DEVELOPMENT: More Uncertain Promises of Aid

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

BERLIN, Mar 28 2007 (IPS) - The ministers of development and international cooperation of the Group of Eight most industrialised countries (G8) have agreed again that their governments “must make…development cooperation more effective” and “keep their pledges to increase official development assistance.”

The development ministers of the G8 countries (Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States) met in Berlin Mar. 26-27 for their annual meeting ahead of the next G8 summit to take place in the German Baltic sea resort Heiligendamm Jun. 6-8.

The ministers said in a declaration that their governments “must honour their commitments to double their funding for Africa by 2010.”

The ministers agreed to work along the principles of the Paris Declaration. The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, endorsed Mar. 2, 2005, is an international agreement among governments and international cooperation agencies to increase efforts in harmonising and managing aid.

The agreement lays down action-orientated guidelines to improve the quality of aid and its impact on development.

In addition to calling for a “pro-development conclusion” of the Doha trade talks, the G8 ministers urged governments in African, Latin American and South East Asian countries to “do their part to support the emergence of structures that make development possible” as a contribution to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The MDGs are a set of eight goals agreed in 2000 to cut poverty and improve health and education, with several specific targets to be met by 2015.

The so-called Doha Development Round of negotiations, conducted within the framework of the World Trade Organisation, aims to lower trade barriers around the world and to facilitate international exchange of goods and services. Major disputes on reducing subsidies for agriculture in the European Union and the United States, and the demand by multinational companies for access to the markets of poor countries have blocked negotiations.

These disputes have set the G8 against the developing countries represented by Brazil, China, India and South Africa. An agreement is not in sight.

Non-governmental organisations have expressed doubts that the commitments declared in Berlin will be kept.

G8 countries have made several promises in the past, only to break them as the ink on the paper dries, sayid Reinhard Hermle, former head of the Association of German Development Non-Governmental Organisations.

At the G8 summit in Gleneagles in Scotland in 2005, the industrialised world made a commitment of 50 billion dollars in development aid. “We are still very far from fulfilling this promise,” Hermle told IPS.

Germany had promised then to allocate 0.51 percent of gross national income (GNI) for development aid by 2010. “We are at 0.36 percent now, but a part of this aid only exists in the books, for instance the pointless debt relief for Iraq,” Hermle said.

At the declaration this week, the German government acknowledged that the new agreement means a gradual increase of overseas development assistance to 0.7 percent of GNI by 2015.

German development minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul who hosted the meeting said that more triangular cooperation arrangements under which an industrial nation or group of nations like the G8 or the European Union work on a joint project with an emerging economy in a developing country could be a major instrument of development in the years ahead.

“Emerging economies have shown great interest in such projects,” Wieczorek-Zeul said to a German radio station. She added that India and China could play an important role in acting as “anchors for development and security in their respective regions.”

Donald Kaberuka, president of the African Development Bank Group, supported Wieczorek’s plan.

“I think that these new (emerging developing) partners bring in major advantages: the experience of being recently poor countries, being recently a recipient of aid. Their experience in itself is important for us.”