Poor Excuses
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday October 17, 1996
Australians spent $820,000 on hair shampoo and conditioner yesterday - the same day that about 35,000 children in the Third World died of hunger and diseases of poverty. Yesterday was also the UN International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. PAMELA BONE reports.
THE universal symbol of the Third World is a young girl carrying a younger child on her back. Chimunya is eight and carries her little sister on her back for much of the day. Yet she herself is weak with hunger and has a hacking cough and bleeding gums caused by lack of vitamins. Chimunya grips her bowl of maize, which is all she will eat today.
This is Magoye, in central Zambia, where the average life expectancy is 44 and one child in five dies before its fifth birthday. Two children in Chimunya's family have already died of malnutrition and diarrhoea. But Chimunya might be lucky. After our visit, World Vision decides to put her family on its high-energy protein supplement program.
In Kigali, the children who live and scavenge on the rubbish dump of Rwanda's capital are tougher and more worldly-wise than Chimunya. Here, there is a hierarchy. One boy has appointed himself as the controller of the dump and another is his second in command. They pick the best of the foul-smelling area for themselves and decide who will have the rest. Today has been fruitful: they have found lots of little packets of processed cheese, thrown out by one of the big hotels or perhaps, the World Vision worker mutters, by the staff of the United Nations.
The children who really break your heart are the tiny ones, standing on bow legs and with the swollen bellies of malnutrition. I had to go behind a wall and sob when I saw 100 or so such children at a health clinic in Kigali run by World Vision, eating special protein biscuits that came from a box marked "Gift of the Australian Government".
This year is the UN International Year for the Eradication of Poverty and yesterday was the designated international day for the same. Yet unlike other such "international years", it has had almost no publicity. It seems that governments, media and many individuals in the rich world are suffering from compassion fatigue. Or is it that many people, and governments, truly believe that overseas aid is a bottomless pit that never does anything to improve the lives of the poor?
NORWAY'S foreign aid is more generous, less tied to its own interests and more directed to the poorest of the poor than that of almost any country in the world. But even Norway's aid projects have at times been shipwrecked on the rocks of good intentions. Consider the frozen fish factory fiasco (or farce) in the middle of a desert in northern Kenya. This is described by Blaine Harden, of the Washington Post, in his book Africa: Dispatches from a Fragile Continent.
Because of its centuries of experience in commercial fishing, Norway was asked during the 1970s to teach modern fishing techniques to the nomads of Kenya, the Turkana. The Norwegians found a big lake (Lake Turkana) teeming with fish, while the Turkana relied for most of their food on environmentally unsound (the Norwegians considered) cattle. Over the next few years the Norwegians designed and built a huge, ultra-modern plant to freeze the fish, the selling of which was going to lift the Turkana out of their subsistence lifestyles.
But even before the plant opened in 1981, it dawned on the Norwegians that the cost of running the diesel-powered generators to freeze the fish would cost more than the fish was worth. So they turned it into a dried fish plant. Then, as happens periodically, a drought dried up the part of the lake that contained 80 per cent of the fish. (The same drought that lasted five years and caused a million Ethiopians to starve to death in 1984-85.)
What the immensely well-meaning Norwegians had also failed to consider was that the Turkana were by tradition pastoralists; their worth in their culture depended on the number of cattle they owned, and any man who had to resort to fishing was an abject failure. When the fish went from the lake, the relatively few Turkana who had been lured there by the Norwegians not only lost that form of livelihood but their cattle died too, because of overgrazing on the barren, overcrowded shores of the lake.
This is the kind of tale that encourages the bottomless pit beliefs regarding foreign aid, yet fashions in foreign aid change. While there have been a few such ill-conceived projects over the years, the best aid today is directed to long-term selfsufficiency, is culturally sensitive and involves local expertise and labour as far as possible.
In fact, remarkable progress has been made this century in overcoming poverty. The overall wealth of nations has increased sevenfold since 1945, and developing countries are growing at an aggregate rate of 5 per cent a year; the percentage of the world's population ranked very poor decreased from 73 per cent in 1960 to 25 per cent in 1995; the average number of children born to women in the Third World has about halved in the past three decades. And despite the fact that the world's population has more than doubled this century, there is still enough food on the planet for everyone.
Yet behind these positive statistics is the fact that every day in the Third World, 35,000 children die of hunger or preventable diseases; 200 million children are working in mines, factories or as prostitutes; 130 million children (two-thirds of them girls) have no schooling; and because of the growth in the world's population, while the proportion of people living in poverty has declined, the number of people described as "desperately poor" has grown to about 1.5 billion.
Then there is the growing disparity of wealth within and between countries (a simple example being the $820,000 spent by Australians on hair-care products every day, while thousands of Third World children don't even have clean drinking water). According to this year's UN Human Development Report, the world's 358 richest people own more than the combined income of nearly half the world's population, and 20 per cent of the world's population receives 83 per cent of the world's income. Australia has the biggest gap between rich and poor of any industrialised country, with the richest 20 per cent earning 9.6 times the income of the poorest 20 per cent. Aborigines are by far the poorest of all Australians.
At the same time, governments of rich countries (with the notable exception of some Scandinavian countries) are growing increasingly stingy. In 1994 half the OECD countries slashed their foreign aid budgets. The richest country in the world, the US, now gives a bare 0.1 per cent of its GNP to overseas aid. In this year's Budget the Australian Government cut its aid to 0.29 per cent of GNP, the lowest ever and less than half the UN target of 0.7 per cent agreed to 25 years ago.
AS Blaine Harden said in Dispatches, it takes a lot more starving Africans to interest the world's media nowadays. Nevertheless, unless there is a massive transfer of wealth from the rich world to Africa, a lot more starving Africans is what the world is destined to see. While the greatest number of poor live in South Asia (Australia's aid to South Asia was cut in this year's Budget), the poorest of the poor live in Africa.
Although great gains in human development have been made there too (life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has increased from 40 to 51 years and adult literacy has doubled since 1975), the UN predicts that half the population of subSaharan Africa will be living in absolute poverty by 2000. And while the fertility rate has slowed, the latest world population predictions are that the population of Africa will quadruple in the next century, which will certainly lead to massive food shortages. Only 7.8 per cent of Australia's aid this year is going to Africa.
Non-government aid agencies (NGOs) say that although raising dollars is more difficult in an economic climate in which many Australians are worried about their jobs, individual Australians are generally more compassionate than their Government towards the poor in other countries. A survey for the Australian Council for Overseas Aid (ACFOA) before the Budget found that 60 per cent of respondents wanted to see overseas aid maintained or increased. Surveys in Britain and the US have also shown majority support for foreign aid.
"We have to dispel the myth that the eradication of poverty is not achievable," says Philip Hunt, the executive director of World Vision. "It is possible. It is not a quixotic dream. Governments have the ability; what they do not have is the will." Only a fraction of the money that goes on global military spending every year could end world poverty, he says.
Or if the big international corporations could be persuaded to pay their share of taxes. Julian Disney, the former head of the Australian Council of Social Service and now the president of the International Council on Social Welfare, says the strongest case for international governance is the coordination of taxes on international financial markets. A tax of 0.5 per cent on international currency transactions would raise $US150 billion a year for the alleviation of poverty.
THERE have been some gains recently in the war against poverty. Last month, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund formally endorsed an initiative to reduce by 80 per cent the debt of countries that have been spending most of their economic growth on interest repayments. (About 20 of Africa's 51 countries have debts bigger than their GNP.) Under its fairly new Australian-born president, James Wolfensohn, the World Bank, which in the past has often been blamed by aid agencies for worsening the lot of poor countries, is becoming a changed organisation. Wolfensohn admits the bank has made errors but has pledged a new direction for which he will be personally accountable.
Last year the bank and prominent NGOs issued a rare joint statement saying that the cuts in rich countries' overseas aid budgets "would not only imperil the lives of millions of people but would undermine global stability".
Stewart Wallis, the representative for Oxfam International, says: "We are no longer dealing with aid fatigue but with potentially terminal sleeping sickness. Not only is this flying in the face of the wishes of ordinary people, it is morally wrong, economically inefficient and will cause more harm to security on this planet than any equivalent cut in defence budgets."
Countries, like individuals, do not want to be beggars. "People," Wolfensohn has said, "do not want charity; they want opportunities. They do not want to be lectured to; they want to be listened to. Like all of us, they want a better life for their children. What I have seen in country after country is that when they are given a chance, the results are truly remarkable."
And despite its dismal statistics and images of starving children, Africa, as Harden says, is not a hopeless continent. "It is a land where the bonds of family keep old people from feeling useless, where religion is more about joy than guilt, where when you ask a man for directions he will get in your car and ride with you to your destination - and insist on walking home."
© 1996 Sydney Morning Herald