by James Mpinga
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has put forward radical, new approaches to development cooperation, seeking, of all things, to replace horse-and-rider relations between aid dependent developing countries and their donors.
“The aid of the past is a poor basis on which to justify the development partnerships needed for the future,” says James Gustave Speth, Administrator of UNDP, in a statement on the eve of the launch of the UN agency’s Human Development Report 1994.
The report also recommends that all debts owed by the world’s poorest countries be cancelled in a barter arrangement which will commit recipient countries to earmark those same funds for social development.
In 1992 alone, developing countries spent US$l60 billion just to service debt charges, more than two and a half times official development assistance (ODA) aid flows – and US$60 billion more than private financial flows.
“Debt servicing is hampering developing countries’ ability to meet urgent human development needs,” the UNDP administrator says. The fifth in a series that began in 1990, the report was launched in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 3 June 1994- the first launch staged in Africa.
Symbolically, the launch coincided with the fourth advisory committee meeting of the Global Coalition for Africa (GCA), which was in plenary just a floor below at the Harare International Conference Centre.
In a deliberate break with the past, UNDP is now calling for new global agreements to replace the old-fashioned foreign aid programmes – which it says were riddled with resource misallocation and marred by tunnel views of third world development.
UNDP puts forward three proposals to break the current impasse in North-South relations, including: A global social safety net, through which more resources could be raised for the .very poorest countries.
Funds for this would come from a proposed “world income tax” of 0.1 percent (yielding US$20 billion annually) to be levied on nations with per capita GNP above US $lO,OOO to benefit countries with less than US $1,000 in per capita GNP.
Can the rich afford it? Today, rich countries spend some 15 percent of their combined GNPs to finance their own social safety nets to benefit about 100 million people earning less than US$5,OOO per annum. But they allocate only 0.3 percent of their GNPs to foreign aid which is shared among 1.3 billion people with an annual income of less than US$300.
A compensation scheme, to be operated under the auspices of a new World Trade Organization. Compensation will be paid when one country inflicts an injury on another, the report says.
Examples of such injury could include cases of a rich country encouraging a brain drain from a poor nation or when a rich country imposes trade restrictions on exports from poorer countries.
A new set of institutional frameworks for global governance to defend the new frontiers of human security. The report argues that a new form of development cooperation will be incomplete without an institutional framework of global governance.
It further calls for strengthening the role of the UN in sustainable human development through a new compact of institutions – an Economic Security Council, a World Central Bank, an International Investment Trust, a WorId Trade Organization and a World Anti-Monopoly Authority.
To achieve results, the report advances a new concept of human security and offers several concrete proposals for the convening of a World Summit for Social Development, next year in Copenhagen.
“It will be a time to reiterate very clearly that, without the promotion of people-centred development, none of our key objectives can be met – not peace, not human rights, not environmental protection, not reduced population growth, not social integration,” the UNDP administrator says in a foreword to the report.
As in the past, Human Development Report 1994 ranks 173 countries by a basket-measure which combines life expectancy, educational levels and basic purchasing power – collectively called the Human Development Index (HDI). This year Canada ranked first in HDI overall, while Barbados scored a first among developing countries.
HDI measurements between the years 1960-1992 reveal that among 114 countries for which data was available, Malaysia and Botswana showed most progress, with the Republic of Korea, Tunisia and Thailand close by.
But the thrust of this year is in the foundation it lays for the Copenhagen Summit. The report recommends that the Summit endorse the emerging concept of human security as the basis upon which national development strategies, international cooperation and global governance should be organized.
Its argument is forceful: human security is relevant to people everywhere, in rich nations as in poor ones. No amount of spending on arms will buy any country any peace, the report says.
The United States, for example, spends US$290 billion a year to defend its borders, while crime within borders costs that country US$425 billion and many lives.
“In 1992, the 14 million crimes reported to the police cost the USA economy US$425 billion. That same year, more than two million workers were physically attacked, and 20 children a day died from gunshot wounds,” the report says.
In developing countries, social funds are also diverted to arms although chances of dying from malnutrition and preventable diseases is 33 times greater than those of dying in a war of external aggression.
But the UN agency also gives kudos to past development cooperation. To its credit, the report admits foreign aid has fostered rapid social and economic progress in developing countries.
Using the past 30 years as a benchmark, Dr Mahbub ul Haq, former Finance and Planning Minister of Pakistan and chief author of the report, says: “Developing countries made more progress over (those years) than industrial countries did in a century.”
Foreign aid also made technology transfers possible – ranging from new industrial processes to vaccines for children and hybrid seeds for the Green Revolution. These have since spread rapidly throughout the developing world.
Other direct, yet hardly noticeable, benefits of foreign aid have seen life expectancy in the South rising from 46 years in 1960 to 63 in 1992. Infant mortality rates were halved, even as literacy rates among their parents increased from 46 to 69 percent over the years.
But UNDP is unhappy that current aid allocations still carry the scars of the cold war. “Aid was more often given to strategic allies than to poor nations,” Dr Mahbub ul Haq points out.
Deficiencies in the old foreign order include distorted allocations, in which donors espouse various Objectives for their official development aid (ODA) – poverty reduction, the protection of human rights, improved governance and the environment. But often these programmes are seemingly motivated by “an entirely different set of concerns.” The report suggests, instead, that ODA could be geared toward global development Objectives rather than countries.
The skewed pattern of aid allocations would be laughable double-talk – if it were not so strategic. Its main features include: While donors, both bilateral and multilateral, talk a great deal about human rights and good governance, the fact is that the World Bank reduced its share of total loans to Bangladesh and the Philippines after these countries lifted martial law.
On average, high military spenders receive two and- half more aid per person than low military spenders. On the extreme side of the scales, EI Salvador receives 16 times more aid per poor person than Bangladesh, even though Bangladesh has 22 times more people to share among themselves only one-fifth the income of EI Salvador.
Ninety percent of the US$12 billion annual technical assistance budget is still spent on foreign experts, even though national experts are now available in many fields.
The 10 most populous nations, home to two-thirds of the world’s poor, receive less than one-third of all development assistance. As a result, the richest 40 percent of the developing world receives twice as much aid per capita as the poorest 40 percent.
Egypt receives US$280 in aid per capita, while an Indian gets only US$7 per person on average. Yet Egypt is three times richer than India in real per-capita income.
Only seven percent of bilateral (government to- government) assistance is directed toward human priority areas such as basic education, primary health care, rural water supply, nutrition and family planning.
On top of all these distortions, the very definition of development assistance remains narrow. It means little more than foreign aid, yet industrial and developing countries interact in more ways than donor-recipient relations -culturally, politically and economically. As such, the North- South flow of aid is often only a tiny fraction of other international financial flows.
But even then, nearly three quarters of that capital goes to just 10 countries, in descending order: China, Mexico, Malaysia, Argentina, Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria, Venezuela, and the Republic of Korea. Only six percent goes to Sub- Saharan Africa – and a paltry two percent goes to the least developed countries (LDCs).
Many of the recommendations contained in the report are not entirely new, but the framework for new global institutions is, in the words of the author, “a rough architecture for the 21st century.” (SADC)
