I am pleased to have this opportunity to support the motion tabled by the Labour Members and to avail of the opportunity to discuss in this House one of the most important and urgent problems facing the entire world and not just this country. I want to remind the House that this motion although it is being discussed against the backdrop of the food crisis in Africa, and that will form part of my contribution as it has of the contribution of other speakers, is one which calls for a thought through policy on development aid. It notes the need for an aid programme which is particularly geared towards the needs and the aspirations of developing countries and which recognises the role that Ireland can play, both as a sovereign country and also within the European Community and the United Nations. It calls specifically for an aid programme of a structured nature which will not have any built in structural disadvantages for aid receiving countries and which will not have any built in component of military aid for oppressive regimes, that this would be a principle of it.
I want to emphasise these aspects of the motion because we are discussing it against the backdrop of the public awareness of the effect on men and women and particularly on children of the very severe drought and famine in Africa. As other Members of the House and indeed Sena-for Michael D. Higgins in proposing this motion emphasised, this is not an instant or a new problem. This is something that those working in those countries have been warning about. We, as Members of both Houses, receive regular bulletins from Trócaire and other agencies on North/South issues. I have one here for June 1984 specifically on Africa's food crisis, specifically spelling out to us the short-term and long-term causes of the particular drought in Africa and the food crisis that has emerged and that we are aware of in our sitting rooms through television and which has provoked such a reaction.
I want to focus at this stage on that reaction. There is no doubt that the imagination of every man, woman and child in this country has been gripped by the severity of the famine and the deaths and the deprivation of the situation in Africa. There is not a school, a resident's association, a tenants' association or women's group that is not doing something for "Ethiopia" or, more broadly, for Africa. That is a very generous, emotional response. Of itself it is important as a very short-term reaction but it could fizzle out very quickly. Memories are short. The media do not keep on covering issues which have already been given full media coverage. The media as a whole does not regard dire poverty as being a media event in itself. We have enough poverty in this country that goes unnoted, and that is not a matter that captures the attention either of the media or indeed of politicians. This is a short-term response. It is one which we must seek to harness and seek to structure more than has happened before. What has happened, and it is extremely important, is that the attention of the public — every man, woman and child — has been captured. There is an audience now for the need for a different and much more accelerated and extensive approach to a development policy and to aid programmes which are based on a well thought out and well structured development policy. In that regard I would like to turn to the conclusion of the report of the Brandt Commission. That report was discussed and debated in this House when it was published, and it was recognised as being a landmark in the sense of drawing attention through the composition of the Brandt Commission and perhaps also through the personality of Willy Brandt, the chairman of the Commission, to the urgency of addressing this area. The report concluded with these words:
Whatever their differences and however profound, there is a mutuality of interest between North and South. The fate of both is intimately connected. The search for solutions is not an act of benevolence but a condition of mutual survival. We believe it is dramatically urgent today to start taking concrete steps without which the world situation can only deteriorate still further, even leading to conflict and catastrophe. It is in a spirit of concern but also of hope that we have formulated the proposals contained in this report.
There was that phrase, which was emphasised, coming from the Brandt Commission at the time of the mutuality of interest between North and South, of the linkage between the developed world and the needs and aspirations and the condition of developing countries but it is something which somehow has been dodged or evaded or laid aside in subsequent discussions where the North-South dialogue has taken place. There is an unwillingness by the North, by those of us who are part of the developed world and in this context, Ireland is privileged and fortunate enough to be part of the developed world — there is a reluctance to see that linkage, to understand that mutuality of interest and in particular, to come to terms with the extent to which we, in the developed world, if we accept accountability for our actions, in many areas worsen the situation in developing countries. We aggravate their problems. We lessen their capacity to address the very real economic and social problem which they have. This is something which must be faced up to and must be faced honestly in seeking to develop an aid programme and a development policy which will achieve the kind of justice and fairness and better balance in the economic resources of the world to which we aspire when Members of this House speak on this subject.
Having put the situation in that way, I have to ask how exactly do the developed countries have a harmful effect on the economies of developing countries. One basic way in which we can and in many ways do this is by halting or slowing up their process of industrialisation or their process of developing their basic industries, of adding any value to those industries, for example, in food processing or in any other sector, by restricting the exports they can send to the developed world. That is why it is important in this motion that we draw attention to Ireland's responsibilities within the European Community and in a broader context to open up this dialogue, to take very seriously the difficulties that are created by the restrictions on trade for the under-developed and developing economies. It makes sense. It is not a complicated point. There are really two main ways in which underdeveloped economies can start to industrialise. The first is to begin processing at home either the agricultural or, if the country is fortunate enough, the mineral commodities, which at present are exported in an unprocessed state. There is no value added. The country does not benefit as much. The value is added later by the developed countries. This does not help the usually very substantially growing population needs of the underdeveloped country.
Secondly, the approach that could be adopted is to start some manufacturing activities which are related to the particular country, for example, textile production. That happens to be one of the areas where developing countries seek to establish a manufacturing base and use that to penetrate the other countries. Of course, their labour is cheaper, and indeed the women provide a very substantial proportion of that cheap labour, but nonetheless it is an attempt to build up their economic base. Yet we, as the European Community, have a very sophisticated system of trade barriers which we employ against imports from developing countries. There are some chinks in it but still it is one of the difficulties which these countries face.
The developed world has sympathy for developing countries particularly when we see on television the pictures of dying children and dessicated human beings reduced to that level of poverty, deprivation and human suffering. Of course we have sympathy, but how does that affect our lifestyle, our deployment of resources, the world's deployment of resources? Is it not a shocking fact of life from which we cannot run away that the resources of the world are so inequitably distributed and so unfairly at the disposal of the developed world? We have what can only be described as a decadence that has to be approached and criticised in a very fundamental way. We have problems of milk super-levies arising from milk mountains in a European Community context. We have before this House today a report of the potential impact on this country of a super-levy being imposed by the European Community to penalise a higher rate of production of milk. That is a very real problem, and the impact on dairy farmers and on particular regions of Ireland is not be be underestimated. All these problems have to be fully appreciated, and it is necessary to acknowledge them in their fullness, because they, nonetheless, have to be viewed within the mutuality of relations on which the Brandt Report laid emphasis and on which, I hope, in our debate on this motion we will also lay emphasis.
That is one kind of relationship, the economic relationship with developing countries. Another relationship referred to in this motion is the shoring up of oppressive regimes, the willingness of the developed world to turn a blind eye not on individualised acts of oppression but on a continuous and sustained oppression against whole sectors of a population. We had an opportunity to debate the United States approach to Central America and to a number of countries there in the context of the proposal to enable President Reagan to address the two Houses of the Oireachtas last June, and many of us were able, at that stage, to query some of the values and some of the basic assumptions in the approach to countries, particularly in Central America and the Philippines. But this is another aspect, the enormous profits which are made by providing military armaments and equipment to developing countries, the shoring up of oppressive regimes through the provision of military aid. This is something which we must face up to and take a very clear policy stand on here in Ireland in developing our approach, which will then determine what kind of aid programme we will be embarking on.