Gordon Brown: healer of the sick and saviour of Africa posted by Meaders

Iron Chancellor turned latter-day saint Gordon Brown is once again saving the world:

At the launch of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm) he said the initiative would:

"Spare millions of families across the world from the avoidable pain of a son or a daughter needlessly dying."

But how now, Mr Brown, will those poor Africans be saved?

The plan will use up-front long-term financial commitments from donors to provide additional resources quicker and in a more predictable way.

Translated from New Labour, this means: we'll borrow collossal sums off the financial markets now and pay them back, with interest, over the next few decades.

You might remember a bit of a fuss, back in June, about so-called Third World debt. The problem with Third World debt was that some very small economies were having to shovel huge amounts of cash, in interest payments, over to some very large financial institutions. This crippled the small economies' development, ate away at resources for their public services, and was - rightly - considered by millions to be simply morally abhorrent.

The IFF's big innovation is to stop small economies handing over large amounts of cash in interest to Western banks. Instead, aid budgets from richer countries are to be made over to Western banks. It's as simple as that. The debt-dependency is still there, only now, instead of asking the South for the money directly, we'll be handing it over for them. Once upon a time, countries in the South would threaten to default on their loans; now, even that option is being removed. The lines of dependency are reinforced.

Let's be clear. A large increase in aid, with the very clear aim of eradicating treatable diseases, is in itself a good thing. Mortgaging that aid is not. The World Development Movement took a very close look at Brown's proposals, and they've seen the fatal flaw in the plan:

The IFF borrows money from international financial markets, this means in years to come we will end up using aid money to pay off the interest to financiers rather than helping the poor.

...the IFF is still a very risky strategy when it is quite possible to shift spending priorities and come up with the money without having to borrow. Although the IFF will provide more money in the short term, WDM, using Treasury figures, has calculated that the net long term loss in aid from the IFF could be over 100 billion dollars.

(The WDM's full report is here - Word file.) Even if the new aid packages did not come tied to a fresh round of what Mark Curtis has labelled "global conditionalities" - demands for privatisation and liberalisation - the IFF would still be undermining the poorest.

And yet the £2.2bn needed could be found very easily, as WDM state:

This is an issue of political will, the Chancellor found £6 billion for the deeply unpopular war in Iraq, yet it can't - jointly with France and Sweden - find the £2.2 billion needed to finance this deeply important programme.

This "PFI for the poor" is depriving those who it is meant to aid. It is forcing still greater dependency on the South. It is attached to the same neoliberal policies that devastated the global South in the eighties and nineties. The ballyhoo and the trumpeting for Brown's alleged "generosity" is seriously misplaced.

(Incidentally, anyone wondering why Bob Geldof's been keeping his head down lately needs to read George Monbiot's latest.)