Mexico has pursued so severe a programme of structural adjustment for seven years that real wages have fallen by forty per cent, and yet it still owes $100 billion of its debt of $105 billion. Nigeria has suffered severely in seven years of structural adjustment, so that poorer people can only afford one meal a day. Yet, they now owe more than the $30 billion debt they set out to clear with their structural plan in 1983.
Some Solutions
Martin Dent, of the Department of Politics at the University of Keele, and some of his colleagues, have devised a plan entitled Jubilee 2000 which seeks to liberate under-developed countries from the burden of unpayable debt by the end of the decade. Dent points out that at the present rate of progress the total debt of one thousand billion dollars will not be cleared until the year 3000. The Midland Bank have set a good example, in a small way, by converting $800,000 of its Sudan debt into local currency and dedicating it for a UNICEF water sanitation programme in the drought-stricken Kordofan region. Dent's radical plan for remission of debt might really begin to bite into the $440 billion South American debt and the $120 billion debt on Sub-Saharan Africa. While debt has increased there has been a corresponding cut in Britain's help for the developing nations. Although Chris Patten managed to obtain the first small real increase in overseas aid expenditure in a decade (to ÂŁ1.5 billion in 1989-90), and was undoubtedly a highly committed and effective Minister, I am sure he would agree that overseas development policy has never been a central question of British politics. The Overseas Aid Minister does not have a Cabinet seat, or even an autonomous Government department. In terms of relative importance the facts speak for themselves: between 1977 and 1987 Britain's aid programme fell by 36 per cent. Even in starving Africa - where, to use the Patten litmus test, babies have been dying in their thousands - there was a decrease in Britain's aid from ÂŁ386 million in 1979 to ÂŁ284 million in 1987. In 1979 we contributed 0.5 per cent of our GDP in overseas aid. By 1990 this stood at 0.3 per cent. In 1979 we were sixth in the league table of Western aid givers, today we are fourteenth. In 1983 the Government promised that we would move towards the 0.7 per cent target figure which the United Nations asked us to reach as long ago as 1970 'when economic circumstances permit'. Despite Mrs Thatcher's boast in February 1989 that 'We now have a higher standard of living than we have ever known. We have a great budget surplus',8 economic circumstances still did not permit the creation of an aid programme that stopped babies dying. This approach is in stark contrast to that of countries such as Germany and Italy.