One must welcome the commitment to achieve the target by 2010, even as one expresses disappointment that we will not meet our original commitment made in 2000 to the United Nations. I do not intend to quibble about the calculation of the percentages but if growth remains stable in the latter years approaching 2010, one might have arrived at the figure by way of a flat increase of 0.6% in the intervening years. There is, however, a methodological argument as to how this would be done. Some have suggested this position but it is important to arrive at 0.7% by 2010.
The Chairman's points are important too. We must restore trust in regard to the commitment as we move into the debate on the achievement of the eight millennium development goals. Progress or lack of it in this respect will be discussed at the United Nations in September. It will be important to say at that meeting how aid, trade, debt and reform of the international financial institutions come together.
It is disappointing, for example, that in the final communiqué from Gleneagles debt relief is granted in the context of the gross commitment which the major countries have made. In other words, the debt relief is being managed out of the gross aid budget which raises the question of whether there is net additionality. Bearing in mind that a 1% increase in trade by the least developed countries on the African continent would lead to a reduction in poverty of 12%, one can see how aid, trade and debt relief go together. I will not delay on this matter because I have mentioned it on other occasions.
The poverty reduction strategy programmes imposed on certain countries in Africa have conditionalities that do not fit with the world millennium development goals. Zambia is the obvious case in point in which the IMF imposed the condition of privatising the Zambia National Commercial Bank but the population rejected this condition and the government receded from the proposal. The resulting cost was the cancellation of $1 billion in debt relief in the round of debt relief discussion that preceded the Gleneagles meeting. Zambia has reintroduced the proposal and the bank will be privatised.
I mention this to illustrate my remark regarding aid, trade, debt relief and reform of the international financial institutions, particularly the IMF, and less so the World Bank, which must modify the conditions they attach to debt relief if the world millennium development goals are to be achieved. I expect there to be more uninformed comment in this debate following the Gleneagles Summit. People are contributing who have not hitherto appeared in the development debate.
We have been talking about the 0.7% commitment for 35 years. We made our commitment before the United Nations in September 2000 and have been through all this before. It is intellectually dishonest for those economists who have not looked at these issues of aid, trade and debt, and reform of the international financial institutions, to now suggest for example that we must meet the commitment solemnly given at the United Nations somehow or other at the cost of the poor at home. It was suggested in an uninformed article in one of yesterday's leading newspapers that our 0.7% commitment would be met at the cost of health, education, social welfare and so on. In fact, as the Chairman pointed out, the increasing growth in GNP means that if one says one is not willing to give 0.7%, one is saying one is becoming too rich to meet one's commitment to the poorest of the poor.
It is interesting that the calculation by Jeffrey Sachs in this regard is that the required doubling of annual official development assistance, if it were to rise to €195 billion internationally by 2015, would be €15 billion more than the cost to date of the Iraq war. In all the debate on the 0.7% commitment there is no time in which military spending compared to ODA spending has not been at a ratio of 20:1. In the past year the figure for military spending was €900 billion. We must put this in context in terms of the wastage of human resources involved.
At a previous meeting I raised a subject to which we can return in the autumn. It is worth going back to a consideration discussed when the 0.7% figure was first considered 35 years ago. The debate was deeper and better in some respects. At that time we looked at the nature of technology transfer. We need to consider it again. On the continent of Africa 70% of those in desperate need of debt relief in order to breathe and of aid in order to develop are living in rural areas in villages. The technology transfer is important with regard to whether it is based on the top end of the technology scale. More than 70% of the aid Italy gives is actually disguised exports, much of it being equipment, some of which is not working. The nearer the technology transfer is to appropriate, indigenous technology, the better it can fit with rural development, agricultural transitions and the capacity of the civil society to emerge. We should return to that issue about the receiving end of the aid and resume the argument about appropriate technology which can give a much better result. The top end of the technology facilitates multinationals and countries hiding their exports as aid and facilitates receiving elites operating in a corrupt manner.
Some have been going on and on in support of an unsustainable proposition. To suggest that those children in Africa who need mass primary education, boys and girls who need to be able to progress to secondary education, should pay in some way by means of us delaying or cancelling aid is unacceptable. There should be a renewed interest in the United Nations Convention Against Corruption. We should seek to open the banks in Switzerland, to recover funds, to seize the assets of corrupt dictators and those who have moved funds abroad. That deserves much more attention than it has received. We need to shift attention from the dangerous suggestion that some countries are, by their nature, endemically incapable of using aid for education and health.
The idea represented by an economist at one of this country's major banks — at home or abroad, they are in no position to lecture anyone on morality — that, somehow or other, there should be a popular uprising against accepting our responsibility to honour our commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on aid, was mentioned in yesterday's edition of The Irish Times. I am being charitable by not mentioning the economist. However, it was not a very well informed article. It is time to meet the commitment, although I could quibble with small parts. I wish we could attend the United Nations review meeting in New York in September saying we were glad to have given a lead and hope other countries follow. Instead, we will be saying we have trimmed our sails but will not break our word entirely, achieving the target by 2010. I hope we do so, but we must also deepen the argument to consider a precise strategy regarding why and how we spend in the short, medium and long term. We must not welch on it.
This point concerns the atmosphere internationally before we started discussing this topic. We have agreed to make a statement on Niger, whose needs have been put by the United Nations Secretary General at $16 billion. The international community, including all the signatories to the United Nations Charter, have to date produced $3.8 million. People regularly make commitments to meet the cost of short-term humanitarian tragedies and on aid. I am quite pessimistic regarding whether the eight millennium development goals will have been achieved by 2015. In that atmosphere, the only proper and unanimous position that would be agreed across the floor by all the different political parties is that we should be taking a moral position on this matter, not breaking our promises, and giving a lead internationally. We should say it is not only about money but about the methodology of spending aid and the way in which debt should be linked to reform of the international financial institutions. We should put our efforts into this.