An aid agency being honest?

Well, reasonably honest. We are talking about Médecins Sans Frontières, which has gone against the usual compound of pointless boasting and demands for more funds that aid agencies and NGOs indulge in as a matter of course.

Four million Somalis are said to be in crisis. Given that insecurity is limiting international aid groups’ activities and some have been banned from territory controlled by Islamist rebels, to what extent are they actually able to help?

"We know we are not yet fully meeting the enormous needs the Somali people are facing," the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Somalia, Mark Bowden, said in Nairobi this week, while stressing that additional funds are now enabling international and local agencies to scale up their work in famine-hit regions.

Around 1.2 million people received food assistance in August, for example. That's up from 750,000 in July, but still only covers just over a quarter of those who are going hungry.

Merlin's move to expand its clinics follows comments from a top official at another medical aid group, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), who accused other agencies of "glossing over the man-made causes of hunger and starvation in the region and the difficulties in addressing them."

Unni Karunakara, president of MSF's International Council wrote that

that many aid and media organisations have portrayed Somalia’s emergency in "one-dimensional terms," ascribing it largely to the severe drought affecting large parts of East Africa.

"But only blaming natural causes ignores the complex geopolitical realities exacerbating the situation and suggests that the solution lies in merely finding funds and shipping enough food," he said.

He added that it's the war between hardline Islamist rebels and the transitional government, backed by the international community, "that has kept independent international assistance away from many communities."

MSF continues to work in Somalia but has at least a glimmering of why the problems stay and stay and stay.

Here is the full article on Comment Is Free. For once the responses are interesting, too.

Let us not forget that the African Union leaders, who talk long and loud about African needs and African brotherhood, have failed their brothers and sisters who are suffering from famine (again). Perhaps, they, too, are suffering from aid fatigue though their help and donations have been little enough; or, perhaps, they do not want anyone to look too closely at the political reasons for the frequently repeated crises.

A reminder

Franklin Cudjoe, a man who knows considerably more about Africa, its countries, their economy and problems than our own Andrew Mitchell (no, I didn't want him either), reminded me and others this morning of an article he wrote in 2005 for the Wall Street Journal and reprinted in African Liberty in 2005 about the Nigerian famine and why African countries continue to have famines and continue to need (apparently) international aid.

As we are about to provide another £38 million in aid to Ethiopia where there is yet again famine, this article is worth re-reading and pondering over. (Oh yes, full disclosure: Franklin is a good friend.)

Attending events

The political year has restarted, which means that there are all sorts of events to attend. Today I listened to Dr David Nabarro CBE, UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition at the Henry Jackson Society. Yes, indeed, he spoke well about Global Food Security: Recent Developments and Challenges with a good power point back-up. In other words, the slides of the power point had real information that enlarged on what he said, maps, charts and some figures.

In the end I carried away some not vary happy impressions. It seems that in the last thirty years there has been a drop in investment in agriculture in many parts of the world and a rise in poverty and number of people who went hungry (though numbers and definitions are hard to come by). What he did not say is that in the same thirty years there has been a stupendous rise in NGOs, UN committees, criss-crossing of continents by people who attend conferences and all sorts of pledges of greater international aid. At the very least, one could say that this development has not been helpful yet Dr Nabarro's responses to various questions included references to further committees, meetings of transnational organizations and the international community.

To be fair, he seemed to be in favour of trade and investment, against export controls in Sub-Saharan African countries and import controls as well as dumping of subsidized produce on those countries by the EU and the United States.

He also had no real answer to the question I posed about the political reality of the worst region for poverty and famine, that is Sub-Saharan Africa. It is all very well for some people to ask about predictions about what kind of instability and violence might develop from climate change but the fact it is that those countries are already unstable and violent as well as corrupt. There are no legal structures and no rules of property ownership, which prevents investment and development. The governments live off foreign aid and are ready to be bribed by anyone, such as the Chinese government who have been known to use those countries as a place where unemployed Chinese workers can be utilized and where good land can be acquired for the production of food for China. Until those political and legal problems are solved the future of Sub-Saharan Africa remains bleak. An end to international aid would be a good beginning.

What an excellent idea!

Are we looking for savings in public expenditure? Do we want to make that deficit smaller? Of course, we do and some of our friends from overseas have come up with a great idea. Not a new idea, mind you, as they would be the first to acknowledge but a great one: stop international aid. It will save a great deal of money, not least by abolishing the burgeoning bureaucracy of DFID, cut back NGOs and, best of all, let the recipients of that aid actually develop economically and politically.

These ideas, often voiced on this blog and on EUReferendum (too often for me to link) were expressed pithily in a letter to the Sunday Telegraph. Signed by a number of important writers and free-marketeers from different African countries (including my good friend Franklin Cudjoe of Imani in Ghana) it pleads with the people of Britain and, as a side-issue, with the Cleggeron Coalition whose Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell, has been mouthing embarrassing platitudes while insisting that international aid must be ring-fenced in the supposed spending cuts.

As Africans, we urge the generous-spirited British to reconsider an aid programme they can ill afford, and which we do not want or need. A real offer from the British people to help our development would consist of the abolition of the Common Agricultural Policy, which keeps African agricultural exports out of the European marketplace.

Naturally, I have no issue with that paragraph or the rest of the letter. But, sadly, one needs to point out to the signatories that the Common Agricultural Policy is not Britain's to abolish. In fact, we have very little say in it though we do participate in that invidious set-up. Likewise, we have very little say in the various protectionist measures passed in the European Union. That policy is not ours either though we all too often applaud it, to our shame.

Can anything be done about African countries?

Over on EURef I pursued this theme in a rather desultory fashion in the past but it is clear that more attention should be paid to the subject and to the somewhat dire role played by transnational organizations, NGOs and foreign aid in the destruction of African economies; it is equally clear that this blog is a far more suitable outlet.

Today I attended a talk my Moeletsi Mbeki, South African businessman and political writer at the IPN. Mr Mbeki is promoting his latest book, "Architects of Poverty: Why Africa's Capitalism Needs Changing". In fact, as he cheerfully admitted in reply to the first question, it is not capitalism that needs changing but the government and the political elite.

Mr Mbeki is a controversial figure in South Africa, not least because of his attacks on the ANC government, run until last year by his brother. He has been banned from SABC, the state controlled main media station but, luckily, there is some private broadcasting in South Africa. His voice is heard.

He is also a successful businessman who owns a number of firms that include a TV station. This is not, on the whole, seen as a positive either by the political elite or by the transnational aid organizations.

Above all, he is controversial because he does not bow to the accepted African and transnational ideology that insists on putting the blame, however stupid that is after all these decades, on Western colonialism. Mr Mbeki has been known to express the view that African countries were better governed by the colonial powers than they are now by African politicians.

He was equally outspoken today. Without actually defending apartheid, he made it clear that the post-apartheid political system is impoverishing and de-industrializing South Africa, as well as increasing massively the gap between the rich and the poor, a situation that is clearly fraught with difficulties for the future.

The reason for all this is clear. There were, he said, two nationalist groups in South Africa, which made it unusual for Sub-Saharan Africa. Apart from African nationalists, there were the Afrikaners, who were the ruling elite from the country's de facto independence in 1909 until the democratic change in 1994.

The difference between that ruling nationalist elite and the present one was their economic activity. The Afrikaners were property owners, entrepreneurs, industrialists and farmers. Their interest lay in developing the country industrially and in strengthening its infrastructure, such as roads and railways, many of which are still there with no new ones having been built.

The new political elite, on the other hand, is interested in consumption of state revenue. The country's ills: de-industrialization, lack of investment, growing gap between rich and poor, lack of economic growth, lack of proper education and health care and the overwhelming corruption all grow out of that simple distinction.

How one overcomes that problem is the question people are trying to solve. There was little Mr Mbeki could contribute though he did put forward one or two ideas, which I shall blog about separately. But the vicious circle is extremely strong: the only way a political elite's grasp or power can be weakened is by encouraging the growth of a civil society; on the other hand, while that strong grip on political and economic existence is there, civil societies cannot grow and entrepreneurship, an essential part of it, dies.

Good point

I have just started reading Dambisa Moyo's important book "Dead Aid" and was, therefore, especially interested in Marian Tupy's article in the Financial Times today. Marian is a very sound chap, who writes about trade, freedom, Eastern Europe and Africa with occasional forays into the European Union, on which he holds all the right opinions. (He is against it for very good reasons.)

In his article Marian makes the point that all opponents of aid find themselves making sooner or later: it has a strong racist element.He compares attitudes to Africa with attitudes to post-Communist Eastern Europe:

Following the collapse of communism, virtually everyone assumed that the key to future prosperity in CEB lay in economic reforms, not in foreign aid. Implicitly, almost everyone understood that the people in the region would simply have to respond to market incentives, and produce goods and services that domestic and foreign customers would want to buy. Inability to compete with the west was inconceivable. Failure was not an option.

Such a mindset is demonstrably lacking when it comes to Africa. Globalization tends to be seen as a threat and seldom as an opportunity. Local politicians fret about competition from China and Bangladesh. Non-governmental organisations caution against liberalisation lest Africans be taken advantage of by unscrupulous westerners. Musicians and movie stars urge aid, not reform, as a solution to poverty.

Mind you, that was before the East Europeans were forced to readjust to EU rules but that is another story.

I find the idea of using the epithet "racist" against fervent proponents of aid rather an attractive one.

Same rules apply to the production of drugs as to any other

Two excellent articles on AfricanLiberty.org deal with the problem of drug production, the difficulties countries that need those drugs face and the prevalence of fake drugs in African and some South-East Asian countries. The conclusion is that, pace the activists and transnational regulators, lawyers and politicians, the same rules of economic development apply to the production and distribution of drugs as to any other produce. Sentimental ignorance kills many thousands of people unnecessarily every year.

In "Drug-induced dreams" Franklin Cudjoe, Director of Imani, looks at the insistent demands that African countries should produce drugs locally. He does not think it is the answer or not the whole answer:

Local production of medicines is not a bad thing in itself: there are many excellent African companies producing high quality medicines. The problems start when politicians intervene by pouring public money into new factories and into propping up businesses which would otherwise go bust. Quality is usually the
first victim.

He discusses the various reasons why African countries cannot manufacture all their own medicines at the moment and points out that harmful effect government legislation and high tariffs have had on the industry and on health care in many countries. These are introduced by governments whose members then travel round the world demanding subsidized local drug production.

Subsidised drug production is not only risky but is rarely cheaper than importing. A study by the US National Academies of Science showed that producing antimalarial drugs from start to finish in Nigeria would cost 15% more than simply importing them directly. The German aid agency GTZ says drugs produced locally in Ghana are often more expensive than imports from India,China, or Europe.

Such insights are not surprising: with globalisation demonstrating all the time that the production of certain goods is more suited to certain areas. This is why the Swedish don’t bother to grow grapefruit but do produce cars.

So why does this political support for state-financed local production continue? It is economically illiterate and endangers the health of Africans but it appeals greatly to activists and to vested political and business interests.

Any government that does really care about the health of its people must first drop the tariffs and taxes that hamper local production and that deter imports: unlike some doomed Five-Year Plan, it's an immediate boost to all patients, especially the poor.

And there you have it. An economically illiterate and dangerous policy that, quite literally, kills people is promoted by vested interests. All too often those business interests happen to be government political interests as well.

The other article is about counterfeit drugs, a terrible and dangerous blight in many poor countries, and often the outcome of inappropriate transnational campaigns. There is a link to a new report, produced by the International Policy Network, called "Keeping it Real".

It starts with a horrific statistic: counterfeit drugs kill over 700,000 people every year. Remember those scenes in "The Third Man" when the writer Holly Martin is shown what damage resulted from the counterfeit penicillin that his friend, Harry Lime, helped to distibute? Well, multiply that by many thousands every year.

The most fundamental cause of the spread of fake drugs in less developed countries has been the inability of manufacturers to protect the identity of their products. This is largely down to a lack of functioning rule of law, which makes it very difficult for manufacturers to protect their trademarks and brands – thereby handing a free rein to counterfeiters. In this context, the stiffer criminal penalties called for by WHO and other bodies may actually entrench the corrupt symbiotic relationship between counterfeiters, lawmakers and officials.

The suggestions the paper makes sound good but who exactly is going to put them into effect is unclear:

1. Strengthening local institutions, in particular the rule of law
2. Governments intervening less in the pharmaceutical market
3. Better use of technologies for identity preservation

Substitute almost any word for pharmaceutical and you would solve many of the problems of developing countries. Instead we keep giving aid, that keeps governments who benefit from there not being a rule of law, in power.