UN calls for aid to end trade barriers

The massive economic problems faced by African countries south of the Sahara have caught the West’s attention once more in connection with the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, the continent’s Aids catastrophe and preparations for the next ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation, to be held in Qatar in November. But they cannot yet be said to have triggered consequences. In Durban, the industrial countries may have promised African states to write off more of their debt burden, but no-one was prepared to say either when or by how much. Kofi Annan’s initiative to contain Aids likewise caused concern and gave rise to pledges of support. The UN secretary-general says 10 billion dollars a year is needed, but so far only 1.4 billion has been pledged, and Africa’s Aids epidemic already seems to be fading from our collective memory. The same fate may lie in store for the appeal by Rubens Ricupero, secretary-general of the UN Conference on Trade and Development. Presenting Unctad’s report on Africa in Geneva on Tuesday, he called on Western states to fund a massive increase in public-sector development aid for the continent. Ten billion dollars a year needed to be invested south of the Sahara, he said, if progressive pauperisation in countries there was to be brought to a halt. Under the present conditions, countries south of the Sahara could only be expected to achieve annual growth of about three per cent, and that would never enable them to recover by themselves. This growth level merely offset the additional burden imposed by population growth. The decline in public-sector aid, the fall in commodity prices, massive foreign debt and ineffective structural adaptation measures had led to countries in the region being poorer in 2001 than they were 20 years ago, Ricupero said. Despite some progress in agriculture, 28 million Africans were now suffering from food shortages. Presenting the findings of Unctad’s Africa report, he made it clear that the region’s plight could, in the medium and long term, only be surmounted if countries south of the Sahara were enabled to modernise their production and export capacities and play a full role in world trade. One of the most important prerequisites for them to do so, the report said, was the abolition of restrictions on imports of goods from developing countries. Africa, Ricupero said, depended on being able to export freely agricultural produce, raw materials and finished products such as textiles. So trade barriers needed to be eliminated. Deregulation of Western agricultural markets could lead to extra export revenues for African countries totalling well over one billion dollars, the Unctad report stresses. The abolition of top-rate importtariffs by the four leading trade blocs would enable Africa to step up its exports by 11 per cent. A lasting improvement in the situation pressuposes not just a massive initial increase in foreign aid and an end to trade barriers, but also further reform of internal structures and the restoration of peace in wide areas of the continent. The progressive decline in direct foreign investment, which continued last year, and the chronic shortage of foreign exchange are not due only to the unpredictability of international financial markets, the report claims. Unctad mainly blames nepotism and economic mismanagement, a hefty increase in crime and the spread of armed conflicts that in its opinion have led to an increasingly widespread climate of uncertainty. In recent years, Unctad estimates that 1.06 dollars has left the region for every dollar invested from abroad, 51 cents was lost as a result of the decline in world market prices, 25 cents went on debt funding and 30 cents could be put down to seepage of funds in the government apparatus and by the legal and illegal outflow of foreign exchange. The German Newspaper News Service