Letter

Don’t u-turn on aid

Dear healthmatters — Amid the flurry of green and white papers coming from our new government one might have escaped UK health professionals. The new Department for International Development has published Eliminating world poverty: a challenge for the new millennium, the first white paper on development since 1975.

The higher priority for development was signalled by creating a cabinet post for the Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short. She wants to increase the proportion of GNP devoted to aid from the present 0.27% up to 0.7%, to reduce tied aid, and to find new ways of mobilising finance. The white paper is disappointing on the debt burden, possibly the single most important measure in poverty reduction.

But it insists that aid address the real needs of the poor: the show piece projects should stop, in favour of work with governments which make a real commitment to basic needs — such as health and education — rather than siphon aid money elsewhere.

Development shouldn’t take place at the expense of environmental degradation — a little thin when it’s the North’s development which has really caused the globe’s environmental problems! Short wants ‘to mobilise the political will for poverty elimination... a reformed and more effective UN, a better World Bank...and a revitalised Commonwealth’. All this would be great – so let’s hope the government doesn’t do a U-turn on this one.