Editorial:Aid pledges fall far short of millennium goals

The pledge of rich countries to donate $4 billion in disaster relief to the Asian countries affected by the tsunami disaster may transpire to be illusory if the experience of previous pledges to disaster areas is repeated. A year ago, countries promised $32.6 million in disaster relief to the victims of the earthquake in Bam, Iran, but only $17.1 million materialized.

The debt burden of countries affected by the tsunami disaster is $300 billion and last year Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Thailand paid $20 billion on debt repayments. Although these countries do not rate among the world's poorest, compared with Ireland they are impoverished.

Thailand ranks 76 out of 177 countries in the human development index, Sri Lanka ranks 96 and Indonesia ranks 111, while Ireland is in 10th place. The per capita income of Thailand is $7,010, Sri Lanka's is $3,570 and Indonesia's $3,230 while Ireland's per capita income was $36,360 in 2002.

There is concern among non-government organisations involved in providing assistance to the world's poorest countries that the aid pledge to the Asian tragedy will be diverted from other areas of the world that are even more needy.

In 2000, the rich nations of the world committed themselves to providing 0.7 per cent of their national income in foreign aid. Meeting this target would generate $120 billion but only five of the 22 major donors are meeting this target. Ireland committed itself to meeting the target by 2007, but this commitment has now been abandoned. Twelve donors have no timetable for meeting this target. On present trends Canada will not reach the target until 2025, the USA will not meet it until 2040 and Germany will not meet it until 2087.

The US, the least generous of the 22 major donors, as a percentage of national income, at 0.14 per cent, is spending twice as much on the war in Iraq as it would cost to increase its aid budget to 0.7 per cent and six times more on its military programme.

The investment of rich countries in world poverty reduction is insignificant. It averages around €60 per person per year – the price of a cup of coffee every week. The proportion of their national income that rich countries are giving in foreign aid has declined over the past 30 years. In the 1960s rich countries gave 0.48 per cent of their national incomes on aid. It is now as low as 0.24 per cent.

For rich countries 0.7 per cent represents a mere fifth of their expenditure on defence and one half of their expenditure on agricultural subsidies.

The cost to the rich countries of cancelling the debt of the most highly-indebted poor countries would be $1.8 billion per year over 10 years, an average of $2.10 per citizen per year. Although commitments have been made to cancel the debt to these poorer countries, this has occurred in only 40 per cent of the cases.

Low income countries paid $39 billion in servicing their debts in 2003 and they received only $27 billion in aid. The repeated claim that the tsunami catastrophe is the worst human disaster of modern times is false. Even if the death toll from the disaster rises to 200,000, it will still be only a fraction of the one million people massacred in Rwanda in 1994 during the genocide there.

It will be an even smaller fraction of the number of people who lost their lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) from 1998 to 2002, an estimated 3.6 million. These conflicts attracted only passing media attention and almost no intervention by the international community – what intervention there was in the case of the Rwandan genocide was poured into the refugees camps in Goma, in eastern Congo, to where those responsible for the genocide had fled.

Although the numbers of deaths that have occurred in Darfur, Sudan is not known, the number certainly exceeds the anticipated tsunami death toll and the war in Iraq is likely to result in higher casualties. The British medical journal, The Lancet, recently reported that over 100,000 people had died in Iraq because of the war there, not all from the violence but also from the accompanying disease and deprivation.

So, although the scale of the tsunami disaster has prompted spontaneous generosity around the world, the amount required to restore the affected regions to their former states is multiples of what has been donated. But more than that, the level of donation – even at this time of almost universal empathy – is a mere fraction of what is required to meet the very modest commitments made four years ago to reduce world poverty.

vincent browne