When one door closes, you would hope that another opens. As the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was formally shut down on Monday, a once-in-a-decade development financing conference was beginning in Seville, Spain.
While initially intended to move the world closer to its ambitious 2030 sustainable development goals, it now looks more like an attempt to prevent a reversal of the progress already made.
A study published in the Lancet predicted that US President Donald Trump’s aid cuts could claim more than 14 million lives by 2030, one-third of them among children.
For many poor countries, the scale of the shock would be similar to that of a major war, the authors found. More than four-fifths of the US agency’s programs have been cut, with surviving projects folded into the US Department of State.
The US was by far the world’s largest donor to global development — although its contributions were a fraction of the G7 target of 0.7 percent of GDP.
Yet the damage does not end there. Its move has encouraged others to follow suit. The UK, Germany and France are slashing their aid budgets to spend more on defense.
Oxfam said that the collective retrenchment by G7 nations is the biggest aid cut since 1960, with spending 26 percent lower next year than it was last year.
Do not expect China or the Gulf states to fill this gaping hole.
It is not just grim news for aid recipients. It bodes ill for all. It would be naive to imagine that aid is a high-mindedly altruistic endeavor. Just as conflict breeds hunger and poverty, so injustice and deprivation breed instability and a more dangerous world. Slashing health budgets also increases the risks of another global pandemic.
Developing countries hoped that the UN and Spanish-hosted International Conference on Financing for Development would at least see a willingness to tackle an international financial system stacked against the global majority. Instead, the US, the UK, the EU and others shamefully acted as blockers, watering down the language on a UN intergovernmental process to tackle the debt crisis. The US reportedly proposed 400 amendments across a multitude of issues to the conference’s outcome document before pulling out entirely. Others would need to be held to their too-limited commitments.
More than two-fifths of the global population live in low-income countries which are in debt distress or close to it. Many poor African nations are spending more on debt financing than they are on health or education.
Contrary to popular perception — and any sense of justice and decency — wealth is flowing from those countries to developed nations. The UN says that servicing debt cost developing countries US$847 billion last year, rising to US$947 billion this year.
Yet developed countries are choosing to shore up an unfair global financial system. The keenness of the UK and others to focus on private sector-oriented solutions looks like better news for the City of London than developing nations. The promise that private finance would turn “billions to trillions” was enthusiastically promoted a decade ago, yet largely failed to materialize.
Despite the enduring inequality, the past few decades saw extraordinary progress in areas such as cutting child mortality. For all their flaws, USAID-funded programs alone saved almost 92 million lives over 20 years.
We know that remarkable leaps in human well-being are possible. We will all regret it if, in this time of conflict and crisis, we slam the door shut on such advances and block out the call of justice.
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Eating at a breakfast shop the other day, I turned to an old man sitting at the table next to mine. “Hey, did you hear that the Legislative Yuan passed a bill to give everyone NT$10,000 [US$340]?” I said, pointing to a newspaper headline. The old man cursed, then said: “Yeah, the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] canceled the NT$100 billion subsidy for Taiwan Power Co and announced they would give everyone NT$10,000 instead. “Nice. Now they are saying that if electricity prices go up, we can just use that cash to pay for it,” he said. “I have no time for drivel like
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