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| Bill and Melinda Gates |
Bill and Melinda Gates are pushing improvements in farming as important in relieving poverty in Asia and Africa, including $1.7 billion donated from a fund they have created with billionaire Warren Buffet.
Another initiative is the Global Agricultural and Food Security Program which Canada joined last year with a donation of $230 million. The U.S. pledged $475 million, but has so far only given $66.6 million; that, plus other national laggards, leaves the fund with only 45 per cent of the money promised on the eve of the first disbursements to Africa and Asia.
While Canada found the money for this donation, it is planning to cut international aid by $1.8 billion between now and fiscal 2014-15. It is also shifting money out of Africa and Asia, which have some of the poorest nations and people in the world, to South and Central America and the Caribbean.
Namango Ngongi, president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, says farming productivity is so low that even minor improvements yield big gains.
Gates told a Chicago audience recently that nations’ concerns about fiscal problems “shouldn’t become a crisis of courage and it should not force cuts in programs that pay huge returns.”
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa has been pleading for money from the Canadian International Development Agency, but so far has only received minor funding from Canada via its Canadian International Development Research Centre.
African economist Dambisa Mayo has written a book called Dead Aid in which she argues that international (multilateral) aid money is easy pickings for corrupt politicians.
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| Dead Aid author Dambisa Mayo |
The same is true for money given directly country to country (bilateral aid), she says, because the African politicians don’t have to answer to their people for money they take; if they raised the money through local taxation, they would be held accountable, she says.
But she also praises direct aid through non-government organizations that bypass governments, and she is particularly impressed by Kiva, a micro-credit organization that uses the internet to link donors with recipients.
Bev Oda, the cabinet minister responsible for the Canadian International Development Agency, has cut funding for a number of non-government agencies.
She was judged guilty of “misleading” the House of Commons, a polite term for lying, when she indicated she did not know who made the decision to cut funding for KAIROS, a Christian NGO. Later she confessed that it was her who made the decision to insert “not” in the CIDA staff recommendation on extending funding for KAIROS.
A number of people, including e-mails from me, have urged Oda to retain funding for NGOs and, if she’s short of money, to divert a slice of the funds that have been going via the channels that Moyo criticizes as counter-productive.
