"
... The problem, however, is that when these policies are relayed to a public audience, they become virtually indistinguishable from those of the UK government. This was brought home back in March this year when Blair’s Commission for Africa set out its own very different proposals on Africa but under the identical headlines used by MPH – ‘trade justice’, ‘drop the debt’ and ‘more and better aid’. In return, most MPH members, led by Oxfam and the TUC, warmly welcomed the report’s recommendations. African activists and many MPH members have a different view
The question, rather, is one of balancing the positive accomplishments of aid programmes against the effects of that work being exploited by government or rebel authorities. Relief agencies routinely operate in places where governments or insurgents kill their own people. Yet it is one thing to accept that NGOs can never control the environment in which they operate and quite another to participate in a great crime like the resettlement, even if the purpose of that participation is to try to mitigate its effects. The truth is that the Dergue's resettlement policy - of moving 600,000 people from the north while enforcing the "villagisation" of three million others - was at least in part a military campaign, masquerading as a humanitarian effort. And it was assisted by western aid money.There, you can do some reading now. Even if you're going to keep viewing Geldof & friends' efforts as a good thing - and that's your prerogative, just as it's mine to have a different take - it's no harm to try and question that assumption by taking in some facts and contrasting views.
... Geldof has proclaimed that Live 8 is about "social justice, not charity". That is certainly an improvement from the simplicities of the original Live Aid. But simplicities still abound. Showing a film from Ethiopia in 1985 at a press conference, Geldof said the famine was "still going on". He also insisted that "the G8 leaders have it within their power to alter history". It would be great if it were that simple, just as it would have been great if the effect of Live Aid on the ground in Ethiopia had been simple, or entirely benign. But it wasn't true then and, though the Dergue is mercifully gone, it isn't true now.
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It's gonna be a great big global cultural event. London, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Barrie (Canada), Joburg, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and, er, Cornwall.
Loads of folks are blogging live. And I hope you all enjoy it.
posted by dash_slot- at 7:48 AM on July 2, 2005