In July 2005, when the leaders of the world's
8 wealthiest nations (the G8) announced their
decision to cancel the debt of 18 of the world's
poorest nations, Live 8 organiser Bob Geldof gave
thanks on behalf of the 'people without a voice',
describing the offer as a 'victory for millions'.
With the stroke of a pen many of the world's poorest
people would, in Geldof's words, 'wake up for
the first time in their lives without owing you
or me a penny'. While few, outside a handful of
super rich celebrities, actually bought into Geldof's
claim of 'mission accomplished', the G8 deal was
effectively sold through the western media as
an important milestone in the struggle against
global poverty. Yet amidst all the back slapping
of the G8/Live 8 jamboree, it's striking that
nobody was asking ordinary people from indebted
nations what they thought about it all.
The
exclusion of ordinary Africans, Asians and South
Americans from most media discussions around global
poverty is the starting point for a new documentary,
shot in Ghana, one of the beneficiaries of the
G8 deal. Worldwrite's Damned by Debt Relief (www.worldwrite.org),
filmed by a young volunteer crew, takes a critical
look at the impact of debt relief and poverty
reduction strategies from the point of view of
ordinary Ghanaians, while delivering a broadside
to the smug complacency of the 'mission accomplished'
brigade. A welcome antidote to 'poverty awareness'
films like Orphans of Nkandla (www.makepovertyhistory.org/video),
Damned by Debt Relief makes the case for a fairer
distribution of the world's resources through
the power of argument. Making no appeal to sentimentality,
the overriding emotion is anger, not pity.
'This
is the fact about debt relief. It does not deliver
development and it also denies us the freedom
to pursue development'. For people like DeRoy
Kwesi Andrew, a science teacher based in Accra,
the much-hyped G8 deal has delivered no worthwhile
benefits, while seriously undermining local attempts
to break the cycle of poverty through development.
Andrew angrily dismisses the G8 deal as rubbish:
'Debt relief has given us nothing but it has taken
away very much: our independence, our ability
to develop, our self respect…..take away
your debt relief, Bob Geldof, get off our backs!'
While
many in the West remain divided on the causes
of global poverty, most believe that the industrialised
nations have, at the very least, a humanitarian
duty to alleviate its worst effects. So when,
at the height of last year's Live 8/ G8 awareness
raising campaign, UK Chancellor Gordon Brown expressed
'outrage' at levels of poverty and infant mortality
in Africa, his anger seemed to give voice to a
mounting sense of frustration among many in the
West, who, twenty years on from Live Aid, were
seeing countries like Ghana collapse further and
further into what appeared to be irredeemable
poverty. For some, western aid was part of the
problem because it encouraged ever greater levels
of dependency among the poor, while financing
avarice and corruption among Africa's ruling elites.
For many, however, Africa's growing poverty was,
at least in part, a consequence of its indebtedness,
where poor sub Saharan countries were transferring
around $30 million a day in repayments to western
development banks, in the context of tens of thousands
dying each day from diseases associated with poverty.
From this perspective DeRoy Kwesi Andrew's repudiation
of the G8 deal seems incomprehensible.
In
summer 2005, as the G8 gathered at Gleneagles,
Make Poverty History (MPH), an alliance of individuals,
NGOs, celebrities, politicians and trade unionists,
was mobilising public opinion, to pressurise world
leaders to 'fulfil their obligations and promises
to eradicate poverty' . Given that the industrialised
nations currently consume around 86% of the world's
resources, while almost a fifth of the world exists
on less than $2 a day, MPH was pushing at an open
door, highlighting the sheer injustice of institutions
like the World Bank and International Monetary
Fund endlessly extracting billions of dollars
in interest from the poorest of the poor. But
instead of pushing the case for a substantial
transfer of economic and technological resources,
which would open up opportunities for the world's
poorest nations to aspire to decent living standards
and real political power, the MPH campaign focused
instead on the achievement of Millennium Development
Goals (MDGs), UN endorsed poverty reduction targets,
promising only minimal healthcare and primary
education to the very poorest, alongside the halving
of $1a day poverty and hunger by 2015. In other
words, if every single MDG target were to be met
over the next 10 years, hundreds of millions throughout
the world would continue to suffer extreme poverty,
while millions more simply survived at the most
basic level.
According
to Damned by Debt Relief, countries like Ghana
are not simply facing the challenges of economic
poverty at home but are further constrained by
a poverty of expectation among donor nations in
the West. For in order to qualify for debt relief,
Ghana has been forced to draft poverty reduction
strategies, agreeing social and economic targets
dictated by western governments and aid agencies,
which are orientated towards implementation of
MDGs, aimed at the alleviation of poverty rather
than economic growth. Although local taxes have
risen to 'match fund' delivery of new poverty
reduction programmes, development is restricted
to low cost, community orientated schemes, which
neither build the productive capacity of the nation
nor work towards universal access to water, electricity,
health care and higher education- the kind of
public services we in the West take for granted.
According
to journalist, Kwesi Pratt, editor of Insight
magazine, the most negative impact of debt relief
has been this loss of economic sovereignty, where
foreign organisations determine how money is to
be spent and everything rotates around what the
donor wants, which in almost every case is small
scale and localised rather than much needed investment
in infrastructure, agriculture or industry,
Adding
insult to injury, debt relief has not generated
any new revenue streams for countries like Ghana,
as the G8's much vaunted $72 billion debt write
off simply represented a transfer of funds from
G8 Treasuries into the vaults of the international
banking system. Not a single cent will be invested
into poor nations, and yet, while no new money
is available, the G8 debt relief programme is
reinforcing inequalities between rich and poor
nations, where powerful international banks and
aid agencies call the shots. As Kwesi Pratt points
out, countries like Ghana with Highly Indebted
Poor Country status are being told, 'You owe us
so much, we are not going to take the money from
you, you generate the money yourself through taxation,
through your productive activity, don't pay it
to us, keep it, but we are going to tell you how
to invest that money.'
Demonstrating
a nostalgia for the good old days of the Victorian
Workhouse, 'donor approved investments', like
the waterless toilet blocks serving 27,000 people
in Ajumako-Bisease, provide worthy targets for
the film makers' derision. Staffed by an elderly
'volunteer' cleaner not even equipped with basic
materials to effectively carry out her work, the
toilet block is proudly branded with the rainbow
logo which denotes 'highly indebted nation status',
otherwise known as a national declaration of bankruptcy.
The rainbow logo turns up again and again on everything
from rubbish bins to local cottage industries,
where women engage in low skill, small scale manufacturing,
financed by cold as charity loan schemes, which
offer pitiful amounts of start up capital and
from which men, being labelled un-creditworthy,
are excluded.
For
millionaire celebrities, World Bankers, UN and
G8 political leaders, it's easy to grasp the appeal
of low rent poverty reduction programmes like
these, but less clear why trade unionists and
anti poverty activists have embraced conservative
political projects, which seek to lift half the
world's poor from abject to grinding poverty within
ten years. Perhaps the answer lies in a political
culture, which, admitting no value in the material
benefits it enjoys, adopts a romantic view of
other people's poverty. So here in the relatively
prosperous West, where industrialisation has already
delivered highways, homes and hospitals, we believe
we can afford some complacency, but, as this film
shows, for the poor of Ghana, without sufficient
infrastructure to support industrial or agricultural
development, getting back to nature quite literally
means scratching a living off the land.
For
Nash Kwadjo Abbey, a community worker from Amamole
village, near Accra, the need for industrial and
economic development is a matter of life and death.
Abbey demonstrates a building made from mortar
and thatch, a family home, where a roof recently
collapsed in heavy rains, killing a small child.
'What do people want? Concrete buildings with
good roofing, zinc or slate. People need industries,
good infrastructure. We need change.' 'What's
your ambition?' one of the filmmakers asks a market
trader selling imported shoes in Accra. 'I want
to travel', she smiles 'but I don't have the money
to travel, so I'm staying here!'
Socialists
from my father's generation were inspired by a
belief that scarcity and human need could be eradicated,
not by forcing humanity back to nature, but through
harnessing the power of human ingenuity and production
for the benefit of all. For thousands of millions
of people around the world, technological advances
have already delivered improvements against almost
every objective measure of human experience from
life expectancy to daily food intake to infant
mortality rates. Before industrialisation, where
at least 200 out of every 1,000 children died
in their first year, infant mortality globally
is now down to 57 in every 1,000 thanks to advances
in nutrition, hygiene and medical care. In terms
of technological and political achievements, humanity
owes a great debt to previous generations and
still has much to be proud of in the present day;
and yet a consensus is growing around claims that
industrial development has made the world more
dangerous and less hospitable. The new philosophy
of 'scaling back' threatens to turn back the clock
for thousands of millions, while trapping millions
more at unacceptable levels of deprivation, hunger
and disease.
Damned
by Debt Relief contributes to one of the most
important debates of our time, opening up contemporary
orthodoxies to challenges from those who are not
only excluded from the benefits of progress but
don't even get to join in the debate. Its time
we started listening and maybe asking a few awkward
questions of our own, about the progressive credentials
of political and social movements, which appeal
to some of the most conservative instincts in
society; those who desire to sustain human dependency
and vulnerability to nature.
http://www.worldwrite.org.uk
http://www.makepovertyhistory.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality
