AT THE United Nations General Assembly this week international financial turbulence was sharply counter-posed to world hunger. Speech after speech from political leaders referred to the impact of the credit crunch on national economies and the need for co-ordinated action to tackle global regulation
Simultaneously it was acknowledged that progress in meeting the Millennium Development Goals, eight major targets set in 2000 by the UN to halve poverty by 2015 is falling short midway through the period involved. That is a deplorable state of affairs, since - as UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon argues - the €48.7 billion per annum cost of achieving them contrasts starkly with the estimated four times that sum spent on agricultural subsidies by the rich world.
Ireland has an honourable record on this issue, as was made clear during the week by Taoiseach Brian Cowen when he attended the MDG review meeting in New York. The Irish development aid programme has increased in volume from €250 million in 2000 to €900 million this year, making up 0.54 per cent of Gross National Product. Primarily aimed at reducing poverty, it is concentrated on the poorest African states and has been favourably judged by international peer reviews.
The Government still holds to the objective of reaching an aid level of 0.7 per cent of GNP by 2012, but is strongly hinting it may not be possible for budgetary reasons to increase the commitment proportionately next year. That would be regrettable, even if it is understandable in a contracting economy. It is essential that the overall objective should be held to and not diluted even in these difficult times.
This week the Government received a valuable report from the Hunger Task Force, which is relevant to both the MDG and aid agendas. It deals with the fact that 860 million people go hungry every day - rightly described as scandalous by Mr Cowen. Its recommendations include increasing agricultural productivity in Africa, particularly among smallholder farmers, many of them women. It wants to see a clear commitment to eliminate poverty in the aid programme and Ireland adopting a major advocacy role along those lines.
These are admirable ideas, worth adopting, but they should not be taken too easily for granted without examining carefully the policy implications involved. African agriculture badly needs encouragement in a period of growing food shortages, for example. But an essential prerequisite of that is to free up its access to world markets. That means letting more of its produce into the European Union and reducing agricultural export subsidies which impede that and undercut African produce in markets there. There is a tension between aid and development policy in Ireland and elsewhere in the EU which needs to be addressed more candidly and openly. It could be a more creative tension than many realise. Ireland has a great agricultural and food industry expertise to offer African farmers. It would be good to see it more creatively harnessed with the eventual objective of enabling African states trade themselves out of poverty and hunger rather than depending on aid in perpetuity.