Ian BoyneLONG DUBBED by some ingloriously as the Dark Continent, Africa has recently been in the spotlight as world media attention has focused on the Rich Man's Club (the G-8) and its attempts to right some glaring inequities in the poorest region of the world.
Led by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who chaired the Commission on Africa which this year released its siren-call report for substantial increases in aid to the Motherland, the campaign to rescue Africa from
economic marginalisation and social underdevelopment has gathered significant steam. It is no longer the political left which is saying that the West has a moral obligation to Africa, but even influential conservative voices in the developed world are accepting as a truism that justice demands that Africa not be left to writhe in poverty and dehumanisation.
That Africa has suffered not only because of its leaders' own corruption, incompetence, misgovernance, tribalism and
populism is now acknowledged by the Establishment in the West. Even if we still have appallingly uninformed and unsophisticated opinions being expressed here by persons such as Delroy Chuck, in his Gleaner column of Wednesday, July 6.
Chuck is blissfully unaware of not only the best scholarship on African political and economic development, but apparently even the popular press coverage, for he is still trumpeting the backward view that "the poor countries of the world are poor, and remain poor, through their own fault and failings, they remain poor through their failure to appreciate that wealth and prosperity do not come from the mines of their land, but from the minds of their people."
TRADE BARRIERS
What is commonly termed the Blair Commission on Africa, (Our Common Interest) says, "Developing countries face disgraceful barriers in the markets of the developed world. It is essential that rich countries stop discriminating against the few goods in which Africa has comparative advantage. G8 and EU (European Union) countries should accelerate the process of dismantling their trade barriers to give Africa a chance to expand exports. If the EU used international standards on pesticides on bananas, instead of its own, African exports would grow by US$410 million'"
The developed countries subsidise their agriculture to the tune of almost US$1 billion a day. Europe puts taxes on developing country agricultural exports of up to four times the tariffs it puts on manufactured goods, and even higher on the agricultural products of interest to Africa. The Commission on Africa minces no words in its condemnation of the trade policies of the developed world:
"Those barriers are absolutely unacceptable. They are politically antiquated, economically illiterate, environmentally destructive and ethically indefensible?They must be scrapped.?
Of the developed countries, the Commission on Africa says scathingly, ?their trade policies are skewed to benefit the rich without consideration for the poor. They have been historically reluctant to lift the onerous debts which add to Africa?s daily burden. And their aid policies have often seemed designed to support the political and industrial interests of the rich countries as much as to reduce poverty. Too much of the industrialised world?s involvement in Africa is a miserable history of broken promises?.
AFRICA'S UNDERDEVELOPMENT
And the Blair Report on Africa does not hold back from laying some of the problems of Africa?s underdevelopment at the feet of colonialism. While it points out the staggering economic gap between Asia and Africa?especially in light of the fact that 30 years ago the average income in Sub-Saharan Africa was twice that of South and East Asia?it admits the role of colonialism in retarding African development. (Though that cannot account for all of Africa?s economic failures, one must be quick to point it out). The average income in Africa is now well below half that of Asia. Africa is the only continent in the world which has stagnated.
Half of Africa?s population lives on less than US$1 a day and life expectancy is falling?and now averages just 46 years while in places like India and Bangladesh it is 17 years higher. But hear the Blair Commission itself: ?The railways and roads put in place in colonial times were primarily designed to transport minerals and other raw materials from the African interior to its ports for shipping into Europe. They were not designed to join one part of the continent to another or to generate more links to the East.?
The result is that today Africa?s transport costs?an important variable in global competitiveness?are approximately twice as high as those for a typical Asian country. Shipping a car from Japan to Abidjan (Ivory Coast) costs US $1,500 while moving it from Abidjan to Addis Abba costs US$5,000! ?The colonial era brought other problems. The division of Africa into its present countries was the product of Western interests, not African minds,? Says the Commission bluntly. The condition of Africa today is grave, though not hopeless.
AFRICA'S PLIGHT
Tony Blair has to be commended for the forcefulness and passion which he has brought to the advocacy on behalf of Africa. He has forced the issue of African development aid on the front burner of the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles in Scotland and has provided an important voice for a large proportion of the world?s oppressed in the face of the marginalisation of the non-aligned movement and the rise of one superpower.
Blair?s cry for Africa is not a case of bawling wolf. The number of people living in poverty in Africa?over 315 million?is projected to rise to 404 million in 2015, by which time Blair is calling on developed countries to pump an additional US$50 billion in aid to Africa. Some 34 per cent of the population is undernourished?which is almost double the figure for the rest of the developing world. Access to clean water in Africa has fallen behind the levels of the rest of the developing world?it is only 58 per cent in Africa while it is 84 per cent in South Asia. for example.
Though South Asia is home to 60 per cent of the developing world?s population, and has historically been very poor, the crisis of world poverty is now centred in Africa. Africa is the only continent in the world where the proportion of the population in poverty is growing. Per capita income has not increased in Africa for the past 30 years?unlike every other region in the world.
The share of African exports in world trade has fallen over the past 25 years from nearly four per cent in 1980 to just 1.5 per cent in 2002.And the AIDS crisis is another matter. Some 25 million Africans are infected with HIV/AIDS. Two million will die this year. In five years every third child in Zambia will be an orphan. Says The Blair Commission graphically: ?We live in a world where every cow in Europe has received almost US$2 a day in subsidies?double, grotesquely, the average income in Africa. And Japanese cows nearly US$4.?
The Commission is not through yet: ?The contrast between the lives led by those in the rich countries and poor people in Africa is the greatest scandal of our age. There is a tsunami every month in Africa. But its deadly tide of disease and hunger steals silently and secretly across the continent. It is not dramatic and it rarely makes the television news. Its victims die quietly, out of sight, hidden in their pitiful homes. But they perish in the same numbers.?
AFRICA, A VIABLE MARKET
The Blair Commission, however, makes not just an impassioned moral and humanitarian appeal but a pragmatic and strategic one to the developed world. Why bother? the Commission asks. ?For a start, out of self-interest. A stable and growing Africa will provide a market for several hundred million people into which the rest of the world can sell its goods and services. It will also provide a stable source of supplies.? Africa generated 11 per cent of global oil sales in 2000 and by 2015 West Africa will provide 25 per cent of the oil imports of the United States. Besides, as the commission says, ?If Africa persists in a state of insecurity and economic stagnation that will not just be bad for Africans, but for the rest of the world.
In a globalised. Post-September 11 world instability in one area of the world is a threat to every area of the world. The influential Brookings Institution in Washington makes the same point in a paper issued in last month titled US Foreign Assistance to Africa: Claims Vs Reality: ?Global poverty undermines US security by facilitating the emergence and spread of transnational security threats, including disease, environmental degradation, and crime narcotics flows proliferation and terrorism.?
Another significant reason to help Africa is that, unknown to many, the continent has been undergoing a quiet economic revolution. In Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, real Gross Domestic Product(GDP) has grown by 5.1 per cent in 2004, the highest growth in eight years. In a third of the non-oil-producing countries in Africa, average real GDP growth has exceeded five per cent. For Sub-Saharan Africa, inflation, once a seemingly untameable beast, has settled at 9.1 per cent, the lowest for more than 25 years. Some 28 African countries achieved single-digit inflation rates in 2004, compared to only 10 a decade ago. Even the IMF has been singing Africa?s praises, as increasingly African countries adopt Washington Consensus, neo-liberal policies favoured by the Bretton Woods institutions. The economic transformation of Africa is detailed in the IMF publication Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa, issued in May this year.
Anne Krueger, the leading female voice for neo-liberal economic policies and now First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, in a paper delivered in South Africa on June 9 ('The Time is Always Ripe: Rushing Ahead with Economic Reform In Africa') gushes over the growth taking place in Africa and its adoption of neo-liberal policies. Newsweek magazine too, in its cover story on Africa (July 11 issue) has a lead article, 'Africa leaps Forward'.
The case of Botswana is well-known in the economic literature. It has had the world record as the fastest growing economy in the world for the last 30 years, a record now being interrupted by AIDS. But other countries have also been doing well such as Mauritius, which has averaged over 5.5 per cent annual growth for over 20 years. Others which have performed well, too, have been Benin, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Namibia, Uganda and Ethiopia.
Says Georgetown University Professor Carol Lancaster in the May 2005 issue of the scholarly journal, Current History ('Development in Africa: The Good, the Bad the Ugly') : ?Currency adjustments regarded as politically dangerous at the beginning of the reform period in the 1980s have now been widely implemented and maintained. Government deficits have been reduced. Commodity boards have been virtually eliminated and prices for most agricultural products have been left to the market to determine.?
Foreign direct investments, though meagre, have moved from US$6 billion in 1998 to $9 billion in 2003.
Professor Paul Collier of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the Department of Economics at Oxford University worries in a paper just released in June that Africa might not be able to productively absorb the increased aid that the Blair Commission calls for. While Africa?s economic management and political record leaves much to be desired, such pessimism as Collier exhibits seems unjustified.
The G-8 meeting in Gleneagles last week again re-emphasised the importance of global action and global reforms in improving the economic prospects of developing countries in Africa sand the Caribbean. The philistines will continue to sprout nonsense about poverty being solely caused by indigenous factors in the developing world, but the age of enlightenment is finally making some impact in the developed world.
Ian Boyne is a veteran journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com
