Overseas aid
Sir: Mr E. Robbins's comments on overseas aid (Letters, 23 July) purported to take us from the abstract to the particular, but soon developed into a dreary attack on socialism: with the inevitable clichés of 'half-baked 'notions' and 'ivory towers', thus trivialising a serious international situation into a party-political argument. One is forced to ask which particular ivory tower he has been inhabiting if he visualises the average Man in the Third World as being in a position to inquire whether he will buy a plough or bury his money for a rainy day; whether to save to open a maize mill or buy another wife. The 1,000 million workers existing (frequently dying) on incomes of less than 1150 per annum are not over-troubled by such difficult decisions. To speak of small projects for building roads or clinics (valuable as these may be) is to show a complete lack of understanding of the size of the problem.
Overseas aid (with the inbuilt defect of its capacity to buttress some inefficierit regimes of the left or right) has to be viewed in terms of being an indispensable part of the overall programme in the West to cdoperate with the poorer nations in their struggle to free themselves from their poVerty trap. It has not yet reached the massive proportions of which Mr Robbins speaks: many countries (including Britain) are nowhere near the 0.7 per cent of gross national product suggested by the Unite:d Nations. Transfer of appropriate technology and improvements in the present unfairly loaded terms of trade must, among other things, be an inevitable accompaniment. It seems from the last UNCTAD conference that the industrial nations are at last moving towards an acceptance that such changes would be mutually beneficial in the long term.
I consider it entirely inappropriate to regard overseas aid as charity, when it should be regarded as an investment towards a more just and inevitably a more peaceful — world.
Aileen Hoare 57 Inca Avenue, Gt. Crosby, Liverpool
Previous page
