TROCAIRE has called on the EU to sponsor policies that would develop alternative crops to drugs in developing countries. "Bananas don't sell as well on the streets of Dublin as heroin," Mr Justin Kilcullen, director of Trocaire, said at the publication of its Development Review 1996.
Although GNP was "shooting through the roof" in Ireland, marginalisation was increasing. If the current economic approach "doesn't work here, how can it work in Brazil or Central America?" he asked.
The theme of the publication is "Trade and Globalisation". In an article on drugs, Mr Andy Atkins, of the Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR), writes that the Irish EU Presidency has "a crucial opportunity" to help develop a realistic alternative policy.
Mr Kilcullen said that east Asia the opium industry started by France and continued by the CIA with destabilisation and control in mind. Yet a country like Laos, which was "communist to boot", was on a development aid blacklist.
"That bluff has to be called." The west, including the EU, "can't have its cake and eat it" by refusing to integrate its drugs control policies with its overall policy towards the world's poorest nations, said Mr Kilcullen, implicitly pointing a finger at the Irish presidency, which has crime drugs as its theme.
Under the Maastricht Treaty, the EU was committed to such an integrated approach, and the EU could do an enormous amount to persuade the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to reform their structural adjustment programmes to assist farmers towards alternative crops band their marketing, said Mr Kilcullen.
Introducing the review, Mr Pat Gallagher, the Labour chairman of the Oireachtas Committee on Development Cooperation, said Ireland was given time and transitional consideration in its first years as an EU member. Speaking in place of the Minister for Justice, Mrs Owen, he pleaded for the same sort of tolerance for poor southern countries now facing free trade and economic globalisation.
Development Review 1996 also carries an article by Dr Marcos Arruda, the Brazilian left wing academic, offering a southern world perspective on neo liberal adjustment and globalisation.
Mr Peadar Kirby, a Dublin City University lecturer, notes a growing marginalisation in Chile, Latin America's macro economic miracle model. An article by the late Erskine Childers - who Mr Kilcullen said had remarked "Development is about people, the rest is technique" - addresses reforming the UN.