"Perhaps the defining moment of Tony Blair's premiership was the speech that he gave to the Labour party conference in October 2001. In June, his party had returned to office with a monumental majority. In September, two planes were flown into the World Trade Centre in New York. The speech appeared to mark his transition from the insecure, focus-group junkie of Labour's first term to a visionary and a statesman, determined to change the world.

The most memorable passage was his declaration on Africa. "The state of Africa," he told us, "is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier." This being so, I would respectfully ask our visionary prime minister to explain what the hell he thinks he is doing in France.

[...]

But the ugliest of its hidden export subsidies is its use of aid as a means of penetrating the markets of poorer nations. While the other major donors provide food aid in the form of money, which the World Food Programme can use to buy supplies in local markets, thus helping indigenous farmers while feeding the starving, the US insists on sending its own produce. This programme, the government states with breathtaking frankness, is "designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities".

The result is that the major recipients are not the nations in greatest need, but the nations which can, again in the words of the US department of agriculture, "demonstrate the potential to become commercial markets" for US farm products. This is why, for example, the Philippines currently receives more US food aid than Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe put together, all of which, unlike the Philippines, are currently suffering from serious food shortages. In a way, this is a blessing for Africa: if the US dumped as much of its produce on the nations that need it as it does on the nations that don't, it would destroy their fragile agricultural economy."

africa that ugly scar

congratulations jesse! don't get too steaming! you've been seen "around town.."