the ol' aid shuffle

Ten years ago we were made a promise by world leaders that in 2015, poverty and its fellow demons like infant mortality would be eradicated. With only five years left to the Millennium Development Goals and the recent end to the 2010 G8 summit, that promise is looking pretty bleak.

Oxfam International's Mark Fried has reported:

“This year the headline is maternal health, last year it was food. With overall aid frozen, the G8 are just shuffling the same money around to different pots,” said Fried. “The only promise that counts is the Gleneagles one to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010 and that is the one they have abandoned today.”

At the last G8 Summit, donors pledges $22 billion over three years to support agriculture in developing countries, but Oxfam calculates that at most $6 billion of this is new money and they are double counting it to pay for other initiatives, such as helping poor countries cope with climate change.

“There are a billion hungry people in the world but it seems the G8 are out to lunch. Instead of new money for old promises, we got old money, re-pledged, recycled and renamed.”

I find it extremely troubling how aid is shuffled from one project to another, depending on what the "hot" issue is this season. This year, it's maternal and child health. Ideally, initiatives for this cause would start right now, but if there's one thing that aid agencies never fail to produce, it's bureaucracy, which is let's be honest, necessary most of the time. But what happens when 2011 rolls around, and these projects for maternal and child health, which have probably just gotten off the ground, haven't yet "solved" the problem? The process starts all over again.

If none of these vague, overly-ambitious projects like "ending world hunger" is seen all the way through, no amount of billions of dollars will be enough.

And double counting aid? That's like writing bad checks to the world's poor.

With the financial downtown in Europe and the US and the Gulf Coast spill, can we expect our president and other leaders to fulfill their commitments?