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Viewpoint
Letters to the editor
Adding beef to the Pan-African Parliament
07/2005 |
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Letters to the editor
After humanitarian aid
Why speed matters, D+C 2005:2, p. 63-65
The article paints an exact picture of the post-conflict situation in Sierra Leone. For me, the article’s maxim “delay is dangerous” goes beyond the immediate post-conflict, humanitarian assistance phase and must include also the recovery, transition and development phases, where Sierra Leone now is.
We have tried to re-establish local governance by reinstituting local councils, which have been absent for 30 years. Unfortunately, this initiative is government-led, and civil society is too weak to be an effective counter-balance. How to push forward decentralisation is our current problem.
Kenneh Kawa, Freetown, Sierra Leone
Sound EU policy
Globalisation blocks regional integration
D+C 2005:3, p. 116-118
In several respects, I have a bone to pick with Henning Melber’s opinion about the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) currently being negotiated by the European Union and ACP countries.
I do not at all like the way that Melber calls the EU’s development-friendly and contractually negotiated EPA policy “anything but helpful”, and mentions it in the same breath as the US’s completely politicised, unilateral, and almost randomly designed African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Melber’s claim that EPAs replace the Cotonou Agreement is not correct. This was never the intention. The Agreement was signed in 2000 with a term of 20 years. EPAs are an attempt to break down the very broad geographical area covered in the Cotonou framework (78 partner countries in three major regions) into subregions. The overall framework is not called into question.
Instead of accusing the EU of pursuing a “divisive strategy”, Melber should recognise that the EU is making a valuable contribution to subregional integration, especially in Africa, where there has been a lot of talk about this issue for decades, but far too little action. The EPA negotiations put some constructive pressure on the partner countries to structure themselves in subregions, enabling them to take part in negotiations at that level. I do not find it at all unusual that a few of these countries will have to choose a region to which they primarily belong to.
Indeed, this is the most important aspect of the EPA approach; for the time being, there is no talk of the ACP countries opening their markets. The EU’s Development Commissioners – and fortunately also former Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and his successor Peter Mandelson – also strongly support a multi-stage process. First, the EPA regions will have to develop their own economic strengths (this is the goal of the EU’s development aid and investments); then, their markets can be gradually opened. Long transitional periods with appropriate precautionary measures have been provided for.
Free trade alone is not a development-policy tool. Rather, three steps are necessary: first, create subregional groups of countries and promote their economic independence and competitiveness; second, carefully open these regional markets to the EU; and finally, the long-term goal is harmonious, gradual integration in the global economy as stipulated in the Maastricht Treaty. During this long phase of adjustment, the EU market will be open to ACP exports, as it has been from the very beginning and on a contractual basis. This asymmetrical design was conscientiously chosen to promote the partner countries.
Dieter Frisch, former Director-General for Development,
EU Commission, Brussels,
Rural poverty neglected
Private business and the state, D+C 2005:5, p. 179
Your advocacy of strong government support and protection of a country’s corporations does not seem such a good idea when one considers the fate of many South American countries, including Brazil, which did not do so well although they protected their industries. One has to consider the cost: protecting industry means plundering farmers, because they have to pay much more for industrial products. So, if you want to create local industrial champions, you must at the same time compensate your farmers for the resulting urban bias. The best way to do this is, as the East Asians have shown, to pay your farmers such high prices and subsidies that they can afford home-grown manufactured goods.
It seems it is now the “sententia communis” among development experts that poverty is overwhelmingly a rural phenomenon and that one has to target agriculture and the rural economy to tackle it. If donors know that, why are they so reluctant to put their money where their mouth is, i.e. give more money to farmers and villages, rather than governments and towns? I suspect that many in the development establishment are still victims of their own propaganda that poor countries are poor because we are rich, i.e. exploit the poor. Not least the rise of China, however, shows that the opposite is the case. The richer the rich become, the more the poor can profit.
Fr. Athanas Meixner, OSB, Soni, Tanzania
The editor reserves the right to shorten readers’ letters. The shorter a letter is, the greater the chance of it being published.
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