Two Fruitless Days in Paris? OECD
I was invited to attend the OECD’s conference on the future of development co-operation in Paris, on the 11th and 12th of May. The focus was “The Future of Development Cooperation, Charting Strategic Directions.” I had hoped it would be the kind of place where ideas are exchanged and joint conclusions drawn.
I was wrong.
There were plenaries and round-table sessions, but I saw no open discussion at all. Instead, the event typified exactly what I argue in my latest book, that the aid industry has systematically eaten all the aid itself.
I do not go to many conferences, because too often the issues get lost in the fighting between factions, or drowned beneath the volume of pontification that arrives from all directions. But this was worse than that.
It was as if I had walked into a completely different world from the one I call development assistance.
A world not of reality, but of make-believe.
The delegates did agree on one thing, that very little can stay the same given the tectonic changes taking place in the world. But there was virtually no agreement on what to do about it.
As one minister put it well. Ask a room full of people whether change is needed, and they will all agree that it is. Ask each of them whether they will be making any changes themselves, and the answer is always no.
Most of the participants represented governments or government institutions, but almost none was a decision-maker, none the kind of person who cares about action or results.
Instead there were researchers, influencers, academics, professors, research assistants, and young interns trying to get their first grip on the greasy pole. For someone genuinely concerned about the rapid impoverishment of the poorest people in the world, it was a profound disappointment.
At best, the discussions exchanged ideas on the techniques of aid cooperation. They included almost nothing on the reality of what development cooperation should actually be for.
So did I learn anything in Paris?
I learned something about power. That no one on the Development Assistance Committee has very much of it.
Real power sits with the people who negotiate the hard questions among themselves, and those questions are no longer really about the poor. They are about leverage.
How can the Western powers stop China gaining influence over Kenya?
How can the UAE be persuaded to stop backing the forces in Sudan that are leading to the massacre of thousands of innocent children, women and the elderly?
How can OECD members shore up legitimate states against the spreading insurrection across the Sahel?
Aid, increasingly, is a tool in that game.
And what about the silent people who merely starve? The wretched of the earth, as Frantz Fanon called them more than sixty years ago. Do they not also deserve aid?
Invariably, they are forgotten.
That is the thing I cannot make my peace with. Two days of clever people, real resources and serious talk, and the people the whole enterprise exists to serve were barely in the room. Not as participants. Not, in the end, even as the point.
I did not write my book to settle scores. I wrote it because someone has to put the forgotten back at the centre of this, plainly, with the evidence laid out. The Global Famine Game is my account of how a system meant to feed and lift the poorest has learned, instead, to feed itself. Paris simply confirmed it, two days running.
If you want to understand how we reached the point where so much money moves and so little of it reaches the people at the end of the chain, that is what the book is for.
The earlier books are here
And if you have sat in rooms like the one I have described, and felt the same disappointment, come and say so. Subscribe, and join the conversation. The forgotten need fewer conferences, and more people willing to keep their names in the room.
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