Make Poverty History

Jupiler · Post by **Jupiler** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 1:25 am

excellent examples to sectors which have the trade embargo probs in "3rd world countries" are cocoa & sugar...

Tare made it up pretty nice tbh

Cernos · Post by **Cernos** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:16 am

Clearing Africa's debt without solving the problems of corruption are nothing but a short term fix. War won't solve the problems either - nothing will be achieved by the G8 nations invading those African nations with corrupt regimes (aren't many of Africa's problems precisely because the likes of Britain, France et al interfered with that continent with their Empires in the first place?). African people themselves need to take the lead in kicking out their corrupt leaders and be fully supported in doing so, not abandoned by the international community. The incentive should be a direct link between debt clearance and cleaning up corruption, and then to remove trade barriers so African nations can trade on an equal footing with the European Community, USA etc.

Argyleyn · Post by **Argyleyn** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:50 am

What they really should do is not stop more government loans to those countries (sell the debt to the private sector). Private banks loaning money is fine ... they will automatically factor in the risk (you are a dictator ... well you have to pay 20% interest, if the government is more stable, they get a lower interest rate). This creates an incentive for stabilising your government. This means that even if you stablise your govenment, you don't get any reduction in the interest rate

Government stability has nothing to do with the nature of the regime. A dictatorship can be a very stable government, there are numerous examples of that.

Also, it's more likely -if you watch things from such a strict econimic point of view- to fund and invest in the most ruthless dictatorships, since they have absolute control over their countries' wealth sources and they aren't subject to any control. Latin America is a good example of this, all the dictatorships were exactly based and funded by american private companies who had huge interests in exploiting those countries, while the local population was being supressed and stolen from its country's wealth.

Africa's problems imo have mostly to do with its past as a european colony. They split the countries in an absolutely absurd way, having in mind the prospect of dragging them into non ending civil wars so that the european influence wouldn't decrease even after providing independance to those countries. Most of the corrupted governments have ties with some side of their former europeans conquerors and are supported by them. Also, the notion of trying to skip 1000 years of political evolution and going from a tribal system to a 20th century western democratic regime hasn't exactly helped.

I think Africa's problem are for Africans to solve, Europe has done enough already and it wasn't any help.

Post by **Xest** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:18 pm

Cernos wrote:Clearing Africa's debt without solving the problems of corruption are nothing but a short term fix. War won't solve the problems either - nothing will be achieved by the G8 nations invading those African nations with corrupt regimes (aren't many of Africa's problems precisely because the likes of Britain, France et al interfered with that continent with their Empires in the first place?). African people themselves need to take the lead in kicking out their corrupt leaders and be fully supported in doing so, not abandoned by the international community. The incentive should be a direct link between debt clearance and cleaning up corruption, and then to remove trade barriers so African nations can trade on an equal footing with the European Community, USA etc.

Not entirely true - whilst a lot of the problems in Africa can be attributed to our empires, it was made worse by the fact Britain was forced to hand back countries by the international community even though those countries just weren't ready to govern themselves. Of course, Britain shouldn't have been in there in the first place, but then you can say the Romans shouldn't have been in half of Europe, Germany shouldn't have been in Poland, Argentina shouldn't have been in the Falklands etc. etc. Whilst Britain is most certainly not innocent, the pressure to give up our imperialistic ways throughout instead of being allowed to continue holding countries until they were ready and stable to govern themselves is why a lot of African countries are like they are now.

As for France, they're pretty much in the same boat as us, the problem with France is they're still extremely eager to sell weapons to unstable countries - the real reason they didn't want us going into Iraq is because disbanding the Iraq army hurt their arms trades with Iraq. Also, more worryingly, France is trying to lift the arms embargo on China right now so they can sell weapons to China which as we all know is one of the biggest threats to world peace right now - particularly if Taiwan declares independance.

If anything we need to stop countries like France arming "dangerous" nations and unstable regimes, if anyone's seen Hotel Rwanda the weaponry used in that tragedy was all French supplied. Of course, it's hard to define what a dangerous nation is and we certainly shouldn't be stupid enough to allow the likes of George Bush (and probably Blair in fact) to define which nations are. Again, England isn't totally innocent here, we've sold weapons to people and places we shouldn't have in the past, but afaik we've learnt our lesson in that area.

Post by **Lairiodd** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 3:42 pm

so .... its basically a way to transfer money from taxpayers in rich countries to arms corps in rich countries

... Africa is beside the point

.

Post by **Xest** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 5:20 pm

Essentially, to cut a long story short, the problem is ensuring the money is spent on the right things and both the corrupt regimes stealing the money and the countries allowing the corrupt regimes to buy weapons and such off them are the ones at fault, the EU taking many more measures to prevent the likes of France and other guilty nations selling arms to unstable nations would do Africa as much good as cancelling debt would - but the French reaction would likely be the typical attempts at moving the focus away from them as they did recently for example by bringing up the UK's EU rebate to hide the fact they screwed up the EU constitution, even though with the rebate the UK still pumps far more money into the EU and gets far less out than they do.

The key is to stop weapons getting into the wrong hands, of course you can never totally stop that, but whilst certain countries are selling thousands upon thousands of bullets to these nations there's thousands and thousands more lives at risk from those bullets than there would be without them and it's things like that that need to be focussed on in reality - preventing new arms getting over there and seizing as many existing arms caches as possible. Of course this does bring further issues, like who polices the countries when no one at all has enough arms to do so? The logical answer would be the developer nations but this brings many more problems, such as:
1) People will see it as an invasion of their country
2) Who's to say democracy, as much as we get it shoved down our throats is how their country should be run? After all it is their country, not ours - in some ways it's little different to Hitler wanting to spread his regime throughout Europe albeit with much less extreme measures (death camps etc.)
3) Do western powers even have the resources to police the whole of Africa? Not likely with Bush/Blair stretching their forces in Iraq and Afghanistan to name the two most prominent places right now.

It's certainly not an easy problem - not one that simply cancelling 3rd world debt can solve as a certain few self-promoting celebs like to make out, the difficulty is when these celebs do make out that that's all that's needed, the people who beleive them are going to be wondering why the hell things haven't worked out when it is done, not understanding the full depth of the problem. Again as much as I praise these celebs for bringing it to the attention of the world, I lose as much respect for not bringing the fully story out so that people can understand the problem, however I guess the question is, how do you get all the details out without boring half the people paying attention to death making them lose interest in the cause altogether?

Bourkey · Post by **Bourkey** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 7:14 pm

I agree with you Xest, but if cancelling alot of the debts can help some of the countries that are not under control by a corrupt government, and would seriously benefit from the debt being cancelled then it is surely worth doing. But yes there are far deeper and heavier problems here and it is going to take a long time to sort out and in the long run it isnt as simple as cancelling the debt.

Post by **Xest** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 7:29 pm

Bourkey wrote:I agree with you Xest, but if cancelling alot of the debts can help some of the countries that are not under control by a corrupt government, and would seriously benefit from the debt being cancelled then it is surely worth doing. But yes there are far deeper and heavier problems here and it is going to take a long time to sort out and in the long run it isnt as simple as cancelling the debt.

Agree certainly, this is the same issue as when England was forced to forget it's imperial era and leave the countries to look after themselves by the international community - whilst English should never have had to leave some that weren't ready to be left there are certainly some other countries that have done well because we left them - it all needs to be looked at on a country by country basis, you can't just say "There's Africa, let's just do such and such in Gambia and that'll solve the problems in Nigeria" which is another thing a lot of people fail to realise, Africa is more than just a single country with a single problem, it's a lot of countries with a lot of problems.