Faith in Britain

In What Kind of Country,7 I set out the arguments for increasing our aid programme (see Chapter 22, 'One World One Day' and Chapter 23, 'Rich Man, Poor Man'). The statistics speak for themselves. In 1980 the World Bank estimated that 800 million people were living in a state of starvation and despair. The United Nations says there are thirty-four countries where over eighty per cent of the population are illiterate; UNICEF says that in one year alone more than 12 million children under the age of five died of starvation. Many millions more died of disease, violence or neglect. In 1980, Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank, said that 'Up to a million of the world's population live lives of poverty which are so limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, infant mortality and low life expectancy as to be beneath any rational definition of human decency.'

The scale of this unspeakable misery and grinding poverty was brought home to the developed world in the prophetic Brandt Report, published in 1980.

Eight years later, Chris Patten, as Overseas Aid Minister, said that 'an effective aid programme is one that stops babies dying'. Yes, but an effective aid programme is also one that does not shackle countries with unrepayable debts. It is one that recognises and addresses the pressures to ravage and exploit forests, land and prized environment. It is one which targets aid at projects which will alleviate poverty direct - rural water supplies, provision of improved seed, simple facilities for crop storage, development of fisheries and village wood lots, primary health care, territorially based livestock grazing projects, minor irrigation using intermediate technology, and so on.

The accelerated growth of international debt provides a graphic illustration of the parable of the unforgiving debtor. Many of the debts were amassed in the 1960s and 1970s when conventional wisdom held that countries could not go bankrupt.

Commercial banks in the developed world gave out money with the alacrity of a three-armed man. The sequel is well known - countries did go bankrupt; they defaulted on debts; the banks rescheduled the debts and interest rates soared. The Third World countries have subsequently been forced to generate exports by selling raw materials and plundering their assets to repay debt and service interest.

By 1990 Third World debt was estimated at more than $1,000 billion. The net negative transfer of resources from poorer countries to richer countries (i.e. debt servicing, less aid) rose from $38.100 million in 1987 to $43,000 million in 1988 (World Bank figures). In trying to reduce this colossal sum the International Monetary Fund tends to place burdens disproportionately on the poor. Financial austerity leads to cuts in already minimal health and welfare services and in food subsidies. That leads to hunger, and to babies dying. President Julius Nyerere summed up the choices which he faced: 'They asked me to make a choice between paying the debts of Tanzania and feeding the people of Tanzania. For me, that is no moral choice; it is not even a practical choice.'