Summary
LAST weekend, a quarter of a million people dressed in white encircled Edinburgh and hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, watched the Live8 concerts on TV. It was either the greatest ever expression of popular conscience, or the most monumental non-event in history, depending on your point of view. But while it may not have brought the world closer together, Make Poverty History has certainly brought left and right together . . . though not quite in the spirit of perfect harmony that Sir Paul McCartney would recognise.
When it comes to Africa, they are united in cynicism. Republicans like George W Bush and anti-capitalists like George Monbiot disagree violently on the causes of poverty, but they are as one in believing that aid isn't the solution. Nor do they rate Chancellor Gordon Brown's package of debt relief. Indeed, both rather think that the rich countries should just take their hands off Africa and leave it alone.See the full content of this document
Extract
If More Aid Won't Give This Girl a Better Life What Will?
The contributors to Arguments Against G8, a radical take on development politics edited by David Miller and Gill Hubbard, say that the conditions imposed on African countries by the World Bank and the IMF make poverty worse by imposing privatisation on vulnerable economies. The Chancellor's initiatives on debt and aid constitute a kind of welfare imperialism, which enslaves the third world by imposing capitalist "conditionality" a...
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