Breaking promises to broken people
Updated on 17 October 2008
The real losers from the credit crunch will be the world's poorest countries, writes Jonathan Miller.
When African finance ministers turned up in Washington DC last weekend for the big World Bank / IMF shebang, they wryly noted the speed with which the rich world corralled billions for the big bank bail-outs while they've failed to make good on pledges of much smaller sums to the world's poorest countries.
Five months on from an emergency world food summit in Rome, when wealthy nations promised £7bn to address the crisis, they've so far coughed up £600m - less than one tenth of what they pledged.
When the UN's World Food Programme launched an emergency appeal for US$57m for Haiti, which was hit by two storms and two hurricanes back-to-back, the initial response garnered US$1m. Six weeks on, the WFP's still got less than a fifth of what it asked for.
Pretty inconsiderate, really, of Haiti to have had a hurricane crisis just as the Credit Crunch began to bite.
All this raises a question that directly affects the hundreds of millions of human beings who already live life on the edge: will compassion be the first casualty of capitalism in crisis?
The UN's World Food Day (Thursday) and then the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty (Friday) have never attracted much attention in the calendar of worthy "days".
This year though, they've fallen as the money markets collapse around us, imbuing the campaign to "make poverty history" with an even greater challenge. The big squeeze is threatening to make charity history.
Recessions are bad news for foreign aid. In the early 90s, British aid contracted by a third before taking a decade to recover.
There is real fear that the world's poorest people will end up paying the highest price in the rich world's financial crisis.
This is not a case of international aid agencies flaming up a crisis or crying wolf: it's a fear backed by empirical evidence. Recessions are bad news for foreign aid. In the early 90s, British aid contracted by a third before taking a decade to recover.
President Toomas Hendrick Ilves of Estonia, who happens to be in London, proffers a brutalist realist view of what are clearly changing European priorities: "If you have less money, you can give less," he says. Well, he certainly says it straight.
Perversely, I've even heard it argued that poor countries might have been better advised to have used the boom years "to get their acts together".
None of this will be too easy to swallow for the million Haitians suddenly made homeless by their tempests, for the tens of thousands scraping by in grim camps of Darfur or Eastern Congo or for those scavenging for scraps in the barren fields of Zimbabwe and Ethiopia.
Oxfam reports that the 80 per cent rise in global food prices had pushed 119 million extra people into hunger this year, bringing the world total to close to one billion.
"A human crisis is rapidly unfolding," the World Bank's President, Robert Zoellick, said last weekend. "It is pushing poor people to the brink of survival."
But if wealthy nations do break their promises, the future looks even bleaker for those who've got very little left to lose.
It's just three years since G8 leaders, in a wave of fabulous Gordon Brown-induced philanthropy, agreed to more than double foreign aid in line with the Millennium Development Goal of halving world poverty and hunger within a decade. Now, all that's in jeopardy.
The credit crunch: a massive multiplier in an equation already complicated by floods and droughts and hurricanes, the rising price of food and fuel, and all too often, violence and war.
Mr Brown is hanging in there, appealing to the rich world not to reneg on promises made. But times are hard and getting harder and Gordon Brown is, frankly, up against it. It'll cost more than £8bn a year to even halve world poverty and hunger by 2015.
But if wealthy nations do break their promises, the future looks even bleaker for those who've got very little left to lose.
