STWR - Share The World's Resources

Current policies favor giant shipping companies and agribusinesses over the starving populations they are supposed to serve.

How many countries worldwide need debt cancellation? What would be the economic ramifications of debt relief on both the Global North and the Global South?

The South has already repaid its external debt to the North. Since the onset of the global debt crisis, precipitated in 1979 by a sharp increase in the Federal Reserve’s interest rates by Paul Volcker, the developing/emerging market economies as a whole have paid in current dollars a cumulative $7.673 trillion in external debt service.

Up on stage in Rostock last Thursday, Bono and Bob Geldof took time off from haranguing the leaders of the G8 to churn out a passable version of Carry That Weight, the old Beatles song. By the next morning they probably wished they had chosen Won't Get Fooled Again by the Who instead.

Sixty years ago last week, US secretary of state George C Marshall stepped up to the podium at Harvard University and set out his case for supporting European recovery from second world war devastation.

In the wake of a host of new international initiatives to extend development aid to Africa - from Tony Blair’s Africa Commission to the G8’s extension of debt relief and the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, not to mention all that pop-star campaigning - two provocatively titled books published last month fundamentally question the value of foreign aid. Both written by former World Bank officials, they give very different explanations for the failure of foreign aid to address Africa’s poverty. 

 Jeevan Vasagar asks whether well-meaning western aid agencies are what Africa really needs.