Regional Pacts

The leaders of the G8 countries no doubt dismissed themselves from today's meeting in Italy feeling pretty happy with themselves. According to the Telegraph, the Messiah has convinced his fellow leaders to back a plan for "investing in increasing developing countries' own capacity to grow and store food".

The article tells us that the "UK's Department for International Development estimates that a quarter of all food harvested in Africa is never eaten because of inadequate storage and transport facilities". In addition to investment in these specific areas, the new 'plan' "calls for farmers in developing countries to be given greater access to seeds and fertilizer".

Bob Geldof's 'anti-poverty' group ONE, however, claims that "most of the money being pledged towards the $15 billion fund was not new money and will come from countries' existing aid budgets". Not that this changes the argument that spending money on infrastructure is better than throwing it away as food aid, which as Kanayo Nwanze, head of UN International Fund for Agricultural Development, says, is "like providing medication after the child is ill".

Infrastructure is all well and good, but it's no good without strong property laws, and the concept of 'the law' is still only a concept in a good deal of these "developing nations". What's more, they're never really going to 'develop' without being able to trade with external markets. And this is where the G8, or most of them at least, should really stop being so happy with themselves:

Poorer countries will also encouraged to establish regional trade pacts allowing them to sell more of their crops.

The problem is that these "poorer countries" tend to be in regions that contain a lot of other equally "poorer countries". Two of the big markets, that of the EU and the USA, are, in part, inaccessible, particularly and notoriously the former, which despite claiming to be "the world's biggest free trade area" certainly is not.

And what can Britain do about it? Nothing.