Madam, - I read Donal Conlon's letter of August 9th with genuine sadness that the author would have agreed with me three years ago, but has been soured by his experience in Mozambique and from his conversations with expatriates working for NGOs, whom he suggests hide their real views from the sponsoring agencies. Such conversations are not new. I have heard them myself more than two decades ago in Tanzania, but I do not accept the suggestion of general bad faith among development workers.
I must also correct an impression his letter suggests. In my article of August 4th I was at pains to stress the connectedness of aid, debt relief, trade, reform of the international financial institutions and such issues as technology transfer.
I did not suggest an indiscriminate and total reliance on aid, as he seems to suggest. I believe in neither an inevitable connection between aid and economic growth or in an inevitable connection between economic growth and a general increase in public welfare. The distribution of the benefits of growth is crucial. I believe it is necessary to resume the discussion on the connection between basic needs and human rights. I also believe it is possible to combine such an approach with a development model that sees growth as an end point benefiting the many rather than as a condition imposed for the benefit of the few.
I do welcome a debate on development. After the G8 it is important to continue a critique of the existing international economic order and its replacement by a new economic order that would re-link ethics with economics, and morality with foreign policy.
We are entering a most important month for all of these issues. The United Nations general assembly will hear a report on the progress, or lack of it, towards the achievement of the World Millennium Goals which include the halving of global poverty, mass primary education and the provision of treatment on a universal basis for HIV/Aids. In September also there will be meetings of the boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The achievement of the World Millennium Development Goals and the modest aims of the G8 conference in relation to debt relief and aid depend on the changing of their rules by such institutions.
As to Mr Conlon's reference to Africans' "lack of belief that they themselves can achieve something or make things happen", their "stoicism" and their "low self-esteem", I recall all of these characteristics being attributed to countries such as Ireland in the heyday of modernisation theory, in the Princeton studies of the late 1950s and early 1960s. I would have hoped we had moved on from that ideological model of the world with its assumptions of superiority on the one hand and inferiority on the other. For decades the poverty of the poor was explained in the characteristics of the poor.
Yes, it is time for a debate on all of the issues: We should discuss corruption and not only deal with those who are corrupted, but also those who corrupt. We should press for the ratification by the necessary number of members of the UN of the United Nations Convention on the elimination of corruption. We should resume the debates of the 1970s on technology transfer. In a continent where 70 per cent of the poor live in rural areas we should examine what technology is best suited to meet not just basic needs, but to create the conditions for development.
We should ensure that the resumed Ministerial Conference of the WTO in Hong Kong in December gets back to being a genuine development round. And yes, Mr Conlon, we have to face up to the issue of trade distorting, subsidies. I have no difficulty with that.
This is not a time for name-calling. Nor is it a time for falling back on old prejudices, cultural assumptions, and narrow versions of economics and sociology that carried the crippling burden, the detritus, of colonialism and colonisation. It is a time for new, committed and original thought in the social sciences. - Yours, etc,
MICHAEL D HIGGINS TD Dáil Éireann, Kildare Street, Dublin 2.