STWR - Share The World's Resources

CAP's defenders argue that it supports small, poor farmers, but data from the Rural Payments Agency shows that affluent Lincolnshire receives more cash than all of the North West, where there are three times as many farms.

'These figures reveal the regional inequality at the heart of the CAP,' said Jack Thurston, an agriculture expert at the German Marshall Fund. 'Payments are skewed towards large, efficient agribusinesses andwealthy landowners. It is no surprise to see the intensive farms of East Anglia coming out on top.'

The regional breakdown of payments to farmers in England, released under the Freedom of Information Act, shows that, while the South East received £212m of subsidies last year, just £86m went to the North West and £96m to the North East.

Beijing bows to pressure from Washington and drops peg to the dollar but Asian exporters may reap greater benefit than the US

China made its biggest monetary shift in more than a decade yesterday by revaluing the yuan and dropping the currency's peg to the dollar.

In a long-anticipated move, the central bank announced that the yuan's value will now be linked to a basket of currencies. The immediate impact was a 2.1% appreciation against the dollar.

China's leaders have frequently talked of the economic desirability of a more flexible exchange rate currency, but the timing of the latest move appears to be political.

Coming two months before China's president, Hu Jintao, is scheduled to visit Washington, the adjustment appears to be aimed at heading off rising US discontent at the bilateral trade deficit, which reached a record $162bn (£92bn) last year.

Debt relief alone won't relieve third-world poverty

With President Bush at the table, the "spin masters" who put a victorious gloss on all his actions had little need to lower expectations concerning the outcome of the G8 meeting at Gleneagles - agreement by the G8 to debt relief is a major event. But we should not be fooled; much of the debt would not have been repaid in any case. More debt relief - encompassing more countries - is needed, but debt relief should be viewed as just a start. As Britain itself has pointed out, developing countries need more assistance and a fairer international trade regime.

Even after the increases in annual assistance promised by Bush in Scotland, the US will still be giving less than a quarter of its commitment of 0.7% of GDP. Of course, not all foreign-aid money is well spent. But the aim should be to improve the efficiency of government, to make sure we get the most value for what we spend. In this there have been marked improvements in recent years. For example, the World Bank has been allocating more of its money to countries with a proven track record in spending money well. It has been exploring new ways of "delivering" aid, sometimes using state and local governments where that appears more effective.

I began to realise how much trouble we were in when Hilary Benn, the secretary of state for international development, announced that he would be joining the Make Poverty History march on Saturday. What would he be chanting, I wondered? "Down with me and all I stand for"?

Benn is the man in charge of using British aid to persuade African countries to privatise public services; wasn't the march supposed to be a protest against policies like his? But its aims were either expressed or interpreted so loosely that anyone could join. This was its strength and its weakness. The Daily Mail ran pictures of Gordon Brown and Bob Geldof on its front page, with the headline "Let's Roll", showing that nothing either Live 8 or Make Poverty History has done so far represents a threat to power.

The G8 leaders and the business interests their summit promotes can absorb our demands for aid, debt, even slightly fairer terms of trade, and lose nothing. They can wear our colours, speak our language, claim to support our aims, and discover in our agitation not new constraints but new opportunities for manufacturing consent. Justice, this consensus says, can be achieved without confronting power.

They invite our representatives to share their stage, we invite theirs to share ours. The economist Noreena Hertz offers, according to the commercial speakers' agency that hires her, "real solutions for businesses and individuals. Hertz teaches companies how to be smart and avoid the frictions that surface when corporate interests conflict with private life ... the political right is not necessarily wrong." Then she stands on the Make Poverty History stage and calls for poverty to be put at the top of the agenda. There is, as far as some of the MPH organisers are concerned, no contradiction: the new consensus denies that there's a conflict between ending poverty and business as usual.

The G8 leaders have seized this opportunity with both hands. Multinational corporations, they argue, are not the cause of Africa's problems but the solution. From now on they will be responsible for the relief of poverty.

Drop the debt? Whose debt?

James Waters ~ STWR Member

If you returned home one day to find that your neighbour had bought a car ? a Mercedes ? for themselves, but wanted you to pay for it, you would be understandably upset. If your neighbour had moreover re-mortgaged your house and beat up your family using baseball bats bought with the money, you would be rightly distressed with them and the bank which had provided the mortgage.

Such a scenario is ridiculous in the developed world, but at an international level it has unfortunate parallels in the way loans are made to some developing country governments. Take the case of Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its former leader notched up US$13 billion in external debt for it between 1970 and 1996, the year he left office. The money in large part vanished into the coffers of his friends and family, although there were a few white-elephant projects, his hometown was beautified, and his parties were "it is widely admitted" great events. The US$13 billion debt is still hanging over the heads of the Congolese people, who survive on around US$0.33 per day on official GDP figures.

Ethiopia (US$0.30 per day) clocked up US$9 billion in debt between 1975 and 1991. These years saw a regime which was alleged to be responsible for the murder of thousands of its political opponents, and breathtaking economic negligence. Burundi (US$0.25 per day) saw its debt rise by almost US$1 billion between 1976 and 1988. During that period, corruption and repression of civil society increased sharply. It goes without saying that Congo, Ethiopia, and Burundi were not democracies.

The west is not, out of altruism, going to reverse the system of trade that impoverishes Africa. It is Africa that must fight politically to force the change. Why hasn't it been done before now? The answer is that African governments have, in the past, been short-sighted and self-centred to a degree that borders on stupidity.