Michael D Higgins (Galway West, Labour)

I welcome the opportunity to make a few remarks on the White Paper. There is little in its 90 pages of text with which I disagree. I want to raise some issues by way of bringing forward the debate as the Minister for Foreign Affairs has suggested will happen in the next few months. The commitment on Irish aid to be delivered by 2010 will be welcome, however it is important that we do not regard 0.7% as a limit. Countries in Scandinavia have already exceeded 1%. I am thinking of Norway and two other countries. The White Paper's emphasis on real aid is welcome and correct. When one adjusts the Irish figures as a proportion of gross national income, even if one deducts €1.4 billion, which might be strictly separate from development, one would still arrive at a figure of between 0.41% and 0.43%. This is in contrast to the European Union figures as regards aid, which are not straightforward. I shall go so far as to say they are dishonestly presented as development achievements. Some of the strongest economies in Europe count expenditure which is not development related as part of their achievement towards the 0.7%. This is very serious. Take just two items, for example, the Iraq and Nigeria debt cancellations. In the case of Austria it was 52% of what it claimed as its ODA achievement — Germany 32%, UK 31%, Italy 29%, France 19% and Belgium 20%. The figures have to be adjusted back to see what is the true position as regards achieving the United Nations target.

As regards the ten newer countries in the European Union, there is not a remote possibility that they will achieve 0.14% by their particular target date. This is not an academic exercise, far from it. There is cross-party support for Irish Aid as non-tied aid, and I welcome that and the fact that we present figures that are transparent. However, I suggest we are not winning the battle at a global level. The millennium development goals do not refer to the elimination of poverty, but rather its reduction. Nor do they speak about the universal provision of certain basic necessities. They speak about their gradual achievement. I would have preferred a strong hinge between the Irish White Paper and the millennium development goals for a reason which I shall make clear. The likelihood at present in terms of the commitments made at international conferences is that they will not be achieved by 2150. A question mark hangs over the European Union achieving its United Nations target by 2015. I am suggesting that there is no difficulty in Ireland achieving its target by 2012. That having been said, the atmosphere in which we are losing the battle against poverty is one in which 3 billion are living on less than $2 a day, 30,000 are dying of starvation every day, 186 million are out of work and 12.3 million are in forced labour. What is happening, too, is that the income divide on the planet is increasing rather than decreasing.

The only academic point I will make is that in 1820 the ratio between rich and poor was about 3:1. By 1950 it was 35:1, by 1973 it was 44:1 and in 1999 it was 74:1. Gross inequality is growing at the same time as poverty is deepening. There have been reductions in the most acute levels of poverty, but the numbers who are condemned to low nutrition, deprived of sanitation and clean water are not becoming fewer. Instead the population push in some of the poorest countries is putting such people at risk. At the moment some 800 million people are starving, 1 billion are without clean water, 2 billion are without access to sanitation, 2 billion are dying of AIDS and 175 million are caught up in international migratory movements and are particularly at risk. There are 940 million people who are illiterate and so forth. The context in which international aid must be assessed is, in fact, getting worse. Equally, I want to express deep disappointment at what has been produced at the level of the European Union, The EU Strategy for Africa, Commissioner Louis Michel's document, published in June 2006, which fails to draw clear conclusions. I have limitations of time, so I must come rather quickly to some of the fundamental points that should be part of the further discussion I hope will take place when the White Paper travels around the country.

It is a matter of disappointment that the White Paper was not able to say that Ireland would have ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption. At the moment there are about 27 UN conventions which we have signed but not ratified. The one I ask about most frequently is the United Nations Convention against Corruption, but it is unlikely that it will be ratified in the lifetime of this Government. It is awaiting clearance from the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, which suggests that there are several different areas in which it has to be examined before we can offer compliance. It will come into effect, however, because it will have achieved the appropriate level of signatures for ratification, during 2006. The White Paper would have been stronger if there was a clear reference indicating that the convention would be ratified in the lifetime of this Government, but it does not say so.

Again as regards corruption, it is important for western governments to take account of the good research that is taking place on the ground. I am thinking of Professor Svendsen's work from Sweden, for example, which showed something very simple in the case of Uganda, namely that if there is publication of the allocations in a newspaper that is read locally, the amount of funds disbursed dramatically increases. In one five-year longitudinal study it went from 23%, which made its way to schools, to 87%. There are practical measures that can be taken as regards getting full accountability.

If one is going to speak about the elimination of corruption, it behoves one to look at the mote in one's own eye. At the moment not one country in the European Union has ratified the United Nations Convention against Corruption. Again, I do not have the time to go into detail but I have shown how the figures give a gloss. The strongest economies in Europe are not meeting their targets as regards development. The Minister of State will be aware of the EU African Peace Facility. That will come out of the development budget. The figures are apparently going up, but they are not actually being spent on development. There is need for clarification, and it would have been worthwhile if there had been a more detailed treatment in the White Paper of the concept of good governance. Good governance is fast becoming a discredited concept. I recall when sustainable development was introduced at the Rio conference on the environment, which I attended. I saw sustainable development as a concept become degraded as it was abused by those who had no commitment to its fundamental character. Equally, in the case of good governance, that has been studied as a single concept, for example, by the Raoul Wallenberg Institute in Sweden, which commissioned a set of scholars to examine exactly what was meant by this concept. If it means, for example, having democratic accountability in African states, that is one thing. On the other hand, if it means offering transparency to international capital À la the World Bank's prescriptions, that is an entirely different concept. The scholarly evidence at the moment is that it is the latter rather than the former and therefore it will be very difficult to hinge this concept into African experience.

I found the debate on development a good deal richer at the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s in respect of a number of other issues I would like to have seen treated more extensively in the White Paper, particularly technology transfer. In the 1970s we discussed the difference between, for example, indigenous, appropriate and advanced technology, which was creating high levels of dependency. What we meant by this was that the transitions that were taking place in agriculture, which affected 80% of the population, would have required a simpler technology. At the same time, however, the elites in the capital cities of many African countries, for example, found it easier to be dealing with multinationals in terms of very advanced technology without the follow-on expertise to repair and maintain equipment. Many of us who have been in Africa have seen abandoned pieces of machinery which cannot be repaired without the appropriate technologists, parts etc. Of course, many of these were not aid at all, but hidden exports. A close look at the Italian aid, for example, would tell a great deal in that regard.

I agree with previous speakers that the White Paper — a Government White Paper rather than a Department of Foreign Affairs White Paper — should have been a whole of Government approach. One cannot really speak about the development issue without speaking about aid, trade and debt together. As I have pointed out, the European Union countries have started fiddling figures to show, for example, that Nigerian or Iraqi debt relief can be counted in what is being achieved in development. That is not necessarily so, and it is having a secondary development effect.

With regard to agriculture, issues arising relating to trade are very important. It is unconscionable that there is an export of the terminator technology which is essentially putting genetically modified seed into Africa. People who have worked on the ground, including aid workers, will indicate that it is the pattern in Africa that when the second rains come and preparations are being made, seed is left at the bottom of the sack for planting. That is as we did in Ireland in the old days. This seed will now be infertile, and that is the seed now being dumped into Africa, particularly by US aid. When the product was banned in one country it was quickly moved to another. This is disastrous for African agriculture.

There are negotiations on finished and processed goods. If one looked at the amount of frozen chicken being sent from Germany to some African countries, one would find it is being done in a way that is little less than dumping, with the net effect of stopping small chicken farms coming into existence. Compliance in Africa under newly-negotiated bilateral trade agreements or Doha could have a negative effect. The primary products in Africa have been falling disastrously in price as a result. The figures are over 70%, relating to prices of cotton, cocoa and other basic products.

It is very important we realise that we must not have an imposed single model of development. I believe the White Paper did not deal with that in detail. It begs the question of how there can be different roads to development. For example, many countries will want to move through food security, food surpluses and simple exports, and onward to achieve an export-led form of growth. Although the World Bank denies it, the kind of model being imposed is very much a case of one size fits all.

The figures I have described are true in Africa, and the suggestion that what is needed there is a private enterprise model is nonsense. I noticed a great intolerance whenever I discussed the detail of NEPAD, for example. That requires about 12% seed money from Nigeria and South Africa. If people are living on a dollar a day, with 77 cents being spent on survival, 23 cents will be available for the management of the surplus.

It is one of the worrying features of Africa in particular that the flight of money out of Africa is not being made a matter of comment. Yet it is very real. A previous speaker mentioned that there are more doctors from Malawi working in Great Britain than in Malawi, and that is true. Many Western countries are bleeding very important skills, desperately needed for survival itself, from African countries.

With regard to a number of fundamental principles, when we write a future White Paper, its central piece will deal with water. If I was writing this White Paper or offering advice on it, I would suggest that the next White Paper should be within the framework of human rights. The Norwegian White Paper tried to do this. Human rights in this case means a human-rights informed policy, and a set of guidelines based on human rights practice. At the centre of such an approach would be, for example, the establishment as a universal right to water, or taking the Food and Agricultural Organisation's prescription of the right to freedom from starvation.

However, the White Paper is not a rights-based document in many ways. It advocates human rights. In future, as we have the discussion around the country, we should seek to craft it in terms of departing from human rights-based principles as policy and human rights-based principles as practice.

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