The Contours of an Aid Alternative

13.4.1 An Abrupt Rupture from the Current Aid Architecture is, Alas, Not Desirable

It would signal a declaration of war, aiming to destabilise the powers that be and maybe even, beyond that, the destruction of the state.

The choice is not between aid as it is or no aid at all. The battle must be waged for radical transformation of the concepts regarding the function of aid, as the South Centre argues. This is primarily an intellectual battle, which should not have boundaries. This struggle is relevant to all those that propose the construction of another world (better), another globalisation, an authentically polycentric world system, respectful of the free (and different) choice of states, nations and peoples on the planet. Let us leave the monopoly on the production of recipes for all to the World Bank and the arrogant technocrats of the ‘north’ to impose.

The moral arguments in favour of debt in the north with respect to the South, giving all its legitimacy to the principle of ‘aid’ (becoming therefore ‘solidarity’) are not without value. More convincing, and politically grounded, are arguments related to solidarity of peoples faced with the challenges of the future. In particular, the consequences of climate change. The project to create a convention on climate change (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC) is an acceptable starting point to envision financing from opulent countries (respon­sible in the first instance for the deterioration of the global environment) for pro­grams that benefit all of the peoples of the planet, and in particular those that are most vulnerable. But precisely because this initiative began within the UN, western diplomats seek, at the very least, impede (if not sabotage) its development.

The elaboration of a global vision of aid cannot be delegated to the OECD, the World Bank or the European Union.

I would therefore give priority of support to initiatives taken by ECOSOCC (the Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the United Nations) in 2005 for the creation of a Development Cooperation Forum (DCF). This initiative began the construction of authentic partnerships within a polycentric global perspective. The initiative is, as one can imagine, very badly received by diplomats of the triad.

But, we have to go further and dare to reach a ‘red line’. Not to ‘reforming’ the World Bank, the WTO and the IMF. Not to limiting ourselves to denouncing the dra­matic consequences of their past and present politics. But to proposing alternative insti­tutions, positively defining their tasks and drawing up their institutional framework.

The debate on alternative aid (united) must immediately eliminate some sub­jects retained by the DAC under the rubric of ODA which, in reality, is not aid from North to South but, rather the reverse!

1. At the top of the list must be concessional loans provided at below market rates. This is merely aggressive trade policy implemented by triad states (some­what like dumping) from which Northern exporters are the main beneficiaries.

2. Debt reduction, decided upon almost charitably (as is evidenced by the diplo­matic jargon that surround these decisions), should not figure under the rubric of ‘aid’. Instead and as a legitimate response, not only morally, to this issue, an audit should be conducted of the debt in question (private and public, from the side of the recipient and the donor).

13.4.2 Alternative Aid is Inseparable from the Conceptualisation of Alternative Development

Although this is not the subject of our debate here, it is nevertheless useful, and necessary to reflect on some important principles of development so as to give clarity to the proposals for alternative aid that follow. These important principles are:

1. Development demands a diversified system of production, which in the first instance engages on the road to industrialisation.

The tenacious refusal to recognize this necessity in subtropical Africa is remark­able. How else can one comprehend the reference to the so called “insane industrial drift”, that should be laughable (which country in Africa is currently ‘over-industrialised’!) unfortunately taken up by people in the alternative glo­balisation movement who are unaware of the real impact of the Bandung era. I suspect actually some racism for the peoples in question, within this proposal. On the contrary, is it not plain that it is precisely those countries engaged on the ‘insane’ path who are today ‘emerging’ countries (China, Korea, and others)?

The incontrovertible industrial perspective does not exclude the call to inter­national capital. Complex and diverse partnership formulae between state and local private capital (when it exists) or foreign capital are certainly admissi­ble, inevitable probably.

2. Diversification (including industrialisation), incontrovertible, demands certainly the construction of infrastructures that do not exist in recipient countries of aid which has become indispensable to their survival.

Social infrastructures: No development without quality education, from the base to the summit, and without a population in good health. Here there is potential for financial and technical aid that is indisputably positive, become solidarity. The eradication of pandemics, of AIDS, are evident examples.

3. Diversification and industrialisation will demand the construction of forms of adequate regional cooperation. Continental countries can without a doubt do without it but, for those of ‘medium’ population size (from 50 millions upwards) can initiate the process alone, knowing that they will rapidly reach terrain that they will only pass through with regional cooperation.

The form that regional cooperation takes must reinvent itself to be coher­ent with the objectives of the type of development spelt out here. Regional ‘common markets’, which dominate the institutions in place currently (when they exist and function) are not in line with this development as they are con­ceived as blocs constitutive of liberal globalisation. I refer here to my paper ‘Regionalisation, which regionalisation?’.

4. Rural and agricultural development must be at the center of the definition of a strategy for another development, not just presently but even for more strongly in the long succession of advanced phases of development.

It is not enough here to proclaim the priority of agriculture as many do. The type of agriculture must also be defined. Coherent alternative development with diversification as its objectives imposes the translation of some grand principles into concrete policy:

- Give priority to food producers within the food sovereignty (as defined by Via Campesina) and not food sovereignty framework.

The latter, promoted by the World Bank and retained by the Paris and Accra Declarations, is the origin of the on-going food crisis.

This priority implies not only that farmers produce more to first feed them­selves (the majority of under-nourished people are rural), but also to produce the excess necessary to satisfy the urban demand.

- Conceive development policy on agriculture founded on the maintenance of sig­nificant rural populations.

As equal access as possible to land and the correct means to exploit it, commands this conception of farmer agriculture. This implies agrarian reform, strengthening of cooperation, adequate macro-economic policies (credit, provision of inputs, commercialisation of products). These measures are different to those put in place historically by capitalism in Europe and North America which was founded on the appropriation of land, its reduction into a merchandise, a rapid social dif­ferentiation of peasantry and the rapid expulsion of ‘useless’ rural surplus.

The option recommended by the dominant system, not put into question by the Paris and Accra Declarations, is situated at the antipodes of advanced principles. Founded on the financial profitability, short-term productivity (rapidly increas­ing production, at the cost of accelerated expulsion of farmers in surplus), it responds certainly well to trans-national interests of agro-business and of an associated new class of farmers, but not to that of popular classes and the nation.

- Radically put into question liberal globalisation of production and international commerce of agricultural and food products.

On these important questions, we can only refer to Jacques Berthelot’s remark­able work which provide the best analysis of the catastrophes that liberalisation has produced, and continues to produce, the best arguments notably concern­ing the fundamental asymmetries that characterize the Cotonou Convention, the so called projects of “economic partnership”, the debates on the subvention of exports from the North and more generally the negotiations at the heart of the WTO. The rebirth of farmers movements in francophone west Africa, organised within the Network of Farmers’ and Agricultural Producers’ Organisations of West Africa, a stakeholder in our debates, bears witness that the option for the farmers path is necessarily in conflict with the dominant productivist options in the circuit organized by the OECD, the WTO and the EU.

5. Alternative development framework provided here imposes a true master­ing of economic relations with the exterior, amongst them the abandonment of the ‘free trade’ system claimed as ‘regulation of the market’, to the benefit of national and regional systems of control of rates of foreign exchange. Beyond the impossible reform of the IMF, the answers to the challenges invites one to imagine the putting in place of regional monetary funds, articulated in regards to a new system of global monetary regulation, which the current crisis makes more necessary than ever. ‘Reform’ of the IMF doesn’t respond to these necessi­ties. In a more general sense, the understanding of external relations, which isn’t self-sufficient, defines the contours of what I have qualified as ‘delinking’, to be constitutive element incontrovertible of the emergence of a negotiated globalisa­tion. This development equally demands control of national natural resources. Alternative development is founded on the principle of priority given to national and regional internal markets and in this framework to the markets that respond in the first instance to the expansion of the demands of the popular classes, not to the global market. This is what I can an auto-centred development.

13.4.3 We Should, Taking as a Point of Departure the Criteria in the Preceding Section, Do an Inventory of the Aid that Countries Receive

1. The principle of international solidarity of peoples, which I defend, legitimizes support for struggles for democratisation of societies, associated with social progress and efforts of critical radical reflection. Does aid currently inscribe itself within this perspective? Aid provided to ‘NGOs’ that accept submission to dominant conceptions regarding ‘democracy’ that is reduced to multiparty-ism, dissociated from social progress and even associated to social regression pro­duced by liberalism, certainly does not. But it is not impossible that movements in real struggle for democratic and social progress can benefit from material support expressing moral and political solidarity.

2. An important fraction of aid to NGOs is inscribed within a strategy of substi­tuting the state for ‘civil society’ in regards to meeting the essential needs of public services. The danger is obvious: this form of ‘aid’ entails the ‘destruc­tion of the state’. The Mozambican example is a well-researched case. What is necessary is a transfer of this aid towards the reconstruction of the state and its capacity to fulfil its functions (public service in education, health, providing water and electricity, public transportation, social housing, social security) and which neither private (who would reserver for themselves the only profitable margins), nor the associative (even benevolent) can respond to correctly.

3. There will always remain a zone of intervention in the name of universal human solidarity that is perfectly legitimate. Assistance to victims of natural disasters, to refugees produced en masse by war, can never wait. It would be criminal to refuse aid under the pretext that nothing has been established to avoid the deterioration of the underlying causes of these catastrophes (notably wars). However, unacceptable political exploitation of ‘humanitarian’ situations nevertheless poses a danger. Numerous examples exist.

On the other hand, immediate assistance doesn’t exclude the opening of the file regarding the causes of the catastrophe. On the contrary, critical independent reflection of these problems and engagement in necessary social struggles needed to redress these deteriorated struggles must be supported beyond the immediate ‘humanitarian’ intervention.

13.4.4 North-South Cooperation is not Exclusive

South-South cooperation existed during the Bandung era and demonstrated its effectiveness within the conditions of the era. Support by the non-aligned move­ment, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), China, the Soviet Union and Cuba, for liberation movements of Portuguese colonies, in Zimbabwe and South Africa, was important and at times decisive. At the time, cooperation of triad coun­tries was absent other than from Sweden and some other Scandinavian countries, as their diplomatic priority was to NATO (which includes Portugal) and support of apartheid.

Today ample opportunities exist to renew South-South cooperation. The South has the means to break the monopoly upon which the supremacy of the triad rests. Certain countries of the South have become not only capable of assimilating the technologies that the North seeks to over protect (precisely because they are never­theless vulnerable) but also to develop these themselves. If they wish to push these towards a different model of development, more apt to the needs of the South, this could open a large field in South-South cooperation. Countries of the South could equally give priority of access to the natural resources that they control, to the strengthening of their own industrialisation and to that of their partners within South-South cooperation. Certain Southern countries have financial resources that instead of being placed on the financial markets and monetary control of the triad, themselves collapsing, could shatter the monopoly of the North in this domain and the bribery of aid that accompanies it.

These propositions are not romantic. Diplomats of the triad have taken menac­ing measures in aligning themselves with the insane project of ‘military control of the planet’ nevertheless become necessary to perpetuate the supremacy of their economies in crisis.

The South can do without the North, the reverse is not true. But for that, the elites of the South must liberate themselves from their internalised dependency thinking, stop thinking that aid is a condition for development of their societies. The South Centre insists, with reason, on this major point of debate regarding the future of development.

References

In the order of their appearing in the text

Tandon, Yash, 2008. Ending Aid Dependence, South Centre, Geneve.

Amin, Samir, 2006: The Millenium Development Goals, Monthly Review, March.

Orwell, Georges: 1984.

Amin, Samir, 2003: “Africa in the Global System”, in: Lauer, Helen (Ed.): History and Philosophy of Science (Ibadan: Hope Public).

Amin, Samir; Founou-Tchuigoua, Bernard: Les regionalisations, quelles regionalisations ? Website: FTM; especiallyin : S. Amin et al., Afrique, exclusion programmee ou Renaissance, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2005: 129ff.

Ndiaye, Abdourahmane: L’avenir des societes paysannes en Afrique de l’Ouest, critique des travaux du Club du Sahel, Website: FTM.

Jacques Berthelot, Website: TWF. (i) WTO and the South, (ii) The Agrarian question, (iii) Demeler le vrai et le faux dans la flambee des prix agricoles, (iv) Cinq bonnes raisons pour ne pas signer l’APE-AO.

Berthelot, Jacques: Uagriculture, talon d’Achille de TOMC., website: Third World Forum. Berthelot, Jacques: Quels avenirs pour les societes paysannes de lAfrique de l’Ouest ?, ibid. Boris, Jean Pierre, 2005: Le roman noir des matieres premieres (Pluriel).

Amin, Samir et al., 2005 : Les luttespaysannes et ouvrieres face aux defis du XXI ieme siecle; les Indes Savantes (Paris) with references on peasant struggles in Asia and Africa.

Mamdani, Mahmood, 2004 : Citoyen et sujet, TAfrique contemporaine et Theritage du colonial- isme tardif (Karthala).

Majeje, Archie: The agrarian question, access to land and peasant responses in Sub Saharan Africa, UNRISD.

Shivji, Issa: interviewed by Marc Wuyts.

Moyo, Sam: Land in the political economy of African development.