Over the last week I’ve read a load of essays on everything from the structure of dictatorial power to the effectiveness of participation methods in poverty measurement. Frankly, I didn’t understand much of it. There was a lot of debate about how many extremely poor people there are, and I’ve written a short essay about that. Otherwise, the debates seem focussed on the issue of trade. Essentially, the pro-globalisers point to the success of Asia, which was as poor as Africa thirty or so years ago, as an example of how trade can end poverty. Africa is poor, they argue, because it hasn’t been plugged into trade. Further evidence comes from the fact that over the last twenty years, the period when globalisation has really taken off, poverty has gone down. Other economists question the figures that supposedly show this, arguing that if you take China and India out of the picture, poverty has risen; and that China and India’s success isn’t down to globalisation.

I’m going to have to look into this in some detail, I think. But I want to understand debt and aid first, because I think they may be simpler. More generally, I’m conscious that I keep talking about the ‘Make Poverty History proposals’ and the ‘G8 proposals’ as if they were one and the same. But of course, they’re not, and neither are they the only proposals put forward in 2005.

There are a collection of studies and reports, all published in 2005, all of which come to broadly similar recommendations. All call for around a doubling of aid; cancellation of debt for most poor African countries; and some reductions in key rich-world agricultural subsidies. The reports are:

  • The Make Poverty History manifesto
  • The report of the Africa Commission, the think tank of leading African brains (and Bob Geldof) set up by Tony Blair to lead the debate;
  • The Final report of the UN Millennium Development Commission, the body set up to monitor and direct progress towards the Millennium Development Goals; and
  • Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty. Sachs was the primary author of the UN report, and though this was not the only book on the topic published in 2005 by any means, it was by far the most high-profile (and the only one, as far as I know, Madonna has read).

So I think if I’m to find a way into this mass of division and disagreement, it must be to take these reports as a starting point. To understand more fully what they propose, and why they say it will work, and how they differ. Then it’ll be time to look at the criticisms of them, from both the right and the left*. You’ll be able to find my posts describing these reports under the category The Main Proposals.