I move:
That Seanad Éireann takes note of the Report of the Joint Committee on Co-operation with Developing Countries: Report for 1984.
It gives me great pleasure to move this motion as a member of the committee. The report covers, in a wide and comprehensive way, much important work that has been carried out by Members of the Dáil and Seanad over the last year. To come straight to the point, and I want to be as economical as I can with my time, I would like to begin by saying that those who look at the report will notice — in doing so I want to compliment everybody who worked in the preparation of this report, the Minister and his staff and in particular, Mr. Martin Greene — that it opens up page 4 with a printed photograph of refugees from famine under the title "1984 will be remembered as the Year of the African Famine". This asks us to assess our development co-operation programme against a wider context. I do not intend to deal with this in depth this morning. I want to raise some principles that arise.
First of all, at this time, when we look at the report now before us, Assistance to Developing Countries, Report for the Year 1984, we are reviewing our total overseas development aid programme which, of course, falls into two sections, our bilateral programme, which is directed towards four countries that have been selected, Lesotho, Tanzania, Sudan and Zambia. These four countries, which take up a very special amount of the programme have recently been visited by members of the co-operation committee including myself. I will turn to those in a moment.
The other programme, which is approximately the other part of our development assistance, some 60 per cent, is accounted for by our commitment in general development assistance and transmitted primarily through institutions of the European Community in modern times. On previous occasions I have commented upon this. There are two interpretations which can be put on it. The hostile cynic would suggest that we give over 60 per cent of our aid because we have to give it as we are members of the European Community. Others would say that this is not so and it underestimates the generosity of the people who designed the programme and the commitment of Government.
The appropriate way of striking a middle way in that evaluation is to look, for example, to countries like Denmark and Ireland and make the comparison which I think is not unfair. You will find immediately that as the total proportion of gross national product which a country gives rises over the proportion over which it has direct control and can exercise indicators in fact it begins to increase proportionately. It brings me to my first and most fundamental recommendation on this occasion as in previous years, that I want to repeat on behalf of the Labour Party and on behalf of the vast majority of the people in this country the commitment to the Minister that he will be supported in restoring the target of achieving the United Nations target in relation to the proportion of gross national product as is mentioned in the joint programme for Government. It is very wrong to slide away from that commitment and it is something that is not justified by economic circumstances. It tends to call into question the depth of the commitment in the first place.
I would like to clear a point. There seems to be some confusion as to the basis of calculation of our commitment. The joint programme was absolutely unambiguous. It suggested that we would reach the United Nations target by a specific date. The appropriate way to measure whether we are achieving our target or not is to go to that date and measure our progress from today towards it. The idea, for example, of recalculating the actual increase of last year, adding it to this year and then going on to some kind of geometric progression, if it were not the fact that I have the highest respect for those who involve themselves in that, is close to casuistry.
I want to unambiguously state that the commitment in Government is very clear. It is contained in the following words which I quote:
The Government will adhere to the commitment to increase development aid by .05 per cent of the gross national product each year until the United Nations target of 0.7 per cent is reached.
That is the commitment and it is no more or no less. I appeal that there be no confusion as to what that commitment is. I appeal for the political support for the commitment to achieve the target. I promise the Minister, on behalf of the Labour Party, support should he decide to embark on that road.
There is need for a coherent set of principles to guide Irish development assistance. I have made this point so often now as to be close to driving some people demented. I would like to put on record that the White Paper on development principles has not appeared yet. In the years when the people of Galway West conferred the honour of sending me to the other House I made this point as spokesman on foreign affairs, and on my returning here, due to the enormous generosity of the graduates of the National University, I continued to make the point that there is need for a White Paper, not for the sake of having one but providing (a) a political framework in which the development aid programme can be assessed and (b) a coherent set of principles which can guide our general development aid programme both in its multilateral form and in its bilateral form.
It is far more urgent than it has ever been. Having made those two general points, there is a need for a coherent set of principles. On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Trócaire at an international seminar in Galway, the proceedings of which are now published in the book Ten Years of Action for Justice for World Development by the Communications Centre just a few weeks ago, I said that there were six essential elements in true development. I said:
Justice must prevail in the distribution of goods and services and inequality must be eliminated and the needs of future generations must be considered.
If I might move that principle of equality on from its ethical language, it is very clear that we must, in terms of debt, trade and the structure of aid, look at the impact of programmes from both the recipient and the donor perspective.
There is no doubt, if I begin with the third dimension, the question, for example, of aid that concern has been expressed very much more particularly about other countries' aid to the developing world more than the Irish one, that aid is very often a form of disguised exports, it makes very little attempt to link itself into the development needs of the communities towards which it is directed, that it is very often staffed and administered by people who are not sensitive to the immediate or long term needs of the place to which it is directed and so forth. Equally, in relation to trade, it seems to me that there are massive contradictions very often in directing aid with one hand and at the same time participating with a different voice in the international trade institutions.
For example, I had been worried about discussions which have frequently taken place even within the general agreement on trade and tariffs where derogations from particular developments have been sought which have the effect of frustrating not only aid proposals but have created vast inequities. A typical example has been the attempt by the United States Government to achieve, through derogations within the GATT, the establishment of its Caribbean Base Initiative which had many exclusive principles which excluded Nicaragua from assistance and allowed other countries within the ambit of the CBI to benefit. This is, as I said, an operation by stealth and it raises a point, to which I will come in a moment, that is, the necessity for there being the characteristic of integrity in Irish foreign policy.
Having returned recently from Africa, I must say that one of the problems which struck me both going and coming was the fact that, while one saw the effects of shortages and, in its extreme sense, the whole effect of children with distended stomachs from different parasitical related illnesses, the fact of the matter is that at the end of the day there is a framework which locks many of the African countries into what can only be regarded as the politics and economics of starvation and death. That is the manner in which the structure of international debt, exacerbated very much by the strong dollar, has increased both the absolute and the interest component of these countries' capacity to survive, not only now, but should they survive past their present difficulties, in future generations.
If we take the principle of equity then in relation to both debt, trade and aid, as I have been describing it, curiously this is a good week to discuss this, because the whole world was moved, I believe, when the last of the concentration camps were opened at the end of World War II and it was a powerful impetus to the establishment of the human rights movement which gave us various principles of human rights, including the charter and a number of other specific directives, on the principle that humanity should never again fall to the depth to which it had fallen.
It is unfortunate that the regular experience of famine has not had the same effect on the world's population, but very particularly on the world's political leadership, to achieve the same result. It is as if in fact, in its own condemnation, philosophically, morally and politically on the world, there has been a complete failure to develop a moral institutional response to the regular effects of famine, All anybody might need to do to think about that, to test that suggestion, is to ask what is happening in relation to some of the more general fora addressing themselves to the problem of famine. There is at the moment the very terrible reality that commitments that had been made in relation medium term commitments to African food shortages by many of the countries in Europe are not being met.
There is the total failure, effectively, of the IMF to restructure itself and there is the whole question in relation to the structure of trade. In the last couple of years we have seen a rise in the cost of imports of most of the developing countries, particularly the least developing countries. They benefited slightly in the early seventies. You have this relative collapse of many of the prices of their major exports. This is exercising a stran-glehold before you arrive in these countries. We have, for example, the disgraceful attempt by the International Monetary Fund, to bring countries like Tanzania to its knees, to bring it through hunger to its knees.
It is very interesting that the two countries in the world which have sought an independent path to development, Tanzania in Africa and Nicaragua in Central America, are both countries which under their present regime are not now receiving, despite their immense problems, one penny from the International Monetary Fund. The price of receiving aid was that they would abandon the integrity of their own independent policy towards development and, coupled with that fact, which is disgraceful in itself, has been the politicisation of United States overseas aid. There has been the suggestion that such aid as will be given now, to quote the United States Foreign Office, will be given where the private sector is encouraged and developed. What right have we to say that aid given like that is development aid at all? This is rather like giving beans to slaves. It is saying that if you work the way we say, you will eat. That is what, effectively, these international institutions are saying.
It raises my second principle that I believe is important in relation to international overseas development aid, that is freedom. The principle of freedom really refers to the integrity and right to self-determination of nations, that individuals must be respected and that their basic rights, provided for in the declaration of human rights, be assured for society and within societies. Most importantly, aid in itself cannot be used and should not be used as a principle for undermining the sovereignty of nations. Their sovereignty includes the right to establish separate development aid strategies.
I will be returning in just a moment to the specific detail of the report before us which contains much good news. This report comes to us in a context that it is very important to understand. Nationally, we are in a very dangerous frame of mind. It is important that I make this point before the local elections. There is, if you like, in this country at present, a perceptible weariness of compassion rather like the person who said to me, "Do not mention Ethiopia to me again". The people of Africa are not dying to suit the whims of Irish charity or compassion. We have, in fact, distinguished ourselves in Europe and in the world by giving an enormous amount of money in response to hunger. We should rightly feel good about doing something that is morally correct. It is something of which we can be proud. It is extremely important that we translate that compassion into some acceptance of commitment towards justice in the international institutions in relation to our overall political strategy in the international foray in which we operate and in the acceptance of a set of principles to guide our development.
That brings me to the importance of the White Paper. Now the argument is, should it be a short White Paper that moves from a description of what we have done towards an indication of what we might do in the future? I believe not. That would be to sacrifice the development education dimension of the White Paper. It is important for young people, middle aged people and anyone who is interested, or the people who elect us, to know the way that we are thinking and the political principles which guide us and let us differ as to the emphasis we might give to one principle over another. That should be stated so that we can adjudge our actions within some kind of coherent framework.
A third principle in international development aid policy should be the principle of democracy. This raises an enormous question because it almost contradicts the second one at points, a point which came up in the negotiations of the latest Lomé. If you want, for example, to avoid wasting money in countries on vast prestigious projects, if you want to get people-to-people aid, and you want to get to areas where it will be diffused most and use local technology, if you are saying that are you not interfering with the freedom of the particular countries, are you not intervening past the point of sovereignty? It is best to realise that the democratic principle when we speak about it, is that we are using it with a major content of participation, that is that at the end of the day it is the impact across the widest spectrum of people within a recipient country that must be the test.
A fourth principle, a principle of solidarity, is that we have had the interesting situation — I have said earlier and I want to be very clear about it — that the IMS give no money at the moment to Nicaragua. Lest people think that it never did, in the six weeks before the Somoza dictator left Managua it gave $6 million despite being in treaties with 17 member countries not to give any more money. It knew, when it gave it, that out of $1.6 billion given to Nicaragua in aid, $.8 billion never reached Nicaragua and is lodged today in different banks, including the United States banking system in Florida, and elsewhere. In full knowledge of that the IMF went ahead and gave $6 million to prop up the last days of a dictator. It was later to look on and suggest that only on the condition of Nicaragua reversing its economic plan of reconstruction, expanding the private sector, would it consider any relationships with Nicaragua.
On our visit to Africa, it was most impressive that in both Tanzania and Lesotho there was a wide acceptance by Irish volunteers, by and large, of the importance of respecting the culture and integrity of the countries to which they went. This is not always so. The general principle of culture is diversity and the acceptance within that of the integrity of recipient cultures is an extremely important point. There is in the development industry a breed of people called the "when we's" who keep talking about "when we were in Africa", "when we were in Asia", "when we were in Latin America" and "when we were in Sri Lanka" who in fact are bringing with them their pride of aspirations, which is a kind of tarted up tourism, whose development principles can be called into question. In fairness to the Irish people who work abroad in many of these different countries, it must be said that they have gone out with a very high level of motivation. They have been practising a great respect for the culture and integrity of the settings in which they find themselves.
The final point which became clearer to me when we visited Tanzania is that in programmes there has to be a great consideration for environmental integrity, that is the whole question of reversing processes of diversification and to try to intervene in the manner of producing substitute fuels for wood. In some of the districts in Africa their reliance on some woods as a source of energy is over 90 per cent with all the implications that has in relation to the future state of soils and so forth.
I have said two main things. The first is we need to increase the volume of our assistance by restoring the United Nations target. The second thing that I have said is that you cannot operate what is called pragmatically simply operating one year after another without losing something unless you have the overall direction of a White Paper. I strongly recommend that. I know that work is at an advanced stage. That White Paper could provide us with political framework, the necessity for which has been indicated by recent world developments that come to bear on undeveloped countries. Within that political framework certain clear principles can and should become a matter of debate. The reason why I said that they can and should become a matter of debate is that I believe it would be a very important contribution to development education.
It is very important that a most urgent accomplishment of such a programme would be to try to locate the attitude of the Irish public towards the task of development in a harder way. The fact of the matter is that in the Brandt report, North-South, A Programme for Survival, a summary of which was published in 1980, the following quotations occur:
In many African countries food output has grown more slowly than population. The expansion of food production and agricultural employment in the low-income countries is crucial. ...Agriculture provides 44 per cent of the poorest countries' GNP and 83 per cent of their employment. Yet they are not growing enough to feed their people, and projections indicate that they will encounter a food gap of at least 20 million metric tons by 1990. The most fundamental difficulty is control and management of water... especially the Sahel zone as well as Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and Tanzania. An action programme must be launched comprising emergency and longer-term measures, to assist the poverty belts of Africa and Asia and particularly the least developed countries. Such a programme would require additional financial assistance of at least £4 billion per year for the next two decades, at grant or special concessional terms, assured over long periods and available in flexibly usable forms. Estimates by the International Food Policy Research Institute, the FAO and the World Bank indicate needs for additional assistance to agriculture up to 1990 from $4 billion to over $8 billion a year, matched by very considerable additional investment and recurrent expenditures by the countries themselves.
My main reason for saying this is that the African crisis, which is represented on the inside cover of the report which is before the Seanad this morning, was predicted by experts again and again. It was studied. It was commented upon by the international institutions that had within them the specialist knowledge of identifying the scale of the crisis and that could predict it. Perhaps it is that incidents in particular areas and in particular years could not have been predicted in the exact detail in which they happened. It makes my point, why should children have to die before the television cameras to move populations, when the political and institutional structures are themselves not willing to be moved in structural principles?
I will finish this section by saying this. The structure of the development needs of the world are located within a specific structure of resources, within a structure of politics and within a structure of economics. Each of these has an institutional expression in all of the major international institutions. I am not simplifying the case because one has only to turn specifically to this document that is before us. I paid a compliment to Mr. Green earlier and I do so again, but we have had very valuable documents submitted to us during the year including one taking up the question of the capacity of regions of African countries and African countries individually to feed their population, trying to get beyond this question of reductionism, of suggesting that the problems of African food production are simply ones related to climate or simply ones related to the organisation of agricultural production in a single country.
There are problems of food transfers within the African country to which we made reference. Equally, there is the question if you take up the argument about the United States aid. May I say that the Soviet aid in the last ten years has been disgracefully tied? There may be more and more of it linked to military aid. It has not grown. In fact, the two great super powers have increased their spending on armaments and they have been declining in relation to overall aid. The reason why this House in the last few years has occasionally felt it necessary to vote additional supplements of aid has been to make good the gaps left by the major powers.
The work of the committee has been invaluably aided by looking more closely at these questions. I want to mention one example, that is the transition from subsistence economy to cash economy. On this question there is a great deal of prejudice and little less than that. There is an assumption almost of what we now call natural law theory within development economics, that where you have a private sector and a mixed economy automatically you will have communities who will rise to the top and start circulating commodities through the underdeveloped countries and that if you interfere with these in any way through forms of State production, you will automatically destroy your natural capacity to feed your people and give your country the commodities that it requires.
This is a gross assumption. It is important to realise that if you move to a system of State led production in agricultural and other commodities and at the same time, walls much higher in economic terms than the Berlin wall so much central to the present administration in the United States, are placed around a country, then obviously you are creating special circumstances within the country so that it will experience shortfall. In many ways you end up with the worst of all worlds as countries are forced to fall within a mixed economic model, that is having some aspects of State led agricultural production and at the same time trying to sustain a parallel economy. These are matters, by the way, which I believe should be more thoroughly discussed in the work of the committee during 1985 and 1986.
The Joint Committee on Co-operation with Developing Countries are interested not only in detail. We have all agreed now among ourselves that we want to move on to talk about philosophy and the economics of undevelopment in a more thorough way, taking on issues like the question of parallel economy, the question of development economics, the politics of development and so forth.
To move to the concluding section of my remarks I just want, lest any of these general principles should be seen as an alternative to recognising the work that has been carried out by the programme, to point out that I have paid tribute already to those who designed the programme. I am worried about a couple of points. Perhaps it would be arrogant of me to speak for all of the committee but I am only talking about the informal conversations which I had with them and we tend to operate not in a partisan way but in a way of much agreement. We have seen ourselves running up against issues of principle both in terms of politics and economics and social structures. I feel that in many cases there are delicate political contexts which have to be taken into account. Of the four countries of the bilateral aid programme one is Lesotho and a question must be asked about the elections which are due to take place there.
Obviously, we cannot talk about our bilateral programme of which Lesotho is at the top. We have to bear in mind the political structures of that country, which are quite complex. Having developed an interest in elections and election watching in recent times, not as an academic study but because of their implications, I would express grave doubts about the elections that are to take place in terms of the requirement which is necessary both in cash terms and the requirement in nomination terms. I cannot recall the details accurately but I think a sum of 1,000 rand is necessary as a deposit to stand, which is not the most significant obstacle but the one that each candidate be nominated by 500 persons certainly is. We have to watch the political context and the manner in which the BCP behaves with its South African connection. It is clear as day in my mind that it has direct connections with the Lesotho Liberation Army and its funds are being provided indirectly by South Africa. Perhaps it is an impression. We will have to delicately watch the conditions which prevail in the country towards which we give aid.
Within that country are people who are working far beyond the level of dedication that I have seen anywhere else, doing wonderful programmes. For example, the Basotho pony project which has been assisted by people from Bord na gCapall and some others from Ireland is a marvellous project. Equally, I think that the two workers who have between them enabled 1,000 women to acquire knitting skills which will enable them to export their products into world markets where they can sell them have accomplished tasks that are not easily seen here. Again, there are questions in relation to the whole modernisation of the economy but particularly in relation to the provision of educational skills, structures, administration and so forth. It is our money that is involved and I do not want there to be any doubt about it. I have no doubt that we are getting value for every pound we spend in our bilateral programme in that country, Lesotho.
How do we say that we are getting value? I believe that it is being spent in a more integrated way. It is establishing more linkages with the indigenous development potential of the economy and it is also, in relation to the personnel component of it, being wedded much better to the personnel of the recipient countries than many other programmes, programmes that are bigger and wider.
In relation to Tanzania I must express the gravest doubts. The country has, exercising its sovereignty, done something which will be, in history, respected by trying to carve a separate path between two separate systems of politics and economics. I recall very well, when the first hopes began to appear about the Julius Nyerere villagisation project and built around the concept of Ujamaa.
I remember well the theoretical people who moved in at that stage and said it was very interesting. Today you have the cleverest form of imperialism of all time within the media in relation to the international press. It is to suggest that Julius Nyerere was a saint who understood nothing about economics or politics. The idea was that he will be remembered for his saintliness and his personal integrity and the lack of corruption in his personal life but that he failed to develop his country. Then you look at who is saying this, the mouthpieces of the international banks, the people who want to have a private sector restored as in Kenya on the Kenyan model and so forth.
The villagisation programme which serves as a background to our work in Tanzania is in fact very interesting. Perhaps, as in anything else, it had an element of coercion in it which was resented in the early stages. However, it has provided an organisational base for development which is unique in Africa in many ways. That is a process of consultation that exists in villages and, of course, this varies as in anything else but no more than from one local authority in Ireland to another — and they do differ. There is a differential capacity to respond to projects. Our workers, again, have found that there are people to go to and that there are people who can debate as to what the real needs of the village and the district are. They have found that to be enormously valuable. What is of course bringing the country to its knees are the external conditions which are being imposed upon it. There is at the minute an attempt to try to bring back the trade unions that were there before villagisation and also to restore some of the co-operative models. This is an acknowledgement of errors but it is not an argument in principle against the system that prevails in Tanzania. I am very glad to say that I do not recall meeting among any of the workers in Africa such criticisms of the system in its general principles but there is an awareness of the difficulties which the country faced in relation to development projects and so forth.
Again, among the arguments of that international migratory tribe, the "when we's" there was the suggestion automatically that they have shortages of soap and they cannot get deodorants and they have great difficulties about these things. They go to Nairobi and the shops are full of these things. We are all accustomed to that crude, vulgar argument. To turn to Kenya, which is not one of the countries mentioned in this report and I will not delay on it, you could report a slightly better average income. It is equally one which has bigger gaps in relation to income, gaps that are indicated not only by income but by social and housing conditions and health conditions.
I hope this report opens the way for discussion. I often wonder, when it gets locked up in either the Dáil or the Seanad, as to what extent the debate widens out. There are encouraging things, there is more interest now in development education and there is every evidence that there is a desire among teachers for materials which they can use in the classroom. That debt will be of benefit.
It would be very wrong if I did not pay tribute, not to the Government's programme, but to the many non-governmental organisations — the NGOs — with which the Government co-operate, particularly the many voluntary agencies, differing among themselves as they do in philosophy, some concentrating on satisfying the immediate needs of aid and others interested in investing in structures. I want to clear a point here that could be unnecessarily divisive. Those people who say, for example, that to create the capacity to feed yourself or to invest in the short term in projects which will enable people to sustain themselves, are not necessarily in contradiction with those who are addressing themselves to the immediate needs of survival today. Neither is this to say that those who bring in quick and instant famine relief are in any tension with those who are involved in more structural-oriented programmes. All the programmes which have been assisted enormously by the Irish people, Trócaire, Concern, goal and all of those who are sending medical assistance, even those who are sending specialist assistance, are to be assisted.
Members of the Seanad will note that there is a discussion on the special disaster relief which was sent this year. I compliment the Minister both on achieving this in Cabinet and I also want to compliment him and the officials of his Department for the influence that they exerted within the European Community in achieving a more developed view — to use an unfortunate word — in relation to disaster and development assistance.
It is a small point but important one. I think in the history of Central America the San José meeting which was referred to in this report, which was under the Irish Presidency, will go down as a very important meeting. That was an attempt that was made by the United States Government, which is referred to at page 40 of the report, to exclude Nicaragua from the aid which the Community might give towards the Caribbean basin. That suggestion was facilitated by the conservative administrations of Britain and Germany — the current conservative administrations, I emphasise. It was rejected and the Community achieved a certain amount of respect for its own integrity in resisting the suggestion of the infamous Schultz letter. There is no doubt that in these matters small countries can exert great influence.
I welcome this report. I move it before the House, not for its adoption formally, but hoping that it will spark off a debate here and in the other House and throughout the Community that will address these issues in the fullness of their complexity. I want to repeat my plea for the support that the Minister should get in developing these issues.
On the occasion when the Minister of State was first appointed and when it was decided to have a special emphasis in what is still today a totally understaffed Department, it was felt that this was a great development. I think it was. It was an education of an urgent specialism but I would not like to think that the moral issues being pursued in development aid policy and the foreign policy positions that are being developed should ever be overlooked. There are principles generically developing and evolving within the development aid programmes. I would like to see these moving to the heart of foreign policy. It should be at the core of our foreign policy. There should be no suggestion of any of the achievements we make in this area being contradicted by other considerations. Considerations of trade can influence foreign policy. It is better to be wide open about this. If we are looking for the character of integrity within foreign policy I have no doubt that this Government, the Minister and the Opposition will support the idea that the development needs and the needs that we have been discussing be moved to the core of foreign policy, and I believe that we would be thanked for it rather than for trimming our sails towards other considerations.
People who are concentrating on other aspects of foreign policy exclusively would do well to move their attention to include development aid. This is a very important matter. Language in tough times is one of the first casualties. There is nothing pragmatic about managing a structure of trade that is part of a system of oppression that produces hunger, but there is something very pragmatic about saving lives today and in the next few years. There is something extremely moral about committing ourselves to a progressive policy to develop different structures. I propose and recommend this report to the House. It would be appropriate at this stage——
