Comment Are there better ways to spread the wealth?
aspects of life for local people.
Having said that, we shouldn’t delude ourselves that such a strategy is entirely altruistic.
British and American aid to Pakistan has a political motive. Western governments can threaten to reduce aid if they are dissatisfied with local policies.
For many African governments, this carrot and stick policy has become a source of irritation.
In recent years, the Chinese have become major players in Africa, often exceeding the influence of former colonial powers.
Some African governments actually prefer the Chinese who tend to turn up and give them what they want, irrespective of the human rights situation in that country.
Typically, the Chinese fly in a small army of men in hard hats and house them in a makeshift city on the edge of a large town.
Next they bus them to a construction site on a daily basis until the project is completed and then they disappear, leaving a state-of-the-art football stadium behind.
Every government likes to have a national sports stadium and the Africans are no different. If you’ve already got one, you can ask them to build an airport or a small railway instead. With the project completed, the Chinese obtain exclusive access to a copper mine. It’s as simple as that.
The recipient country gets no employment gain, no up-skilling of their own workforce. And yet they often prefer it to the more traditional – sometimes patronising – projects provided by Britain and America.
In truth, the Pakistani population in Britain is now quite substantial. British Pakistanis now deliver around £1.5 billion pounds per year to the old country and trade between Britain and Pakistan is growing relentlessly with the British importing over £6 billion last year and exporting £5 billion.
Meanwhile, total cash exchanges are now in excess of £12 billion a year and growing. This figure is so large that it is not unreasonable to question to what extent the £500 million pounds of overseas aid actually achieves.
The issue of remittances is hardly unique to Pakistan.
British and American aid to Pakistan has a political motive – the west can threaten to reduce aid if they are dissatisfied with local policies
India’s desperate rush for modernity has been fuelled, at least in part, by exactly the same phenomenon and India now received more than 70 billion dollars per year from overseas (the single largest source being the Middle East).
Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in North America.
Take a look at the recent Donald Trump proposal for the El Salvadorian population of the United States. Trump has threatened to evict over a 150 000 El Salvadorians.
Sadly, about 15 per cent of national income in El Salvador comes from remittances sent back from the United States.
Bear in mind that the main driving force behind the Hispanic migration from central America is relative poverty and it’s not at all clear if the forced deportation of the El Salvadorians will deliver anything more than a deluge of refugees heading North.
Aid programmes will surely continue, but tourism, overseas retirement and soaring international trade may well make the traditional view of aid go the same way as steam power and gas street lighting.
The future doesn’t have to be a linear extrapolation of the past. It could be something completely different. Steve Cutts is a Worcestershire
based doctor and author