In his comment on my post about Ethiopian famine relief in the 1980s, Patrick acknowledged that different countries within Africa needed different solutions to their problems and that short-term emergency famine relief aid ought not to be condemned for failing to have long-term development benefits. He went on to note some specific criticisms of development aid that seemed to him to be more serious. I reproduce them here with my own comments, and also comments by Owen Barder, who is on temporary unpaid leave from a senior job in the UK Department for International Development and is currently working in California for the Center for Global Development – and thus a great deal more up-to-date on aid matters than me (my last active involvement in aid matters ended in 1991).
Here are Patrick’s points and Owen’s and my comments on them:
[P:] Aid being siphoned off by corrupt governments & officials thus aiding those that may be ‘part of the problem’.
[BB:] When I was involved in aid matters, more than a decade ago, a high proportion of our emergency and development aid was in effect given in kind, the money being spent directly on the goods and services used in specific aid projects. This leaves relatively little scope for money to be siphoned off to line the pockets of local politicians or officials, especially as most projects of this kind would be monitored and supervised by British aid officials on the spot. However we were also giving money as such to some countries, e.g. in balance of payments support. In those cases we would generally agree a programme of imports needed for development and needing to be financed by foreign currency, ensuring so far as possible that these were additional to the country’s regular imports and development purchases. We would transfer the funds only on production of the relevant invoices and we would collect and scrutinise the receipts. But since money is fungible, it was never possible to be 100 per cent sure that some part of the funds released by our own foreign currency grants could not be drained off in local corruption. Insistence on real additionality helped to keep this to a minimum.
[OB:] A large and increasing amount of aid is nowadays given as budget support, either through the Finance Ministry or direct to Government Departments (eg Health etc). However, this aid is accompanied by what is known as a "fiduciary risk assessment" which is intended to provide some reassurance that the aid will be used for the purposes for which it was intended. See http://tinyurl.com/b2u45 for details. This has the merit that it forces donors to look carefully at the arrangements for accounting for public funds, and ensuring there are proper systems for audit and accountability; no longer can donors ignore the possibility that public officials may be siphoning off public funds, as their own funds are mixed in the same system. (In the old days, if donors paid for schools or roads, this released expenditure pressures which could allow corrupt officials to siphon off other revenues – eg domestic taxes, telecoms revenues etc.)
Donors are pretty careful to ensure aid is not siphoned off. There was a lot more of that sort of thing during the cold war, when the main purpose of aid was to support particular governments, rather than reduce poverty.
[P:] Distortion of the local economy.
[BLB:] My impression is that the bulk of western aid nowadays is designed to strengthen, not distort, the local economy — although emergency food aid almost unavoidably does have some distorting effect, and of course US (and EU) dumping dressed up as aid inevitably distorts. In the case of the food aid given by the whole international community to relieve the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s, there was no serious distortion of the local economy, because local food had virtually disappeared from the markets in the famine areas after three successive years of major drought, affecting (most unusually) virtually the whole of the country. A good deal of the food aid given by western and other countries for famine relief was distributed as payment for labour in food-for-work programmes, in which Ethiopians were employed on irrigation and other water projects, re-forestation, etc., and received part of their payment in relief food aid, thus using the imported donated food as a means of stimulating a revival of local farming in the medium term. This could be regarded as a kind of beneficial distortion.
[OB:] Dumping food aid definitely distorts the local economy and should only be used in extreme circumstances. Large aid inflows can also lead to an appreciation of the exchange rate (eg Uganda) which can lead to a shift in the terms of trade against the domestic export sector. But the benefits unambiguously outweigh the costs (see paper at http://tinyurl.com/9nakm for an explanation of why).
[P:] Tied aid being used by donor governments to further foreign-policy objectives & support various industries.
[BB:] During my time serving in developing countries, I and some others repeatedly urged our political bosses to reduce and eventually terminate the reprehensible practice of ‘tying’ our aid to the purchase of goods and services from the donor country, and to encourage other donor countries to do the same thing. There was (perhaps naturally) some opposition to this from the Department of Trade and Industry which argued that we should untie our aid only if other donors were also untying their aid: otherwise British taxpayers’ money would inevitably tend to be spent on imports from other countries which continued to tie their aid, and our suppliers and exporters would be unfairly disadvantaged. There was some progress in untying UK aid in my day, but not much.
[OB:] All UK aid is now untied; and it is now illegal for the UK aid budget to be used for any purpose other than the reduction of poverty (International Development Act of 2002). All industrialised countries have committed to untying aid; most of the others have not done it as completely as the UK.
[P:] Are these criticisms valid, & if so are there any solutions to them? I would be extremely interested to read your opinions.
[OB:] My collection of evidence that aid works (so far) is here: http://tinyurl.com/d5ouc.
[BB:] No system is completely fool-proof, and the ingenuity employed in trying to divert money and resources into private pockets is phenomenal: if that energy and imagination were to be applied to making the country concerned more prosperous, aid would be virtually unnecessary! But times have changed since donors used simply to hand over the cheque and keep their fingers crossed about the way the money was spent — as I hope the foregoing comments help to demonstrate.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
http://ephems.blogspot.com
Wimbledon fortnight (two weeks, that means, you Yanks) is here again and all the Brits are out before the first weekend. Our flag-wagging tabloids — and some of the solemn papers too — have been plunged into grief by the defeat once again of our perennial white hope, Tim Henman, who went out in a storm of colourful language more reminiscent of McEnroe at his saltiest than of Henman the eternal public schoolboy with the short hair and the sententious sentiments about the defects of his game.
At almost the same moment the British media have been hysterically excited by the sudden epiphany of an 18-year-old Scot, Andy Murray, who unexpectedly won a couple of early rounds at this year’s Wimbledon, and even for a time seemed capable of winning a third, against a much higher-ranked player. The mass celebrations of this national (if ephemeral) triumph would have been appropriate for a major victory in a war for the country’s survival or the arrival of a team of British astronauts on the surface of Mars ahead of the Americans and the Russians. Still, Murray did play with much style; so much so that he has now aroused expectations for the future which a Titan of the game would be hard put to it to satisfy.
As we live only about half a mile away from the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club (its actual name — founded in 1868) we do enjoy the privilege, throughout the Fortnight, of getting half-hourly highly localised weather forecasts, which partially makes up for the fact that we can’t park anywhere within a ten-mile radius of the centre court.
Incidentally, for the uninitiated, we’re talking about tennis. Not croquet.
Well, perhaps the Brits will be the first on Mars with their little digital cameras…
Brian
http://www.barder.com/
There’s a fascinating and encouraging article by Jonathan Power in the current issue of Prospect magazine about the economic progress and successes registered by Tanzania and a raft of other African countries in recent years. Power notes Tanzania’s many on-going successes (and the similar progress made by many other largely unsung African countries) and acknowledges the contribution to that progress of western aid. He also acknowledges the mistakes and failures in aid policy made in the past by donor countries and institutions — and by the media. His article should be compulsory reading for the small army of people who think Africa should be written off as a basket case, that resolving the continent’s many huge problems should be left to the Africans and that western aid and even trade measures can’t make any difference, indeed may even do more harm than good (see my post of earlier today about a recent malicious assault on the Ethiopian famine relief programme of the mid-1980s). It’s refreshing to read Jonathan Power’s words:
"There is no doubt that aid works. The proof of that can be seen in both Tanzania and Uganda from the times when they were given little or no aid. Nothing moved. Look at both countries now and you can see aid projects delivering. Even the Asian tigers, with their undemocratic but capable "development" states, could not have got going without aid—the Americans put South Korea and Taiwan on the road to success."
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
http://ephems.blogspot.com
Last week the Guardian published a long article by David Rieff about the international effort to relieve starvation and disease in Ethiopia in the mid-1980s. The article singled out Bob Geldof and Live Aid for special condemnation, but also denounced the other western NGOs and western donor governments for allegedly supporting forced resettlement in Ethiopia (described as a campaign of ‘mass murder’ by the then Ethiopian government) and thereby possibly contributing to more deaths than the whole relief effort had saved.
Enraged by these preposterous allegations, I submitted the following letter to the Guardian on the same day:
"I read David Rieff’s polemical attack (Cruel to be kind, G2, 24 June 2005) on Live Aid’s relief activities during the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s with mounting anger. As the British ambassador to Ethiopia during most of the relevant time, I saw a good deal of what happened at first hand, travelling all over the country throughout the period. Although firm facts and figures were even then hard to come by, and much harder now, I have little doubt that Rieff’s allegations about the numbers of people who died as a result of resettlement are seriously exaggerated: but even if they were accurate, it would be quite wrong to blame them on Live Aid or the other NGOs working throughout Ethiopia at the time to relieve starvation. The western aid donors and their NGOs had grave reservations about the way in which resettlement was carried out, and in some cases about the justification for it: and we pressed those objections and fears forcefully on the Mengistu government at the time.
"Part of the reason for the harsh conditions in which the settlers were transported to their new homes was the refusal of western aid donors to condone the mechanics of resettlement by helping to fund it or provide transport facilities for it. Resettlement would have happened regardless of the presence or activities of the NGOs, Live Aid or western donor governments. Moreover the case for it was very strong: there were far more people living in the famine-ridden, soil-eroded, deforested northern highlands than the land could support, especially after successive droughts. It’s true that many people – no-one knows how many – were resettled against their will. But I visited several resettlement areas and talked (through my own embassy interpreter and without any Ethiopian officials listening in) to numerous settlers, randomly chosen: not one said he or she had been forced to move; all of them welcomed the move and expressed their hopes for a better life in their new and incomparably more fertile homes. Anecdotal, certainly; but there’s no other reliable evidence.
"The régime may have been encouraged in its decision to resettle large numbers of starving people by the potential benefits for the government in the context of the Eritrean and Tigrean armed rebellions in the north, although these supposed benefits were always hard to quantify. Anyway it’s unlikely that this was the main motive, since the case for large-scale resettlement on food grounds alone was so strong. (Rieff seems to blame the Ethiopian government for ‘waging war’ against the Eritrean and Tigrean rebels: how else would he expect any sovereign government, however repressive, to respond to armed rebellions on its soil?) Even if you accept Rieff’s case against resettlement, it’s simply malicious to blame its casualties on Live Aid or the NGOs. Rieff speculates that it’s sometimes better to do nothing than to act. Many Ethiopians alive today, who owe their survival to the emergency help given by western taxpayers and charitably funded NGOs, may be forgiven for taking a different view. Rieff’s endorsement of de Waal’s astonishing assertion that ‘the relief effort … may have contributed to as many deaths’ as the number of lives it saved deserves to be treated with incredulous contempt.
"Brian Barder (British ambassador to Ethiopia, 1982-86)"
The Guardian published an ‘edited’ (but on this occasion not seriously mangled) version of this letter on 27 June: see http://tinyurl.com/7cfa8. The only omission from the original letter in the published version that I seriously regret is my question: what did Mr Rieff expect a sovereign government, however repressive, to do in response to armed rebellions on its territory? (He had written that the Ethiopian government was ‘waging war’ on the Eritreans and Tigreans, a pretty rum way of putting it.)
I’m glad to have got the main points of my attempted rebuttal onto the record, or at any rate into print. But I’m afraid it’s a lost cause. The strange campaign to discredit the Ethiopian relief effort and all who took part in it (especially perhaps Bob Geldof and Live Aid) continues relentlessly in recurring television programmes and articles in the press, even though Mengistu was forced into exile and disgrace as long ago as 1991. It seems to be some sort of hangover from the vitriolic dispute over the resettlement programme in 1985-86 between a highly ideological wing of Médecins Sans Frontières and the rest of the NGOs working in Ethiopia, with MSF ending its relief work and leaving the country rather than compromise its political principles, bitterly denouncing its sister organisations who put feeding the starving above their ideological purity. Elements of the anti-communist fervour of the US government of the day in its attitude to Ethiopia also seem to linger on, long after the faintest whiff of communism vanished into the thin Ethiopian air. There’s also a faint smell of an out-dated and discredited view that all international aid to poor countries, whether emergency humanitarian aid or longer-term development aid, is wasted and counter-productive. So we must expect many more manifestations of this disagreeable crusade against all the good things done by so many good people in Ethiopia (including very many brave Ethiopians) in 1984-86 and later. Ultimately they may indeed succeed in re-writing the history books. That would, I believe, be an enormous pity and a great injustice.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
In response to popular demand, expressed variously in other people’s blogs as a ‘meme’ or a ‘tig’ (neither of which terms I understand), I join other contributors in answering four challenging questions – challenging, because blogging, emailing, cycling aimlessly round Wandsworth, listening to Radio 3, and watching the 24-hour news programmes on television leave virtually no time for reading books; and that ‘virtually’ is perhaps mildly dishonest. Nevertheless, here goes.
How many books do I own? I have no idea. We gave lots of boxes of books to charity shops when we moved to a smaller house two years ago. Those that remain occupy, I reckon, about 30 to 40 metres of shelves, but as the books vary so enormously in thickness, from thin paperbacks to hefty tomes, it’s impossible to convert the mileage to numbers.
What’s the last book I bought?
The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt. An extraordinary and ambitious attempt to find a pattern in history, full of fascinating and detailed accounts of events that cast light on his basic theses. The Prologue comprises nearly 200 lines of the Iliad(in translation, a rare concession).
What’s the last book I read?
Blair’s Wars, John Kampfner. A useful chronology based on many anonymous interviews, although most of its revelations have been in the public domain from other sources by now. I’ve been reading it partly because I have a rather vague plan for an article comparing the Kosovo and Iraq wars, and their uncanny parallels.
What are the five books that mean the most to me?
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton, 1621. For its wonderful cornucopia of words and word-lists, its vivacity (despite its subject), its sense of being drunk on language and ideas. Impossible to read from start to finish (432 pages of small print in my Everyman’s University Library edition) but lovely to dip into from time to time.
The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, including especially Urne Buriall, 1658. Another great celebration of our glorious language, gems in every long paragraph, full of scientific curiosity and diversions.
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Marcel Proust. Not just by way of boasting that I’ve actually read the whole thing, although I do and have, but because it’s one of those works that actually transforms the way you experience your fellow humans, enabling you to appreciate and enjoy the way the same people keep coming back into your life in subtly (or sometimes dramatically) different roles, yet retaining their essential personalities re-adapted as necessary. (Like the next entry, below, it’s of course rather more than a single book, but that can’t be helped.)
A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell. I have to apologise for this, partly because it already figures in another blogger’s list, partly because it’s 12 books rather than one. But it has the same extraordinary effect as the Proust in presenting a sort of constantly shaken kaleidoscope of characters in ever-changing roles, and in addition is one of the funniest series of books ever written in English. Worth reading for the immortal Widmerpool alone. And Powell has a beautifully idiosyncratic prose style which affects all who have read his books, notably establishing the ablative absolute in its proper and honoured place in English, other writers generally neglecting that pleasant trope.
The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Third Edition, edited by R. W. Burchfield I have to include this for a number of reasons: (1) It’s quite simply the best book about the proper use of English, sensible, tolerant (too tolerant sometimes), almost always providing the answer to one’s questions about what’s acceptable and comely; (2) it’s not just a revision of the two earlier editions of Fowler, great though both are, but in reality a largely new work of indispensable reference; (3) Burchfield’s ‘Acknowledgements’ include an absurdly over-generous compliment to my own occasional contributions to his linguistic store-house, accumulated while he was preparing the book, a compliment of which I’m inordinately proud; and (4) Bob Burchfield was such a lovely man, such an austerely conscientious scholar and polymath, and such a warm and human friend.
Of course reducing such a list to five, even when two of them are themselves multiple books, is bound to be misleading. For example, there’s no room for poetry (where are Auden, Yeats, Hughes and Plath, Heaney, Whitman, or my kinswoman Ruth Fainlight?) or a host of novels (both the Amises, Waugh, Le Carré with whom I was briefly at school, Greene, Ruth’s husband Alan Sillitoe?) or books on politics (Hennessy, Watkins, Rawnsley, lots of biographies?) or affectionately much-used works of reference from the OED to the ODQ and the indispensable Twentieth Century Political Facts by David and Gareth Butler. Where are the collections of books about Africa in general and Ethiopia in particular, setting the loud echoes of my past life flying? Well, you can’t have everything. And, as I say, there’s not much time for reading the printed word these days anyway.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
It’s becoming fairly clear, I think, that the British position will be: We won’t discuss the UK rebate in isolation from the factors that make it necessary and justified, namely the distorting effects of the CAP and the disproportionate contribution that the UK has to make towards it (even with the rebate). We are happy to discuss the need for a firm commitment to CAP reform and the implications of such reform for the rebate, but we shall not debate the rebate in isolation. If there’s an attempt to reduce or abolish the rebate without a corresponding commitment to CAP reform, we shan’t hesitate to use our veto. Over to you, Jacques.
Chirac and Schroeder are now so badly wounded by the French and Dutch referendum results and their own administrations’ unpopularity at home that Blair, recently re-elected despite Iraq and not having to face another election as prime minister, is now in a far stronger position than either of them. He knows that a UK veto in defence of the rebate would do him nothing but good at home, and that many other EU governments would have a good deal of sympathy with his insistence on linking CAP reform to any change in the rebate. He holds some impressive cards. I doubt if he or Brown is worried.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
http://www.barder.com
(Posted as a comment on Thersites’s blog)
There’s a seductively easy way to keep an eye on blogs that you find interesting without constantly having to visit them one by one on your browser. If you aren’t already using an ‘aggregator’ to skim quickly through a lot of blogs and single out the items you want to read properly, have a look at the plain wo/man’s guide in a new post (entry) in — apologies for plugging it again, but it runs in the family, so to speak — Owen’s blog.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
http://ephems.blogspot.com
Once again the government is seeking parliamentary approval for the religious hatred Bill which has been repeatedly condemned and rejected on all sides, from far left to far right, as an unconscionable and unenforceable assault on freedom of speech and expression.
Notable features of the Bill include the absence of any attempt to define ‘religion’ or ‘religious’, presumably because it got stuck in the Parliamentary Draftsman’s Too Difficult tray. As other commentators have plaintively enquired, is Christian Scientism a religion? Satanism? Flat-Earthism? Scientology (now there’s a can of worms waiting to be opened!)? What about astrology, a system of beliefs having no rational or evidential basis and therefore not easily distinguished from other systems having the same characteristics but obviously qualifying as religions? It will be hard to exclude almost any kind of dotty irrationalism from the scope of this sloppy piece of draft legislation.
Perhaps even more curiously, the Bill includes not only groups ‘defined by reference to religious belief’, but also groups ‘defined by reference to …lack of religious belief’. The atheists and agnostics will be protected too. That’s a relief! Even the wording of the bits about ‘hatred’ is peculiar:
‘“religious hatred” means hatred against a group of persons defined by reference to religious belief or lack of religious belief.’
"Hatred against"? How is that different from the more usual "hatred of"?
Then the scope of the Bill is to be sweeping: it’s going to be an offence to engage in behaviour or to publish material –
“…likely to be heard or seen by any person in whom they are (or it is) likely to stir up racial or religious hatred.”
Or to put on a play or film or poetry reading or, I suppose, drag act, if –
“…the performance [or the 'recording' or the 'programme'] is likely to be attended [heard, seen, etc.] by any person in whom the performance (taken as a whole) is likely to stir up racial or religious hatred.”
Notice that it won’t be necessary to prove any intention to ‘stir up’ religious hatred: if some policeman thinks, and a court agrees, that your speech, book, play, film, etc., is ‘likely’ to be seen or read or heard by any person (any person!) in whom religious hatred is ‘likely’ to be stirred up, whether that was the intention of the speech, book, play, etc., and however daft or bigoted the person with this proclivity for hatred, you’re heading for the slammer, as Sir Malcolm Rifkind, that phoenix risen from the electoral ashes, put it the other evening on Any Questions.
There’s a widespread suspicion that the motive for persisting with this pernicious proposal is to lure back to New Labour the Muslim vote, much of it diverted into other political directions by Iraq, Belmarsh, control orders and other recent blunders. Alas, some Muslim leaders have indeed been seeking the same protection for Islam as that supposedly afforded to Christianity by the anachronistic blasphemy laws. They may have a disagreeable surprise awaiting them if this misbegotten Bill ever becomes law. It’s every bit as likely to be used against Muslims as against the adherents of other religions, and adherents of none. The fact is that freedom to criticise, denounce, mock and generally ‘stir up’ feeling against other groups, especially those groups whose members are members by choice and belief, is an essential freedom in a democracy and one in which the law should have no role. The defence against criticism and mockery should be counter-argument and debate, not a resort to the cops or the courts. Harassment and threatening behaviour are already offences.
The airwaves have been replete with eager assurances by junior ministers that the Bill, if it’s allowed by a supine House of Commons and a weary House of Lords to become law, certainly won’t be used against comedians or others who invite us to laugh at the more surreal claims of the devout in our midst. Such assurances are entirely worthless. The fact that prosecutions under the Act will require the permission of the Attorney-General prompts more alarm than reassurance. Whether or not we may rely on the good sense of the Attorney-General of the present government not to allow the Act to be misused to curb legitimate free speech and expression, what possible confidence can we have in the benign judgement of the law officers of some future government, perhaps one even more authoritarian and illiberal than what we have now? A law that relies for its sensible administration on the good sense and restraint of a politician is a bad law. This one is among the worst. How many of our bright-eyed new (but not necessarily New) Labour MPs are going to stand up and be counted when it comes to a vote?
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
http://ephems.blogspot.com
The paradox highlighted by Tam Dalyell’s West Lothian Question (why should Scottish MPs at Westminster be allowed to vote on English domestic matters while they would not be allowed to vote on Scottish domestic matters, which are dealt with by the Scottish Assembly?) reflects the anomaly in our constitution created by devolution. With what amount to regional parliaments in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (currently dormant) and London, we already have in effect a federal system, but England has no comparable regional institutions and above all there is no proper federal constitution setting out the respective powers of the federal level institutions (the Westminster government and parliament) and the regional institutions. As long as we lack both of these — English regional institutions and a federal constitution setting out federal, regional and joint powers — we are going to continue to encounter anomalies such as that identified in the West Lothian Question, and many others.
Unfortunately there are four huge obstacles blocking the way to progress in remedying either of these deficiencies:
1. British, or at least English, addiction to the concept of the unlimited sovereignty of the Westminster parliament, which will have to be abandoned when we eventually bite the bullet and make Westminster the federal parliament and government with no jurisdiction in subjects assigned exclusively to the regions;
2. The extreme reluctance of many of the English to allow the establishment of regional parliaments and governments, seen as ‘adding an extra layer of bureaucracy’ — and expense;
3. The fact that in the debate on the EU and its powers relative to those of its member states, the word ‘federal’ has become a term of opprobrium, which hinders recognition of our current realities and their implications for further reform; and –
4. The widespread hostility to the idea of having a written constitution in a single document, a sine qua non for a properly functioning federation, since clear definition of the distribution of powers and functions is absolutely essential in a functioning federation.
So we are a federation in all but name, and because of our deep reluctance to recognise it, we are trying to run a federation which lacks certain key elements required to make it function properly and in a democratic way. And because of the four obstacles listed above, there is almost no prospect of repairing this defective situation in the foreseeable future, unless a political party emerges which (a) is prepared to exercise brave and far-sighted leadership on these issues, and (b) has a sporting chance of being elected with a working majority and a constitutional reform programme. (Incidentally, PR for elections to the House of Commons would almost certainly rule out any hope of these conditions being satisfied.)
Meanwhile we shall no doubt continue to muddle through regardless, probably making a reasonable fist of it in spite of the anomalies and loose ends.
[This is a comment that I have posted on the admirable blog The Sharpener as a response to an interesting post there by 'Third Avenue'.]
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
This is a test post from 
, a fancy photo sharing thing. It seems you can look at some family photographs of mine by visiting http://www.flickr.com/photos/brianlb/
– although why on earth anyone should want to….
How we celebrated a family anniversary by the seaside in Brighton in August 2004 in the rain…..
Brian
http://www.barder.com/brian/
A Seaside Celebration
Originally uploaded by Brian B.
