I spent three summers at as a lifeguard for a ritzy tennis club after my senior year of high school and after my freshman and sophomore years of college. Among other experiences, I remember a particularly all-too-tanned leathery old lady who was usually one of the first members in the pool each day. (She was a real life Magda from Something About Mary.) She would invariably comment to us that "the water is delicious!" I'd never heard anyone describe their swimming experience in this way which is why I guess it has stuck in my head. I thought of that the expression reading this post by Tim Blair describing a bit of a problem with the latest celebrity attempt at shaming the rest of us for failing the world's poor. That is, to paraphrase "Magda," "The irony is delicious!"
FASHIONABLE wristbands worn by pop stars, actors, top athletes and celebrities to publicise the Make Poverty History campaign are produced in appalling "slave labour" conditions, damning evidence has revealed.
Chinese factory workers producing the white rubber bracelets are forced to toil in conditions that violate Chinese law and the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) set up to establish international standards for working conditions.
The revelations are laid bare in sensitive "ethical audits" of factories that make the must-have fashion accessories for the national Make Poverty History campaign begun by a partnership of over 400 charities.
Too funny. Deliciously funny, I'd say. But more importantly, Blair also links to this excellent post by Stephen Pollard that really obliterates the "send more money now" style of poverty aid that celebs tend to favor. Read the whole thing, but this is the basic gist.
According to Make Poverty History: “We need trade justice, not free trade . . . ensuring poor countries can feed their people by protecting their own farmers and staple crops.” With that, the campaign destroys any claim it might have to serving the interests of the poor.
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The engine of growth, without which countries remain in poverty, is trade. Tariff protection keeps resources in unproductive, low-return activities such as the type of farming which Make Poverty History seeks to entrench. Free trade shifts resources to more productive uses. Take Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea and India: while they maintained their tariffs, they remained stuck in poverty, the only thing which tariffs protect. As recently as the early 1980s they were poor countries. Their incomes per head ranged from $700 (£350) to $7,000. Today they range from $2,000 to more than $21,000. Even India, one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s and 1970s, is on the road to prosperity. In 1991 the Indian Government reacted to a financial near-collapse by cutting forty years of bureaucratic control in seven hours. Its economy now grows much faster than its population and India is becoming one of the leading exporters of computer software and services. There is a vast new middle class of 250 million.
Trade with the rest of the world has allowed these countries to attract the investment that brought them comparative advantages in the manufacture of an ever-widening range of products. Sectors in which they have no comparative advantage have shrunk as a proportion of national output and been replaced by cheaper, better imports.
It is not just swivel-eyed market zealots who realise the importance of trade. According to Oxfam, if Africa could increase its share of world trade by just 1 per cent, it would earn an extra £49 billion a year; enough to lift 128 million people out of extreme poverty. Trade is the key, and the protective tariffs that Brad Pitt wants to impose on the populations of the Third World destroy trade.
The abolition of debt and an increase in aid — in effect the same thing — are red herrings. Far from rewarding governments for the disastrous policies that have kept their populations in poverty by handing over more aid for them to siphon off, a campaign to make poverty history would champion open trade, reduced regulation and, critically, property rights.
Much Third World poverty is the result of governments taking the decision, in effect, to remain poor. The conditions under which they can prosper are known, and available, if those in power choose to avail themselves of them. As Hernando de Soto (who has done much to alleviate poverty, not least through his seminal book, The Mystery of Capital) points out, it is easy to make a country prosperous. It needs only security of life and property, and markets in which property rights can be valued and traded. The West’s prosperity is built on property rights and the rule of law; it is the denial of those rights which causes poverty and prevents growth.
The World Bank report, Doing Business in 2005, shows many of the regulatory and bureaucratic obstacles to prosperity. Registering property requires one step in Norway, but 16 in Algeria. To incorporate a business takes two days in Canada, but 153 in Mozambique. In Haiti, it takes 203 days to register a company, 201 days longer than in Australia. In Sierra Leone it costs 1,268 per cent of average income, compared with nothing in Denmark. To register in Ethiopia, a would-be entrepreneur must deposit the equivalent of 18 years’ average income in a bank account, which is then frozen. In Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, recording a property sale involves 21 procedures and takes 274 days.
It is a crying shame that efforts, celebrity and otherwise, aren't as clearly focused on what works as they should be. It's a total disaster for the people living in the underdeveloped world that there is still so much pressure to continue with monster aid packages that don't address the real problems. Happily, this new poll from Britain suggesting that the people there are fed up with throwing money at the problem when there are few tangible results to speak of.
A huge majority of Britons believes that pumping billions of pounds into Africa would be a waste of money, a verdict that is a major blow to Tony Blair's crusade to rescue the continent.
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It also shows that 79 per cent of voters believe that corruption and incompetence were to blame for Africa's problems.
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However, the poll indicates that many Britons remain suspicious of the way money given to Africa would be spent.
YouGov asked how confident respondents were that donated money would be spent wisely, "rather than being wasted or finding its way into the pockets of criminals and corrupt governments".
More than 80 per cent said they were either "not very confident" (41 per cent) or "not at all confident" (42 per cent). Only 11 per cent expressed some confidence that the aid would not be squandered.
The public's lack of faith in Africa's ability to cure its own ills was also revealed when respondents were asked to identify three factors most to blame for the condition of the continent.
Corrupt and incompetent government was seen as the main problem, with 79 per cent citing it as a factor. More than half of respondents also cited the HIV/Aids epidemic and civil wars.
By contrast only a minority said factors for which the West was responsible - such as colonialism, exploitation by multinationals or protectionist trade policies - were among the principal causes of African poverty.
Fewer than 10 per cent said the continent's problems could not be solved. A majority said Africans could help themselves with assistance from rich countries.
The article also discusses how this poll may effect Tony Blair's platform towards Africa, but it's interesting to see that the people are pretty much fed up with having their money used to prolong the kleptocracies that are responsible for so much of the continent's misery. The Telegraph also has a page with the poll results here.
