DEVELOPMENT-OUTLOOK 2000: Much Ado About Aid That Shrinks and Shrinks

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Nov 23 1999 (IPS) - When the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, recently urged the rich countries to “abide by their solemn undertakings to assist in development”, she touched a highly sensitive issue.

The fact is that nearly half-a-century after the concept of development aid was introduced in international relations, the combined ODA budgets of Germany and other donor nations, clubbed together in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris – constitute a bare 0.25 percent of their Gross National Product (GNP).

This is in stark contrast to the 0.7 percent of GNP, the developed nations -major among them former colonial powers – had agreed to set apart for financial and technical aid. The pledge was renewed at the June 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Four years later, the Ministers in the OECD Development Assistance Committee reaffirmed the vow in the report entitled ‘Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Cooperation’.

The report maintained: “…the international community needs to sustain and increase the volume of official development assistance in order to reverse the growing marginalisation of the poor and achieve progress toward realistic goals of human development.”

It added: “Domestic preoccupations in member countries should not jeopardise the international development effort at a critical juncture. Today’s investments in development co-operation will yield a very high return over the coming years.”

Even the enlightened self-interest emphasised by the OECD/DAC report appears to have fallen prey to what the industrialised countries describe as their financial constraints at the end of a century which brought forth lofty concepts such as international solidarity and the welfare state.

These have now been replaced by vociferous public commitment to human rights, which the U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants to be strictly observed in every nook and the corner of the world. Annan however stresses that human rights include the right to development.

Against this backdrop, the U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Robinson told an international gathering in the former plenary hall of the German federal parliament on Nov 11 in Bonn: “It is simply not credible to talk about human rights and preventing conflicts and at the same time to cut ODA budgets.”

“In fact, I believe that rich countries are sometimes guilty of a kind of double-speak: they are strongly – and rightly – critical of human rights abuses in the civil and political field. But they are much less vocal about economic, social and cultural rights,” Robinson said.

Her view is endorsed by the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Cornelius Sommaruga. “Poverty, like social injustice and massive human rights abuses, is one of the causes of armed conflict,” says the ICRC chief, adding: “In the limbo of contemporary history are any number of regions with hardly any economy – except the arms market.”

“Without doubt,” says Nobel Laureate Oscar Arias, “military spending represents the single most significant perversion of world-wide priorities known today.”

The 780 billion dollars spent on weapons and soldiers in 1997 constitutes a global tragedy, adds Arias, a former President of Costa Rica, who is advocating an International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers.

Arias told IPS recently in Bonn, only 10 percent of the global military spending would suffice to provide basic social services to all of the world’s population in ten years and an additional 10 percent enable everyone to earn above the poverty line of his or her country.

Industrialised countries could help strengthen democracy and promote good governance in the developing world by expanding their foreign aid budgets, said Arias.

In real terms, however, foreign aid is down by almost a fifth since 1992. Donor nations provide just 55 billion dollars in ODA out of a combined GNP of 22 trillion dollars.

Industrialised countries’ support for programmes aimed at “poverty alleviation” and “good governance”, the keywords of the 1980s and 1990, is more on paper than in reality. Arias argues: “The challenge of good governance lies in the fact that nearly one-and-a-half billion people world-wide have no access to clean water, one billion live in miserably substandard housing.”