Ros Wynne-Jones guardian.co.uk, 1 March 2011 In the coalition construct aid is set in opposition to the NHS and Africa's poor aren't Britain's concern
And so, once again, the poorest pay for an economic crisis they did nothing to create. At home it's certainly not the bankers who are belt-tightening. And abroad, the world's poorest people are hit twice over. Once, as developing country economies reel from the impact of a global crisis caused by western markets; twice because the west can no longer afford to lend the assistance that was apparently a luxury of boom times.
Some non-government organisations were celebrating yesterday that the cuts to the Department for International Development's budget were not as severe as anticipated, a neat feint the coalition government is beginning to specialise in. The department's budget is to be frozen, we hear. But as anyone whose wages have ever been frozen knows, it amounts to a pay cut – £2.2bn in this case, from the threadbare pockets of some of the poorest people in the world.
In the construct of our straitened times being rapidly assembled by coalition thinkers, overseas aid is consistently defined in opposition to our own domestic needs, as if it is an either/or choice. This is an entirely false dichotomy. DfID's budget accounts for much less than 1% of government spending and has nothing to do with how many doctors or nurses we have in the NHS. But it is a useful illusion.
The question Andrew Mitchell's constituents should be asking is not why is he helping distant poor people instead of them, but why champagne is flowing in the city once more yet there's no money for child benefit in the UK, or to benefit the poorest children abroad.As an alternative, a tiny Robin Hood tax on banks could mean there need be no choice between saving lives abroad and protecting livelihoods at home, while also ensuring the banks clean up their own mess.Who we choose to give to, and how we choose to give, defines us as a nation, and goes to the core of our moral values. In the brave new DfID that has been unveiled, winners and losers in the aid lottery are clearly weighted by the ordering of a new moral universe. Does helping them fit in with our anti-terrorism aims and our strategic economic interests?
The question becomes less about need and more, does helping them help us? (The coalition wants to focus up to 30% of overseas aid on volatile states such as Afghanistan and Somalia.) It also lends itself to further false dilemmas, as Andrew Mitchell – defending continuing aid to India as its economy booms – notes, "In India there are more poor people in three states than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa," as if development spending were an ugly kind of Miss World competition.
In a globalised world, poverty is more than ever all of our problems, yet it has become grotesquely fashionable to knock the whole concept of aid, a beautifully conscience-salving opt-out. Western aid does more harm than good, goes the theory trotted out by dinner-party controversialists. It just simply doesn't work.
I have seen aid work, simply and beautifully, and also in complex, compound ways. I have seen emergency aid from DfID save lives in Mozambican floods and in Sudanese drought. I have watched development aid work in Rwanda, where tiny sums of money lent to farmers are still feeding families. I have seen both state and NGO aid work on other continents besides – in Kosovo, in East Timor, and in Thailand.
It is a lie that aid does not work. The truth is far more human – that sometimes there are failures of imagination or discipline. The answer is not to abandon aid, but to make it work better.
Aid is not the solution to poverty, but it is part of a solution that includes changing the way we trade, dealing with despots and corrupt governments, tackling climate change and the way international debt and finance is structured. But at its best, aid has the power to put books into the hands of children, food into the mouths of the hungry, and to offer suffering people their human dignity. Wouldn't those be the last things any government or any citizen would want to cut?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/mar/01/coalition-aid-cuts-poverty
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