I will not take too long. Obviously it would be a hard-hearted individual who could do other than welcome this Bill. It is not in any way to make little of either this country's efforts or the Minister's efforts that one has to point out how small the sum is in terms of the needs of the world at large. It is small relative to the needs of the world. It is small relative to what the western world spends on cosmetics, on alcohol, on tobacco and the other things we all enjoy and take for granted. The amount of money involved in this International Development Association is small by any of those standards.
I do not want in any way to appear to be sneering or denigrating. I am simply saying it is only right that we who are wealthy and prosperous should realise that what we are giving is not a sacrifice but the little bit we can afford to give without making any real sacrifice. We need to keep our contributions in context.
What do we really do to people from the oppressed parts of the world? Conventional words like the Third World, the underdeveloped world, and underprivileged world and all those words we use at home and abroad are devices we use to protect ourselves from our own consciences. It is not an accident that two-thirds of the world are poor. It is not an accident that two-thirds of the world are deprived of what the rest of us would regard as the essentials of life. It is a necessary and direct consequence of our life style, our standards of living, our prosperity and of the way we choose to organise ourselves. It is not just a misfortunate development. It is a consequence of what we do for ourselves, of what we expect for ourselves, and what we demand for ourselves over and above the basic necessities of life.
For instance, we spend the best part of ten times more in this country on drink — and I am fond of drink myself — than we do on our total overseas aid. I am sure we spend equally large sums proportionately on tobacco and other luxury items. We have to keep reminding ourselves that, whatever we are doing, it is very little. I say that not because I think it is a simple answer, not because I want to throw away all these things. We participate within the EEC in a system of tariffs and protections which guarantees that the capacity of many oppressed countries to produce agricultural goods cheaper than we can cannot be realised. We guarantee that those goods will never be able to be marketed because of the operation of the Common Agricultural Policy.
It would be dishonest of us to go through a debate like this without facing up to the fact that in many ways the Common Agricultural Policy which we are fighting strongly to defend — and I suppose if I was forced into it I would have to say with my support — is a major instrument of discrimination against the rest of the world because of the way the EEC operate that policy.
To be even more specific — and probably I would be the first to defend it; and I know Senator Killilea would also do so — we have a sugar industry which in terms of world sugar prices, in terms of the capacity of many other countries to produce sugar, is both uneconomical and inefficient but which we preserve because we have obvious major reasons for doing so. It is a fact that there are whole areas of the world outside of Europe which can and do produce sugar at a price vastly undercutting the cost of sugar produced from sugar beet. Yet we have tariffs to ensure that we produce our own sugar at home in direct competition with people who have greater needs by far than we have.
There are also trade barriers. I recognise the progress that has been made through the Lomé Convention and other agreements with individual countries and group of countries. I recognise all that progress. When it comes to the crunch, we are as good as ever we were at preserving our vital interests. A question has to arise about the whole area of international development. Can we in the western world sustain our present life style? Can we sustain our present standard of living? Can we sustain our present sort of consumer expenditure or our present sort of wasteful expenditure? Can we sustain all of those things and at the same time really talk about real development and real progress?
The result of this collapse in the price of raw materials in recent years, the raw materials we often buy from Third World countries, the change in prices and the change in incomes of many countries resulting from that collapse, would exceed by a factor of four or five, the total amount of foreign aid made available by the entire western world in the same period. In fact, what they have lost because of the drop in raw material prices is far greater than anything we have given them in the form of aid over the same period. We have to look again at the possibility of guaranteeing prices for commodities and raw materials, and we do not seem to have made much progress with that. The United Nations Commission on Trade and Development has not made great progress there either.
At the base line we do not seem to want to talk about the fact that we cannot succeed in the two parallel aims of continuing our growth at the maximum possible rate to the maximum possible standard of living and, at the same time, do anything about the fundamental inequity that exists between ourselves and the 2,000 million who are oppressed. That is why I say I think it is wrong to keep talking about them as the underprivileged or the Third World. They are the oppressed. They are the victims of our success as clearly and as categorically as the poor at home are the victims of the rest of us succeeding. The poor of the Third World are the victims of our success and our prosperity and, therefore, the appropriate description is not poor or underprivileged but oppressed. They are suffering from injustice which is a consequence directly of the way we organise our lives.
It is probably impossible to quantify the amount of money or capital needed to provide the basics of life for the oppressed of the world. The figure sometimes quoted — I do not know where people get these figures from, but it is worth quoting — is 40 billion dollars a year. Allegedly that would be sufficient to provide basic food, education, health services, sanitation and shelter. We are talking about very basic things. We are talking about the endemic diseases. We are talking about giving people clean water and basic sanitation and shelter. We are talking about $40 billion which is an awful lot of money in many ways. The horrible fact is that 40 billion dollars is about the same as what the world spends on armaments in two weeks. In other words it is estimated that about 4 per cent of the world's armament expenditure could provide all that is needed in shelter, food, health, education and sanitation for the 2,000 million or so people in the world who are starving — and the figure is probably higher.
Senator Bulbulia mentioned that the 1981 figure was about $650,000 million. It is probably closer to $800,000 million if you add in the fact that military expenditure usually inflates faster than the overall rate of inflation. There has been a real increase in military expenditure on top of that, so I would say $800 million or possibly even $900 million is the sort of level of world expenditure. The tragedy is that, as that expenditure has escalated frighteningly overall, most first world countries, the prosperous, the rich, the well off are probably either actually producing an absolute decline in their overseas aid, or are definitely producing in many cases a relative decline when compared, not just with our own inflation rate, but with the frightening inflation rates to which many Third World countries are subjected because of the escalation in some of their import prices by comparison with the collapse in the prices of their exports.
There are very specific examples of the cost of armaments. The book produced by the Irish Commission for Justice and Peace "Disarmament and Development" should be compulsory reading for every member of every parliament in every democracy. It gives in horrifying detail the huge cost of armaments by comparison with the minuscule amount of money contributed to overseas aid. There is a simple proposition contained in that which ought to be transferred by the Department of Foreign Affairs to the Department of Defence, on the whole question of armaments and the idea of armaments as the basic form of defence and the idea of armies as a necessary part of a nation's dignity, that is, that we as one country should allocate 1 per cent of our defence expenditure, approximately £2½ million each year, to researching and to training and to working on non-violent methods of defending ourselves, on non-violent resistance to oppression and non-violent resistance to attack.
At this stage the myth of a noble nation defending itself by the use of arms is a thing of the past. Nobody can defend us from the sort of invasion that will happen to us. What will happen to us is an invasion from the skies that will come so fast that our Army will not be even out of bed not to mention out of barracks, and we will all be incinerated if it ever happens. There are basic ethical and moral questions about the whole question of nuclear weapons, their cost, their deployment, their use, and whether it is ever possible to envisage a situation in which anybody with a conscience could morally believe that whatever you were defending was so important that you could consider incinerating the whole of the population of another country. The irony of it is that very often those we identify as our enemies we would also describe as oppressed societies where the people are not free. In other words we cannot blame the people of the Soviet Union for what their government do because their government allegedly are not a democratic Government. Still apparently we contemplate the prospect of incinerating the same people because of what their government might threaten to do to us, which seems to me to have a moral contradiction somewhere. If the people are not at fault you cannot punish them for what their government do.
I do not want to get involved in an argument about armaments or neutrality, but the whole moral question of armaments expenditure has to be faced up to and it is a fact whether we like it or not that it is the western democracies and the socialist countries who constitute I am sure 90 per cent of the armaments industry of the world who make most of the money out of the armaments industry. Everybody in this House would, I think, claim to be on the side of the oppressed of this world. The sad and tragic fact is that, over the past ten years, the area in which the greatest growth in military expenditure has occurred is sadly in many Third World countries. It needs to be said over and over again that there has been a frightful increase in military expenditure in countries going through the most dreadful economic decline. They still managed to increase military expenditure. They have done it. We have supplied the arms and we have made money out of that dreadful topsy-turvy set of moral values.
It is time somebody said what I think most people feel. Participation in the world arms trade must be close, in terms of moral values, to participation in the world drug trade, in international drug trafficking. It cannot be morally justified to sell large volumes of arms to Third World countries, to poor countries, to countries that do not have enough money to feed themselves. Nobody can justify it by saying that if we do not somebody else will, because that rationale could just as equally justify trafficking in heroin or any other drug that was available.
It is morally wrong to sell armaments to people. It is morally wrong to build a nation's prosperity on the basis of armaments expenditure. It is morally wrong to contemplate it. I regret certain decisions of some of our Government Departments and some semi-State agencies in getting themselves recognition by major international defence agencies so that they can supply components through Irish industry to international defence industries. In particular, I regret the agreement between our own Institute for Industrial Research and Standards and the US Defence Department. I hasten to add I am not particularly concerned whether it is the US or the USSR we are dealing with. Any attempt to build any part of our prosperity on an arms industry seems to me to produce a basic moral question which no amount of equivocation or no amount of passing the blame to other people can evade.
Those of us who talk about development, whether we stand in Irish politics on the left of the spectrum or on the right, have got to face up to the fact that, whether it be the sycophants of freedom in North America or the betrayers of socialism in Eastern Europe, neither of us shows any concern for the values we claim to defend in the way we deal with Third World countries. This is as much true of Eastern Europe as it is of North America.
The sums are very easy to do in terms of Western and Eastern European contributions to development. It is a little bit too trite to say that Eastern Europe does not operate on the basis of the hard curregencies the rest of the world does and therefore to measure their contribution in cash terms is a bit too harsh. There is no doubt that in terms of deviousness, in terms of self-interest, Eastern Europe has been as calculating and as ruthless in terms of what it does for developing countries as has been the western world.
All of us have been quite calculating and quite ruthless in protecting our own interests. Therefore, in relation to the invasion of Grenada and the situation in Central America, it is difficult not to see self-interest involved in our less than forthright analysis of the fact that an invasion was carried out on a defenceless country in the interests of something other than the freedom of the people in that country. I know what I think of the invasion of Grenada, I know what virtually every Member of both of the Houses of the Oireachtas thinks about the invasion of Grenada. It was morally wrong. It was anti-democratic. It was an assault on the freedom of a small country. In the same way what is going on in Nicaragua or Afghanistan is an assault on the freedom of small countries. It is a further example of the fact that both major powers, irrespective of their verbal commitment to international development, are as ruthless as any imperial power in the past has ever been in defending their own interests.
That is why we as an independent democracy have an obligation to recognise not just as I said before the dreadful betrayal of socialism that is being carried out in Eastern Europe, but the equally dreadful abuse of the great word freedom by many of those whom we would claim to be almost allies if not close friends. It is interesting that in the midst of all the denunciations of the allegedly Cuban destabilisation of Central America and of the Carribbean, after the current Prime Minister of Jamaica was elected — and who is known for his close ties with the United States — when he was busily throwing out the Cubans, he asked them if they would leave their 1,000 or so doctors who were working there to look after the health of the people of Jamaica. This is a compliment to some of the work that much maligned country does for many Third World countries.
I would like to put it on record — though I am far from being an unqualified admirer of Cuba — that the country in the world with the greatest per head of doctors working in Third World countries is the People's Republic of Cuba. It is far ahead of all western countries put together. Cuba has more doctors per head working in Third World countries than any other country in the world. It is very difficult to link up some kind of devious political plot with that sort of commitment of medical resources where they are needed in many developing countries. Many of the rest of us who have produced far too many doctors for our own needs could mirror that development and the sort of basic medical advice that could be given would be given.
What has happened to the poor of the world is a conspiracy of the powerful between the east and the west. Many Third World countries have discovered this, whether it be at trade and development conferences or elsewhere. When it comes to the basic idea of raw material prices and of trading relationships, the east with its banners of socialism and the west with its protestations of concern for freedom, show a mutual self-interest in preserving their own vested interests that excludes any concern for the needs of small and poor countries. That, unfortunately, I fear, is where we may well end up: as part of this conspiracy of the powerful. As we work harder and harder to become part of the wealthy and the rich and the powerful we will be drawn more and more into the partnership of power and oppression which represents the world's present trading structures.
If anything can be said with absolute certainty it is that the market economy as we understand it will never produce world justice, because ultimately the market economy is about the free movement of capital. You will not get capital to move freely to poor countries with high levels of political instability, high levels of illiteracy, high levels of underdevelopment, if there is a better, more lucrative and a more profitable market available at home. The movement of capital to tiny, isolated elements of the Third World, whether it be in Singapore, or South Korea, or Hong Kong, is more a response to the fairly rigid authoritarian societies that have developed there and that have guaranteed security and low wages, than of any sense of a real development in the Third World generally. So I do not believe that the present unfettered market forces can do anything other than perpetuate the inequalities and the injustices.
On the other hand, I heard one of the most inspiring addresses on world development I have ever had the good fortune to hear. I am not sure if the Minister of State heard it. It was given by Fr. Xavier Gorastiaga who was responsible for economic and social planning in Nicaragua. He spoke at the Trocaire tenth anniversary seminar in Galway and defined poverty as the absence of choice, not as the absence of consumer goods, not as the absence of the things we often define as poverty, but as the absence of the capacity to make choices. He pointed out that in Nicaragua in the past two years, in spite of the fact that they have no money, they have built more houses than had been built in the previous 20 years. They conducted the most massive literacy campaign that has been conducted anywhere in the world outside of Cuba in the immediate post-revolutionary years without any money.
He pointed out that, given the political conditions, even an impoverished country, a country that has suffered a civil war like Nicaragua, can do an enormous amount to achieve basic dignity for its people. He then talked about the aspirations of the people of Nicaragua and the hopes of the Government for Nicaragua, and he was quite categorical that they did not want western style prosperity, that they did not want western style affluence as we have defined it, and as we have attempted somewhat arrogantly to define success and a standard of living. What they wanted, he said, was a civilisation of simplicity.
He recognised what we must recognise, that it is virtually impossible to visualise a world in which countries like India and China could achieve standards of living like those of the United States. The world does not have the natural resources to provide cars in the numbers that would be needed to give the citizens of China and India an American-style standard of living. The waste that would be generated by an American or, indeed, western European standard of living if all those countries achieved those standards would swamp the oceans of the world, would swamp the atmosphere of the world.
If we talk about world development and we are sincere about it, we cannot really talk about it in terms of hoping that China and India and all the rest of the developing world will achieve standards of living similar to those of the United States and western Europe, because the world does not have the resources to do it. The consequence of that, therefore, is that if we have to achieve justice within finite resources, those of us who are prosperous will have to become less prosperous, and that is the hard and the painful fact of world development. It is not achievable with us even standing still. In many areas we will have to go backwards. It may be through higher taxes; it may be through fewer services; it may be through various other ways. It may be through the provision of free services which we pay for out of our taxation.
We cannot continue to grow incessantly in the wealthy, powerful, militarily and economically powerful west and, indeed, in the almost equally powerful east and, at the same time, talk about development. Development will be achieved only if we either stand still or move backwards because we consume too much of the world's resources. We take up too much of the world's capital and because of that we control too much of the world market.
That is why, as I conclude, I want to say that of course I welcome this Bill. It would be dishonourable not to point out that, as we maintain our values, our priorities and our demands in so many other areas, there is an element of hypocrisy in the way we all welcome this small gesture. It is a welcome gesture. It is a small gesture but, if it is no more than an attempt to satisfy ourselves that we are doing enough, then we really are nothing more than hypocrites.
