Foreign Aid: Poorest Pay, Privatisers Gain

AN ARTICLE by George Monbiot in The Guardian shows how
Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) is consciously
targeting its foreign aid at countries who are prepared to sell off their
assets to big business.

The DfID paid the Adam Smith Institute (the right-wing
lobby group that has for decades been campaigning for privatisation and
ironically, against government aid), £7.6m in foreign aid last year. That’s
more than they gave to such desperately poor countries as Liberia or Somalia.

The department hires the Institute as a consultancy that
advises third-world countries how to privatise industries. Its guidance to
South Africa’s government led to almost ten million people having their water
cut off, another ten million having their electricity cut off, and over two
million people being evicted for non-payment of bills.

The government is giving £342 million to the Indian state
of Andhra Pradesh, 15 times what it spent last year tackling the famine in
Ethiopia.

Andhra Pradesh’s government, you see, is committed to mass
privatisation. That policy will dispossess 20 million people from the land;
even the DfID says the scheme has "negative consequences on food
security" and does "nothing about providing alternative income for
those displaced".

In Zambia, DfID is spending just £700,000 on improving
nutrition, but £56 million on privatising the copper mines. In Ghana, they
made aid payments for upgrading the water system conditional on partial
privatisation. Britain’s foreign aid programme is taking vital resources –
water, land, utilities etc. – from the poor and handing them to the rich.

As Monbiot points out, aid has always been politically
biased, and has also been designed to give aid to home-based exports. Nearly
80% of the US Agency for International Development’s grants and contracts go to
US firms directly.

The world is dominated by capitalism. A third of the
world’s private assets are under the control of at most 40,000 private
companies, mostly based in the advanced capitalist countries. The profits of
these greedy giants are swollen by squeezing the life out of the world’s
poorest people. A partial and lopsided development is the best that capitalism
can offer the ex-colonial world.

Real aid designed to end world hunger and poverty will only
become possible if we fight for socialism and start by taking these huge
companies into democratic public ownership. We could then start to plan a real
increase in world living standards to end world poverty and hunger.