Africa's new best friends
-------------------------
The US and Britain are putting the multinational corporations
that created poverty in charge of its relief
George Monbiot
Tuesday July 05 2005
The Guardian
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 Sat-
urday. 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 Afri-
can 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 ei-
ther 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 agita-
tion 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, ac-
cording to the commercial speakers' agency that hires her, "real
solutions for businesses and individuals. Hertz teaches compa-
nies 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 Af-
rica's problems but the solution. From now on they will be re-
sponsible for the relief of poverty.
They have already been given control of the primary instrument
of US policy towards Africa, the African Growth and Opportunity
Act. The act is a fascinating compound of professed philanthropy
and raw self-interest. To become eligible for help, African
countries must bring about "a market-based economy that protects
private property rights", "the elimination of barriers to United
States trade and investment" and a conducive environment for US
"foreign policy interests". In return they will be allowed
"preferential treatment" for some of their products in US mar-
kets.
The important word is "some". Clothing factories in Africa will
be allowed to sell their products to the US as long as they use
"fabrics wholly formed and cut in the United States" or if they
avoid direct competition with US products. The act, treading
carefully around the toes of US manufacturing interests, is
comically specific. Garments containing elastic strips, for ex-
ample, are eligible only if the elastic is "less than 1 inch in
width and used in the production of brassieres". Even so, Afri-
can countries' preferential treatment will be terminated if it
results in "a surge in imports".
It goes without saying that all this is classified as foreign
aid. The act instructs the US Agency for International Develop-
ment to develop "a receptive environment for trade and invest-
ment". What is more interesting is that its implementation has
been outsourced to the Corporate Council on Africa.
The CCA is the lobby group representing the big US corporations
with interests in Africa: Halliburton, Exxon Mobil, Coca-Cola,
General Motors, Starbucks, Raytheon, Microsoft, Boeing, Cargill,
Citigroup and others. For the CCA, what is good for General Mo-
tors is good for Africa. "Until African countries are able to
earn greater income," it says, "their ability to buy US products
will be limited." The US state department has put it in charge
of training African governments and businesses. The CCA runs the
US government's annual forum for African business, and hosts the
Growth and Opportunity Act's steering committee.
Now something very similar is being set up in the UK. Tomorrow
the Business Action for Africa summit will open in London with a
message from Tony Blair. Chaired by Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the
head of Anglo American, its speakers include executives from
Shell, British American Tobacco, Standard Chartered Bank, De
Beers and the Corporate Council on Africa. One of its purposes
is to inaugurate the Investment Climate Facility, a $550m fund
financed by the UK's foreign-aid budget, the World Bank and the
other G8 nations, but "driven and controlled by the private sec-
tor". The fund will be launched by Niall FitzGerald, now head of
Reuters, but formerly chief executive of Unilever, and before
that Unilever's representative in apartheid South Africa. He
wants the facility, he says, to help create a "healthy invest-
ment climate" that will offer companies "attractive financial
returns compared to competing destinations". Anglo American and
Barclays have already volunteered to help.
Few would deny that one of the things Africa needs is invest-
ment. But investment by many of our multinationals has not en-
riched its people but impoverished them. The history of corpo-
rate involvement in Africa is one of forced labour, evictions,
murder, wars, the under-costing of resources, tax evasion and
collusion with dictators. Nothing in either the Investment Cli-
mate Facility or the Growth and Opportunity Act imposes manda-
tory constraints on corporations. While their power and profits
in Africa will be enhanced with the help of our foreign-aid
budgets, they will be bound only by voluntary commitments: of
the kind that have been in place since 1973 and have proved use-
less.
Just as Gordon Brown's "moral crusade" encourages us to forget
the armed crusade he financed, the state-sponsored rebranding of
the companies working in Africa prompts us to forget what Shell
has been doing in Nigeria, what Barclays and Anglo American and
De Beers have done in South Africa, and what British American
Tobacco has done just about everywhere. From now on, the G8
would like us to believe, these companies will be Africa's best
friends. In the name of making poverty history, the G8 has given
a new, multi-headed East India Company a mandate to govern the
continent.
Without a critique of power, our campaign, so marvellously and
so disastrously inclusive, will merely enhance this effort.
Debt, unfair terms of trade and poverty are not causes of Af-
rica's problems but symptoms. The cause is power: the ability of
the G8 nations and their corporations to run other people's
lives. Where, on the Live 8 stages and in Edinburgh, was the
campaign against the G8's control of the World Bank, the Inter-
national Monetary Fund and the UN? Where was the demand for
binding global laws for multinational companies?
At the Make Poverty History march, the speakers insisted that we
are dragging the G8 leaders kicking and screaming towards our
demands. It seems to me that the G8 leaders are dragging us
dancing and cheering towards theirs.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited