The illusion of our time

This is a book of 16 short chapters, just 166 pages long in all, to which is added another 60 pages or so of notes and appendices. It sets out to disillusion the public as to the desirability of foreign aid. Each chapter deals with a currently accepted myth about foreign aid and in general the food crisis in the Third World; each is effective in achieving its aim.

The introduction is particularly illuminating. Among other things it points out that aid programmes are not designed to help the people of the Third World, they are designed instead to help unrepresentative and usually tyrannical governments, in whose present interest it is to undertake vast agricultural and industrial projects. As the authors note:

"The misery these projects produce for the local population is justified by their presumed benefit to the greater economy: they are seen as economic imperatives in much the same way as the slave trade a century or more ago was deemed necessary for the economic progress of Western nations."

The analogy of the slave trade is very much closer than one might think. Indeed,

"the West was able to finance its slave trade itself, but most Third World governments have no such means. As a result, they have turned to the West's international financiers to see their projects through: foreign aid agencies like the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development, and the Canadian international Development Agency etc."

These International bodies, he adds, "are financing national governments against local populations".

The Anti-Slavery Society in London also compares these projects to the slave trade. This society was originally set up to combat and still combats

"Threats commonly faced by indigenous peoples throughout the world including dispossession of land, flooding of land through hydroelectric schemes, deforestation and the consequent damage to traditional agriculture, armed forces carrying out the policies of distant central governments, desecration of places of worship and ethnocide, the destruction of a culture. The enemies, wittingly or not, of indigenous peoples are multi-national companies, international funding agencies and governments bent on 'development' at all costs."

The first myth this book sets out to expose is that foreign aid is humanitarian and does not violate human rights. It does this by describing the forced displacement of tens of thousands of tribal peoples whose land Is flooded by large water development schemes financed by multilateral development banks (MDBs).

The second such myth is that eventually the billions we are spending on energy aid could pay off the Third World's poor. This pursues the same theme as that of the first chapter but accentuates the plight of those who are pushed off their land to make way for large schemes whose goal it is really to satisfy the personal interests of politicians and other parasites.

A further important myth is explained in chapter 5: the myth that the Third World with its billions of people is straining the world's resources. Indeed the World Bank, the FAO and other promoters of environmentally destructive schemes, do everything to blame the poor for the destruction of their environment.

The authors point to the environmental disasters of El Salvador, where 77 percent of the land is suffering from soil erosion and just about all its forests have been cut down. It may look as if it is the peasants who are doing the damage but then the real cause of the damage becomes clear when one finds out that 5 percent of the land owners have 70 percent of the arable land, most of which is devoted to export markets. The peasants of course are forced, as a result, to plough marginal land in the mountains which quickly erode. This would clearly not occur if most of the good land were not used for producing food for export.

Chapter 8 exposes the myth that the Third World cannot afford to worry about protecting its environment when it has more important things to worry about like 'feeding its billions'. "We cannot afford ecological luxury" stated Vasudevan Nair, Premier of India's Kerala State.

It is surprising how many educated people still believe that environmental conservation is only a concern of the middle classes, they forget that famine in the Third World today is largely the consequence of environmental degradation. People who live in an untouched, highly forested environment, teeming with game and who necessarily have ample water supplies do not starve.

Chapter 9 exposes the myth that floods are an act of God, the particular act of God incriminated in South America today being the erratic behaviour of that oceanic current called El Niño.

Thus in the 1983 annual report of the Inter-American Development Bank, we are now told, "climatic changes precipitated by El Niño current off the west coast of South America in late 1982 and early 1983 created severe drought in the dry plateau and valleys of Bolivia and produced floods in lowland areas". The authors point out that the floods like the other discontinuities we are subject to today, are the result of human mismanagement.

The authors end tip by making a number of useful recommendations concerning the way development aid should be controlled and the MDBs and the various development agencies be made accountable for their acts. Ross Campbell, ex-chairman of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd, stated at a 1978 meeting with the No Candu for Argentina Committee, Ottawa that

"Business is business and human rights is human rights."

This attitude is clearly no longer tolerable.