Kenan Malik for the guardian || Donor nations use crippling loans as weapons to promote their own interests
…Last week, during her tour of Africa, Theresa May proclaimed that, in the post-Brexit world, Britain’s aid budget would be used to promote British trade and political interests. That, though, is exactly how aid is already used. The countries that currently receive most British aid are primarily either significant markets, such as Nigeria, visited by May last week, or of geopolitical importance, particularly for the “war on terror” – Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria.The same is true of America, too. None of the poorest countries in the world is among the top recipients of US aid. Most aid goes instead to Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Afghanistan and Kenya, again for reasons of geopolitics and trade.Nor is it any different with multilateral aid (funds channelled through international organisations such as the World Bank rather than directly between donor and recipient). Again, not one of the poorest countries is among the top 10 recipients of multilateral aid.Many on the right detest foreign aid, insisting that the money should be spent at home. Many on the left laud it as a means of redistributing global wealth. But aid is not given away as charity – it is wielded as a weapon to boost trade and further political aims.Half of all international development aid is “tied”, meaning that recipient countries must use it to buy goods and services from the donor nation. As the USAid website used to boast (until the paragraph became too embarrassing and was deleted in 2006): “The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programmes has always been the United States. Close to 80% of the US Agency for International Development’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms.” Aid has “created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans”. Long before Trump entered the White House, USAid was “putting America first”.…
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