Our Word is Our Weapon

Buala bos (that’s Irish for “give a big hand to”) for Ireland today, specifically Ireland Aid, the government’s overseas development aid agency, as newly released OECD figures show that Ireland has greatly increased the amount of aid it gives to developing countries by both the total cash amount and by the percentage of GNI (Gross National Income) yardstick.
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Just to follow up on the post about Iraq’s ‘reconstruction’, I wonder what Clare Short, the UK’s overseas development minister, makes of the complete lack of UN involvement in post-war Iraq? This, after all, is the person who decided to withdraw her resignation threat before the war on the grounds that (amongst other things) “There has to be a UN mandate for the reconstruction of the country [Iraq] otherwise any forces would be an army of occupation and you can’t restructure the country” and that she was convinced that such a resolution had “been got”.

Maybe she knows something the rest of us don’t, but as far as I can see there has been no such resolution either legitimising the US/UK presence in Iraq or agreeing terms for reconstruction. The United Nations is not even being allowed ’suggest’ personnel for the new adminstration, as Bush has pledged, and by no stretch of the imagination does it have the ‘vital role’ Tony Blair seemed to think he had secured (unless ‘vital role’ turns out to mean ‘humanitarian donkey-work we couldn’t be bothered with’).

So what, exactly, was the point of Blair’s efforts to ‘restrain’ US aggression and promote a legitimate replacement regime in Iraq? And how the hell can Clare Short believe that she was not tricked into sticking around for as long as her resignation would have made a difference?

I’m a bit puzzled about what the Americans are doing in Iraq. IMHO, they’re going about things completely the wrong way. Because they didn’t have to give any real thought to the idea of the legitimacy of the war in order to win it, they think they don’t have to deal with legitimacy in the aftermath. And they also seem to think that letting anyone else get a ‘finger in the pie’ would somehow remove the point of the whole operation.

But it would actually make their job a lot easier, assuming their desired goal really is a peaceful and democratic Iraq, if they gave in a little and asked for help.
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Sunday’s New York Times carried an extraordinary attack (registration required for full article, or see link to ‘extended’ post below for full text) in its lead editorial on George W. Bush’s domestic agenda, calling it “On almost every front … a disaster, a national train wreck that must be headed off for the country’s well-being”.

The article is prompted by the alarming rise of the US federal budget deficit - to an annual figure of $300bn at the latest estimate - combined with Bush’s determination to push through a $726bn tax cut at a time when state and local governments are experiencing their greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. And that’s not even accounting for the need for Social Security to pay for all those baby boomers hitting retirement age.

With that approaching fiscal bombshell (due to land towards the end of this decade) in mind, the economy creaking and unemployment rising, Bush should at least be careful about strangling the government’s revenues and allowing state and local authorities to cut back on so many programmes (and on the jobs of the people who run them), but instead the tax cut will redistribute wealth to the rich and have little or no boosting effect on the economy.

So, as it is too polite to assume that the Bush administration is simply wracked by insanity, the NY Times chooses the only other option - this is all deliberate. “Republican ideologues”, it says, “see [massive tax cuts] both as a reward to the well-heeled, and a key to starving the government of money that might be spent on programs like health care or housing”. In a story in Sunday’s Observer, economist Jeff Madrick (also a NY Times columnist) says that when the tax cuts don’t fulfill their supposed jobs’n'growth function, there’ll be “no more money for that public spending burden on schools and pensions. Time to privatise everything”.

Bush’s policies will further polarise America, which will further polarise America’s politics, which will decrease the will and skill of politicians to address that polarisation. More than ever before, American politics will be run by the rich, for the rich. Now might be a good time to point out that Bush’s advisers envisage spending $200 million on his 2004 election campaign.

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According to a story on agweb.com (via the iatp.org mailing list), a certain Dan
Amstutz has been appointed by the US Department of Agriculture “to lead
the U.S. Government’s agriculture reconstruction efforts in Iraq.
Amstutz will serve as senior ministry advisor for agriculture in the
rebuilding effort and will coordinate the U.S. Government activities in
the sector”.

Which is all very interesting, especially given Amstutz’s background:

He has held positions with Cargill; Goldman, Sachs &
Company; the International Wheat Council and North American Export Grain
Association. In government, he served as USDA Under Secretary for
International Affairs and Commodity Programs from 1983 to 1987 and then
as Ambassador and chief negotiator for agriculture during the Uruguay
Round General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) talks in
1987-1989.

So he’s been around. He’s worked for industry, he’s lobbied governments
on behalf of industry, he’s lobbied governments and businesses on behalf
of governments … I wonder if he ever gets his priorities mixed up.

Cargill, by the way, is the largest privately owned corporation in the
world, the third largest food processor in the world, controls over ? of
all US grain exports and is a major developer and promoter of
genetically modified food and farming techniques (source).
The company enjoys extremely close ties with the US government ? it
reaps huge public subsidies for its exports, it is a key lobbyist behind
the US policy of ?crowbarring open? food markets around the world for US
exports, and as the story shows its staff have been given public jobs as
department secretaries, trade negotiators and now reconstruction
specialists.

Basically I believe that even if Dan Amstutz really cared about how to
improve the lot of the small-scale Iraqi farmer, he would not know how
to do it. If he’s one of the people who have made it US policy to
undermine food security around the world, devastate local farming
networks by dumping cheap subsidised agro-exports and abuse food aid as
a mechanism for introducing GM technology into virgin eco-systems, then
I really don’t think he’s quite the right man for the job. His area of expertise is in factory farming, export monocropping, trade law and helping run a cartel. Why has he been given this job?

As with any large reconstruction job, the rebirth of this blog began with a thorough looting. Tired of the slightly gloomy preset MovableType style, I went and plundered bluerobot.com’s three-column style, following a link from Kieran Healy’s excellent blog, which I in turn found via my old mucker Martin Stabe (don’t worry, I won’t be retracing every step of every internet foray in future, just thought those were a few pages worth a read).

So I’ve switched over to the bluerobot style, and have set about tinkering with it. This is not all that easy, as I haven’t a notion what I’m doing. Hopefully I’m learning from my mistakes, though nothing’s really stuck yet as I keep making them. Anyway, here’s a few things that I intend to change soon:

• Reduce over-use of bold style in both side-columns;
• Rescue archive pages from design limbo;
• Sort out this damn list style;
• Build at least three more sub-sections of the site to go along with the ‘news’ blog, offering more detailed background information, theory, etc, and maybe even a photo collection and the ‘thanks Pat’ page I have to put up before he kicks me off his server.

World Trade Organisation members recently missed an initial deadline on agriculture negotiations, nowhere near agreement on probably the most crucial issue in the half-formed ‘Doha Development Round’.

Oxfam International has published a briefing (can’t find a link, I got it through iatp.org) sharply criticising the current negotiating text produced by Stuart Harbinson (an experienced WTO trickster and now chair of the Agriculture Committee).

According to the briefing, the Harbinson text is far too timid from a development point of view. Export subsidies (which seriously undermine farming livelihoods in the South) might be phased out over nine years; the abuse of export credits and food aid is not effectively forbidden; tariff reductions are too harsh for developing countries.

The briefing also includes a good argument for making self-sufficiency a development target for the South, as it is developing countries who are most vulnerable to financial and trade instability, which would be all the more damaging if the country in question was dependent on imported food.

Two more important points emerge: Oxfam propose that “as a rule, subsidised products should not be exported, unless subsidies are minimally trade distorting”. In my view this is the most necessary step the rich countries could take towards human development in terms of agricultural trade - simply stop trading in subsidised agricultural goods. If you have to sell food abroad, compete fairly with everyone else. Boo hoo, no more “You have KerryGold in Ireland too?”, then.

Secondly, they propose that changed tariff rates and emergency food safeguard mechanisms could all be utilised by developing countries in certain situations, according to an agreed set of simple development indicators. Moving from a market-centred to a development-centred regime would be fairly revolutionary, but only fair.

The new issue of the Bretton Woods Update leads with a description of a string of water forums, international meetings supposed to coordinate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals on safe drinking water and sanitation. So far they’ve followed the usual MDG pattern: lots of talking, not much real action or commitment, and constant attempts by private interests to hijack the agenda.

Investment in water services in developing countries must increase by about $100bn annually, but the rich countries are in no mood to meet this through increased aid. Instead the World Bank seems more interested in returning to the bad old days of lending for massive dam projects of questionable developmental merit.

Also in the BWU:

• IMF study shows financial liberalisation may hurt the poor
• Democratisation of IMF and World Bank blocked again

Just to add to the confusion over Iraq’s debts, the World Bank’s press review for Saturday the twelfth had a long discussion on the topic which seems to contradict the reports I described below. To quote:

Iraq’s indebtedness is estimated at about 400 percent of GDP, making it a heavily indebted country. Among key lenders belonging to the Paris Club of creditors, Russia and France are each owed about $8 billion by Iraq, while its loans to Germany total about $4.3 billion. The biggest single creditor
is Saudi Arabia, to which Iraq owes $25 billion.

The article also highlights the extent of confusion over who is owed what: The US and France ‘had different Iraqi debt numbers and the British also have different figures, a US Treasury official is quoted as saying. “There are vast discrepancies” in the Iraqi debt estimates, he said. “The numbers are all over the map”.’

Russian, France and Germany want the Paris Club (ie rich countries’ debtor cartel) to sort out how much, if any, of Iraq’s debt to them should be forgiven, but this will in turn depend on how much the Gulf states feel like forgetting about. It’s all going to be horribly complicated.

The World Bank report also highlights the complaint from those who have long campaigned for Third World debt relief that if Iraq’s debt problems are recognised as illegitimate and holding back development, there can be no argument except sheer political hypocrisy for not cancelling the debts of other countries suffering under burdens assumed by previous dictatorships. These include much of Africa and also Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina and others. All ‘odious debts’ must be cancelled, unless the hardship and resentment the US fears in Iraq is to be further exacerbated in other debt-ridden countries by this extra dose of double-standards.

Further to my earlier post on Iraq’s debts, have a look at this BBC Online story about Iraq’s debts. It cites an interesting report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which estimates Iraq’s total external ‘financial burden’ at $383bn, of which $127bn is debt (and interest), $57bn is pending contracts and $199bn is outstanding compensation claims from Gulf War 1. Most of this will have to be forgiven or cancelled if Iraq is to have any hope of reconstructing itself adequately.
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The World Bank has released the new edition of Global Development Finance, its big finance and development report (it used to be called ‘World Bank Debt Tables’, but that was considered too depressing). The full text is here; I contented myself with the overview, which has its moments.
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