Yash Tandon

The Least Developed Countries (LDCs) have become objects of the international community.  They have ceased to be its subjects.  This might be seen to be a “natural” consequence of their smallness, poverty and vulnerability.  They don’t count.  What they say or do makes no difference to the way things get organised in the global community. Their poverty is objectified, put into statistics and made the discussion issue of innumerable international conferences. They become an object of charity for northern-based Non-Governmental Organizations and other charitable foundations.

Is this right?  Is this how it should be?  Do LDCs not deserve a little more respect than the international community usually gives them?  Should the political leadership of LDCs allow such erosion of their self-respect?  Should they always be seen on bended knees asking for aid, largesse, free access to rich country markets, emergency aid during natural disasters?   Are they really so weak or so poor that they cannot grasp their destiny in their own hands?

Not a year goes by when the international community does not hold a meeting or a conference on the Biblical “poor amongst them”.   The LDCs are a good subject for academic papers, and for international conferences for enacting yet another ritual incantation of rich country “commitment” to them.  It gets the industrialized countries off the hook from doing anything really serious about the poor.  If words were to be substitute for action, then the thousands of words poured into “solving” the poverty of the poor will take the grades. This year at the World Summit on Social Development, pious resolutions were passed on the “commitment” of the rich countries to get the poor of the world, especially those in the LDCs, out of their poverty.  Commitment number 7 of the final “Outcome” reads: “To accelerate the economic, social and human resource development of Africa and the least developed countries.”

This issue of the Bulletin gives a sample of the kind of statistics that fill hundreds of U.N. documents.  Of course, the messenger is hardly to blame for the message.  It is indeed a reality that the condition of the people in the LDCs is daily worsening.  The people are worse off today than they were a decade ago.  Numbers do tell a story, although not the whole story.  The Bulletin also carries articles that show the litany of failures on the part of the international community to do something really tangible to fulfill the commitments they themselves make to the LDCs.  Indeed, industrialized countries do the opposite of what they promise.  For example, having promised to “integrate” the LDCs into the “globalized markets”, they then raise their technical or health standards to prevent the entry of LDC goods into their markets. Indeed, at times they display such ignorance of basic scientific facts as, in one instance, to prohibit the entry into their countries of fish and fish products from Uganda and Tanzania on the grounds that these would spread cholera in their countries!

Similarly, the highly publicized initiative taken by the six Intergovernmental Agencies (ITC, IMF, UNCTAD, UNDP, World Bank and WTO) in 1997, called the “integrated Framework”, (IF) is in tatters.   The agencies recognize this themselves. And now they have voted to raise a princely sum of some $20 million over three years (i.e. $6m per year) to create an Integrated Framework Trust Fund (IFTF) for the LDCs.   And this at a time when Japan spent $800 million just to hold a meeting of the G7/8 in Okinawa. This is a telltale sign that the industrialized countries have neither the will nor the intention to do anything really serious about the LDCs.  Obviously, they have many more important matters to take care of.  One must marvel at their courage (for there is no better word) to try to get away with the promise of a mere $20 million in three years, when $20 billion would still not have been enough. 

The message should be taken seriously by the LDCs.  They must not depend on the rich countries to bale them out either with money or with markets, or with technology transfers.  These things are not going to happen.  The next ten years will be the same as the last ten, and the previous ten.

So what should the LDCs be doing?  At the end of the day, it is a question of resources. The LDCs lack them, or they believe they lack them.  The truth of the matter is that many of them are quite rich in resources.  The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola (both LDCs) are cases in point.  But even a small country like Uganda is not poor in resources.   A combination of manipulation of these countries from outside (as in the case of the Congo during the cold war), internal civil wars, structural deficiencies in their economies (whereby, in general, “they produce what they do not consume, and consume what they do not produce”) have all interacted to make LDCs the basket cases they are.

But they need not be basket cases.  They need not be perpetual objects of charity and good will of the rich, both of which are scarce commodities.  If it is a matter of resources, then they must look for these within themselves.  The Intergovernmental Preparatory Committee for the Third UN Conference that met in Addis Ababa at an Expert-Level for English-Speaking African LDCs highlighted the fact that much of the resources of Africa are flown out of the continent because of “leakages”.  Clearly, they must stop these “leakages”.  Capital flight alone amounted, according to the background paper presented at the meeting, to an estimated figure of $225 billion for the period 1980-1992.   Even if this is an exaggeration, it is a telling figure.  The Report of the Experts Meeting did not define “capital flight”, but if this includes the billions that the mining and oil transnationals have been able to take out of the DRC and Angola over the years, then the amount could well go beyond $225 billion. 

When everything is said and done, and if truth be told, then there is a net outflow of capital from African LDCs to the rich North rather than an inflow.  The African LDCs should refuse to accept the $20m largess that the Inter-agencies have promised to them for the next three years.  It is an insult.  African LDCs should from now on focus on closing the “leakages” that impoverish them. They should mend their own homes so that they can resolve internal conflicts with peaceful means. And they should reorientate their economic structures so that, first and foremost, they produce what they consume.  That is the only sure way that they can regain their dignity, and be counted as proper subjects of the international community.