I hope to be as brief as possible but in saying that I am not giving a promise that I will be finished in a couple of minutes. A great deal of useful information has been given in the Minister's introductory speech on Second Stage. The debate in the other House was to my mind a more valuable debate than has taken place in recent years, because I noted from the content of the contributions that it concentrated on explaining the International Development Association, its work and its history. Therefore I do not propose to be repetitive; I want simply to raise a few matters that might bring this debate a bit further.
Before I do so, I welcome the Minister, Deputy O'Keeffe, to this House and debate. I want to record my own gratitude to him for the manner in which he has addressed these issues but more than that, the courtesy he extended as late as last week to a visiting ambassador on behalf of the Nicaraguan Government. Having said that, I want perhaps to put a harl to it in a way. Deputy O'Keeffe is here and he is the best representative we might have, but I think it is overdue that we straighten out the relationship between the Department of Finance and the ministry for which Minister O'Keeffe has responsibility.
When I was spokesman on international affairs in another House I always thought it a little absurd that in matters such as this the Department of Finance was the Department responsible. I felt that if you had brought into existence a separate ministry to deal with development issues, to which you have given important tasks such as the development of a White Paper on the philosophy and purposes of development, that had responsibility for a large budget for overall development and the bilateral programme, that dealt with so many agencies with projects multiplying every year, then it really behoves us if we are committed to administrative reform to give to that ministry all matters relating to development aid. It betrays an interesting orientation in the international world of politics towards the international institutions, including the International Development Association. If I might put it rather simply, the International Development Association is seen as a part of the complex of institutions that deal with international financing rather than something that sits logically at the top of development programmes that might have been co-ordinated from different countries. I make that point in a spirit of constructive criticism because I look forward to the day when development will be properly funded, when it will have a coherent form and when all its different aspects will be integrated into a properly funded ministry.
I want to make another general preliminary point. This debate is taking place at a time when the financial arrangements for next year are being discussed. As chairman of one of the parties represented in this House I want to indicate the public support of my party to the Minister in any submission he wants to make towards our meeting our development aids target not only for this particular Bill but towards the other targets to which we have committed ourselves which I think we will be thanked for honouring in the international community. I do so without any reservation whatsoever and with a great deal of emphasis. At different stages as we have to vote more money — I hope not for the same reasons — for different increments in the logical extension of the work of the International Development Association I hope we will be doing so against the background of a published White Paper, a clear philosophy and a set of principles of development aid which will have been discussed in both Houses.
I noted that the Senators who spoke before we adjourned and before we began the debate on the last topic concentrated quite movingly on the manner in which this money of the International Development Association is being spent. I want only to say a brief word about that bit and I want to say it as sharply as I can. The International Development Association is over 20 years old. It is addressed, by and large, to the problem of world poverty. One of the most dramatic realities that is inescapable is that the diversity between the richest countries and the poorest countries of 20 years ago has not been narrowing. Many people had hoped that from the developments of the seventies the eighties would see a dramatic rise in the life prospects of the poorest countries.
We all know from the contributions that have been made so far and also from the Minister's speech on Second Stage in this House that the assistance of the International Development Association flows to the people on the lowest incomes, to places where the greatest need exists. We can state the position in 1983 as follows: their position in the last few years has dramatically worsened. On present trends, we are now likely to end this century not narrowing the gap between the poorest countries and the richest, not significantly intervening in the prospects for life itself for the children of the poorest countries. We have seen a virtual strike in relation to development generally by the larger super powers in the world. For example, I do my own figures rather crudely, but about 1978 the total development funds in the world virtually stopped and from 1980 they have been actually declining.
Lest we be in any doubt about it, we have seen vast expenditure on armaments and vast applications of scientific and technological intelligence moving into the destructive area of armaments production at the same time as we have seen first a freezing of the funds available for development and then their actual fall. If one thinks of it, the enormity of this is not confined to our present world population. The population of the world between now and the end of the century will increase to, perhaps, more than 6,000 million people.
If, for example, you want to look at a single year, in 1978, 30 million children under the age of five died of malnutrition and diseases and illnesses that could have been contained. In relation to unemployment which is now affecting the so-called developed world, the unemployment figure for all of the economies in receipt of assistance has rarely fallen below 35 per cent. Those countries which have been in receipt of aid are urbanised in a way European peoples rarely understand. It has not been a matter of urbanisation following industrialisation but the urban population increase is living more and more in shanty towns, in slums, in conditions where disease is transmitted, particularly in relation to the lack of adequate services. Again and again, the message coming from those countries is to tell us how much could be achieved even if clean water was available and the impact that it would make on health itself.
Practically every indicator that we take as normal in our lives is missing in the experience of these countries: access to shelter, basic nutrition, safe water, health, primary education, transport or even a respect for their culture. Some 800 million people are trapped in absolute poverty into a condition of life limited by malnutrition, illiteracy, disease and low life expectancy. We should be very careful at any time about even allowing ourselves to be influenced for one moment by the atmosphere which now prevails in Europe, unfortunately, and is growing, that in a time of our own economic recession, high unemployment and increasing domestic poverty, we turn our eyes away from something that is a global tragedy. The tragedy is not from a single event but it has been from our inability to take into our experience and our vision what kind of world we have tolerated in existence. It can be put more dramatically by saying that the human rights emphasis in international politics was at some stage assisted by the nadir to which human behaviour had been brought by the gas chambers in the Second World War. Regular famine, malnutrition and death have not moved us to question our political and economic structures. That is the crucial background against which this Bill must be measured. The International Development Association's work has sometimes been done not in tandem with the work of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. It has had to forge out almost a separate raison d'être for itself in its projects and in its philosophy.
I am delighted to welcome this Bill which will enable us to give money. I will be direct about why we are providing this money: we are providing this money because the richest nation in the world instead of keeping its commitment over a three-year period, has decided — under an unexplained decision of Congress, and which was not explained either in the Minister's speech but perhaps we will have an opportunity of hearing it expanded — to move its commitments for the three-year period to a four-year period.
My general remarks in introducing my speech have been that the work of armaments building had dislodged moneys that should be available for development. I criticise the Soviet Union, even more strongly than the United States, for its neglect in the area of development. These two super powers, if one looks at them, are responsible for only six per cent of the united aid in the Third World. We have been reminded earlier that the OECD countries and the Arab world, for example, take up the vast proportion of non-tied, non-military aid for projects in the Third World.
I want to paint the picture as accurately, as possible, even if it be in strokes of black. This agency's work is a victim of politicisation of the very worst kind in recent years. Into the work of the International Development Association has come the ghost of the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. It has, in fact, been a victim of the deteriorating prospects for peace at world level where conditions are being sought, for example, for loans which were made before and where the criteria were accepted by people in all parties in both of these Houses, of the viability of the projects, and so on. In recent times votes have been forced on projects submitted by countries who had their projects approved in an earlier non-problematic way. The obligation is on me to give an instance if I may, of such a serious allegation. I am referring to the applications for some projects from the Nicaraguan Government, some of which were approved earlier on. Let me put it in a more stark way: there was assistance given under the Somoza regime from the association's funds which were renegotiated by the Government which dislodged the most disreputable dictatorship in modern times and which were accepted. One finds in the last year in particular more and more difficulties being placed in the way of the Nicaraguan Government's applications, sometimes not succeeding in blocking the funds but succeeding in delaying the funds and creating liquidity problems for that country that is under siege.
In the thinking that has infiltrated into the decision-making process of the association, it has found itself the victim of a particular attitude towards Nicaragua. I make this point very sharply because I know that you could put this as one of the three or four techniques of destabilisation of that country.
The Cathaoirleach knows I have been in communication with him about messages which I have received from Central America which suggest that the invasion of Nicaragua is imminent due to a mixture of political and military moves. It is interesting to note the new aggression towards that country, as revealed by the resignation of the Foreign Minister of Costa Rica, the deployment of engineers in that country and the meeting of adjoining countries — Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — to come together to seek some process by which they can ask for an invasion. As well as that there is a build-up of troops on the Honduran border. The response of the Nicaraguan Government, yesterday has been to put its population on alert and to introduce a new emergency draft law explaining how the country can be defended. I will not stray from my topic. I am saying that the international financial institutions, even the best of them with the best record, are not free from the influence of those who want to use these agencies and the disposal of these funds for political purposes.
I will return to the question of development. There has been a worth-while and encouraging interest developed in this country in the whole question of development. Curiously, even three years ago, there was less knowledge of our development work than there is now. There is a heartening interest in the community among all people, among schools, and young people in the work of development and what it might be. However, we might sometimes sound a little pious if we make too much of the little that we give. Our overall contribution to development and what we are willing to do now is to the credit of everybody.
To come back to the problems that affect the country of which I was speaking, I want to give one more example of the deflection of money away from the area of development with disastrous results. I spoke of the money drying up about 1978 and actually declining from 1980 to the present. The scandal of it is that it was in those years between 1980 and 1983 that some major developments took place which could save lives in the so-called undeveloped world. At the same time as these massive medical, technical, scientific break throughs took place, the funds that might have assisted in their application were, in fact, not being made available.
For example, 40,000 children die every day, more than the population of Galway. Four techniques became available which are referred to in the UNICEF Annual Report for 1983 and are described in detail in UNICEF's publication The State of the World's Children 1982-83. For example, many children die in their first few years of life from diarrhoea. The reaction of people unable to deal with their children affected is, in fact, not to give them liquids. A technique was developed, namely, oral dehydration therapy, which simply meant that by using glucose, salt and water in a simple mixture one could save the lives of thousands of children. Indeed UNICEF itself has distributed several million sachets enabling oral rehydration therapy to be applied. The Lancet, probably one of the most authoritative journals in the medical world, referred to it as possibly the great medical breakthrough of this century. A sachet to use this technique costs 10 cents to produce.
Secondly, new techniques in medical technology led to the development and the possibility of general child immunisation against the major diseases which affect children. As well as that, there were new developments in education towards nutrition, and the use by different agencies of growth charts in the developing world in which mothers could monitor the progress of children.
As well as that, there were many other developments not least of which was the new education programme on breast-feeding. Indeed this latter reveals an interesting hypocrisy in the attitude of those of us in this part of the world towards the developing world. We have very often — let it be recorded — sent to that part of the world medicines that we rejected for our own use. I am not speaking about Ireland but I am speaking about the widespread use by the major pharmacological exporting companies of their products to the Third World after they had been rejected on safety standards at the level of the European Community. One woman opposing the manner, for example, in which breast feeding had been discouraged and the use of bottle-feeding expanded, was driven in the Philippines to tear down posters and put up others advocating a return to breast feeding as a means of child feeding and so on.
I just mention these four in so far as they are available in literature and are available to every Member of these Houses. These techniques could have saved lives: one alone, oral rehydration therapy, could have saved 15,000 children every day but the funds were drying up which would have enabled these techniques to be made available. Let us be perfectly clear: to manage the connection with which we deal here it goes like this, you dislodge money from development because you are spending it on armaments. For example, in the case of the United States you are a major borrower on the domestic financial market. You make an impact on employment through spending on defence. You move on then and the reaction of your domestic population is that they want to provide jobs at home rather than save lives, even tens of thousands of children's lives abroad. It is the short-fall that has arisen in the International Development Association's committed funds that comes — let me repeat — from the United States' decision that it would not honour the pledge it made to provide funds in a three-year period, that it would provide them over a four-year period. It is against that background I have described that that curtailment or postponement of funds has taken place.
This raises many questions. It means that the development issue, the development aid policies, can no longer be discussed in isolation but it is at our peril that we discuss them in isolation. They are a crucial part of our overall foreign policy. What you do in development has to be mirrored by your overall foreign policy position and the people who have been making the case for peace and an end to armaments building are indirectly always making the case for the spending of funds on development.
In relation to the Bill that is before us I think that there are a few points that I want to make. Different speakers on this Bill have drawn attention to the way in which the funds are being spent. It is a reminder to us all that 90 per cent of the association's lending goes to countries with a per capita income of US$475 or less per annum. We might think this is a very good thing. The lending terms reflect the extreme difficulties that the poorest countries face in meeting loan obligations. They provide for interest-free loans for 50 years with capital repayments starting after ten years. There is a small service charge and a fee of about 1/2 per cent on loan amounts committed but awaiting disbursement.
Of course, there is a powerful, valuable vision contained in the existence of a fund that would be available like this but the fund sits side-by-side with other international financial agencies that have not worked for or with the philosophy that we might detect in this agency. For example, Michael Manley before he was dislodged from power, had gone on record as saying that he could not apply any more to the International Monetary Fund for assistance because of the conditions it sought to exact from his country and from his party. Negotiations broke down. President Nyerere of Tanzania has also gone on record as saying that the World Bank and the IMF as institutions of international finance were set up and controlled by nations who were not committed to any restructuring of the world economic order but to serve the purposes of the rich nations which brought them into existence.
You can summarise what I have been saying by simply saying that in the context of international financial institutions the International Development Association is something that is not similar to but something that is separate and different from these other international financial institutions. In fact, in a curious way the dependency bind into which the lending philosophy of these other two international world lending agencies locks some of the developing countries feeds the problems to which the International Development Association addresses itself.
I want to temper my remarks about the United States by simply saying that, of course, I recognise that a country that was providing 27 per cent of the replenishment totals that were required is a country that is giving more but I would argue that what is called into question by the decision to delay one's payments is the quality of the commitment one had made in relation to world development. I am not naive at all about this development. Neither am I just making an appeal to sentiment or to the heart by suggesting the scale of the problem or the three or four measures that could make an impact in relation to the prospects for the lives of children, for example.
I realise very clearly that there are other things that need to be done. You could have all of these techniques but you need to offer the possibilities of new structures in those countries that will release processes to meet the needs of the people. This is being attempted in several other countries, including some Caribbean and some Central American countries. These basic need philosophies require a change of structure. They equally need rethinking in regard to a change from dependence to a system of mutuality, which a speaker on this side of the House spoke of just before the break. When assistance is given it should not be called that, but something that has to be understood as a contribution to a new order of things.
I remember when the Brandt Report appeared. I had the great honour of being one of the first people to meet Willi Brandt after the publication of the report, and the Irish Labour Party was one of the first of the signatories. The Brandt Report was welcomed at its time, but it was somewhat insufficient. One can only say now that most of the principles suggested by Brandt are less popular, have less prospects and have less support than they had at the time of publication.
In that report much is made of the necessity of a new international economic order. In relation to that new international economic order, I felt that one of the defects of the Brandt position was it built into the proposals a number of things which were almost irreconcilable. The attitude of the different British Governments, for example, was that in relation to development aid they would stress that it was in the self-interest of many of the developed countries to be involved in increasing aid, and so forth — of course, that is all completely short of an adequate critique.
There are fundamental principles in development policy that sooner or later will have to be accepted. This means that one must acknowledge the right of the countries involved to break away from the structures in relation, for example, to overthrowing dictatorships, autocracies and authoritarian regimes. One will have to go further than that and acknowledge the right of these countries to a place in the world community different from the present one. There is just no way, I believe, in which we should support a view of development which seeks to put a human face on the existing structure of the world's economic resources.
I want to allow others to have an opportunity to speak and to draw my remarks to a close. There is an enormous moral challenge in a reality like this — that the world of which we speak, those recipient countries, so far have been the countries that hold the larger proportion of the population of the world. If you put the two principal belligerents in international conflict together, they do not represent a third of the world's population: two-thirds of the world's population, black, yellow, brown, and some white, are the people who are threatened by the wars of the developed nations. How can we say that even transferring funds is a sufficient recognition? What is necessary is that we do this in the short term, but sooner or later there has to be an evolution of attitudes which will enable us to see that we have a further obligation, and that is, to undo the structures of colonialism which we are sometimes perhaps tacitly assisting in the modern world.
I refer to a point in the Minister's speech which referred to the early work of the International Development Association. He said it consisted of giving funds for such projects as infrastructure. Later, infrastructure projects began to slide down a little as spending on agriculture projects took over. Even within the agriculture projects more emphasis is now being placed on rural development and rural planning correctly moving towards the idea that it is necessary to give people the capacity to meet their food needs, something in which success can be demonstrated in South Asia but which, for example, cannot be demonstrated so easily in the case of Africa for structural and institutional reasons. The interesting side of all of that, conferring that aid and using it in that way, is that it is a recognition that aid in itself is insufficient. But the whole technology relationship within the work of the association is now correctly coming under review.
I want to put it bluntly, more simply. We gave assistance under the fund historically towards projects for irrigation which consisted of the building of dams. Evidence came from the countries themselves that these exchanges between Governments were sometimes not reaching the people, that there were things that people simply did not benefit from. People have realised that though it was in the donor country's interest to give its allocation and to give its companies contracts and to send the whole technical capacity abroad for large scale glamorous projects, it was equally to the advantage of the unrepresentative elites within those countries to see such glamorous projects being undertaken while the needy people with families in the conditions I have described were asking for water. They would have accepted it in a simpler form. They would have accepted a simple pump and simpler irrigation techniques.
What we have to think about in relation to the transitory behaviour in the development aid field is to make sure that the aid we give will go to people, that it is a transfer to people in need rather than a transfer to Governments. That has immense implications in relation to the terms of the exchange. It means being willing to recognise native technologies in a way that we did not, being willing to acknowledge intermediate technology, being willing to abandon the transfer of technologies which are advantageous to donor countries in the short term. It means more than that. As well as allowing countries, through investment in education, to go past us in technology instead of committing them to the dated obsolescent part of our industrial history, it means creating within them the capacity to have their own historic breakthrough and move past us in meeting the needs of their peoples.
I deliberately decided to fill in that background because it is an important development background to build like the one we have today. I am also, unashamedly, broadening the debate strictly away from the couple of million pounds we are giving through this Bill. I am reflecting that it is too rare we have an opportunity to discuss development and our whole relationship, the content, principles and the structure of our overseas development aid projects, our bilateral programme and so forth — we have too few opportunities to do this. Therefore, when a Bill like this comes before us, it enables us at least to exchange ideas about what should be the constant of our development aid philosophy. It is very heartening that more and more consensus is developing in this country about our development strategy.
What will the next phase of it be? None now questions that we should give aid — there is a better attitude towards giving aid that will enable structures to be changed. What I think is necessary now is that we should be able to develop this into a politically coherent action that will go away past the Brandt Report, that will build on to the fundamentals of our foreign policy. The demand, away past the Brandt Report, that those countries that are in the non-aligned movement and those countries that are neutral, small countries with the same historic experience as ourselves, countries with the same experiences and needs as ourselves, will in fact be a more articulate wedge in the world between the belligerent powers. That will require new institutions. Today as we discuss this, the sister institutions of the International Development Association are two, the Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the World Bank itself.
I am convinced that we cannot assist the people to which this assistance is directed by any form of recovery to a return to growth within the old international economic order. Neither can we do it with the international financial institutions that we have. We have a choice. Those peoples will more and more have a politicial attitude as elected members of assemblies like the United Nations. We must be playing our part at a more generous political level, or answering questions like what form should the new international banking institutions take? What should be the reserves?
For example, I could spend a fortnight here showing how the ability to functionalise the reserve banks internationally has conferred on them unearned money and income through the major currencies of the world. What is needed is realisation rather like the way in which we made the journey from putting a penny in a box to sending people abroad to work with people who wanted to change structures. In the same way, internationally in our foreign policy we will have to move more centrally into the general area of making the case for a new international economic order. It would be to waste the time of this House to say that this is something which can easily evolve from what we have.
Many of the problems I spoke about at the beginning are often there because of the abuse of these countries by the international banking fraternities. I will give you an example of it. The great money that was earned by many of the oil exporting countries in the early seventies found its way by investment into the Caribbean and into Central America. The investment had the effect of capitalising the economies of many of these countries to the extent that labour was displaced, machinery was bought, international debt was piled up. At the same time people had less to eat.
Then suddenly, as the terms of trade deteriorated — in 1975, for example, what oil one bag of coffee could buy cost two bags of coffee in 1980 — the loans piled up, the people were dislodged from traditional labour, international investments wrecked these economies and exacerbated their social problems. It is not as if we were approaching economies that had some intractable features internal to themselves. They have been made disastrously poor and their children died because of the regular activity of multinationals and our existing banking world. It is to that problem we have to address ourselves, and the real reason why we grow from the development debate is that as we morally make progress towards achieving a broader vision of these things, it is not only that they gain but that we grow by gaining a better perspective on the one world that one speaker spoke about before we adjourned.
