But what happens now is that African countries compete against subsidised goods in European and American markets. And what makes a bad situation worse is that because of the subsidies Western countries overproduce and dump produce below cost on African countries (destroying their farmers).
I remember a year where our neighbour (who had a dairy farm) started giving away milk for free (mainly because of dumping of European milk products which led to a collapse in price).
Absolutely We spend a lot of money on aid, and then spend orders of magnitude more to chancel that aid by killing the market for third world products. But fixing that problem will require us to make thousands of farmers unemployed, and that's political suicide. Especially in Europe, where agriculture subsidies are strongly supported by the political mainstream.
The farmers of New Zealand adapted, too.
The other argument I've heard against abolishing food subsidies is a strategic one. We'd become dependent on food from countries that are often not politically stable. An oil crisis on the food level could be devastating.
I say, if that's the argument, then be honest about it and nationalize agriculture instead of pretending it's private businesses.
For some more optimistic aspects of the developing world (and especially Africa), see the newest special report of the Economist (http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?sto... (be sure to click "next article" at the bottom, if you want to read all of it).
The problem still however is price. In China it costs 0.15 Yuan to send a text message – in SA it can be the equivalent the equivalent of 1 Yuan. Voice calls are even more expensive (R3+ a minute – about 0.4 US$). I believe that the price elsewhere in Africa is even more expensive (since some of the base stations run on Diesel generators).
I also don’t think that telecoms growth should be seen as economic growth (it is not always coupled). Telecoms is however still a giant problem. In SA we have huge problems with extremely expensive Internet. This is extremely unfavourable. We have a lot of people that can speak English without an accent at the same time zone as Europe – yet it is too expensive to put up call centres.
Africa will never develop with external aid (it will only become more welfare dependent). The model that Africa should follow is the Chinese model. Africa needs to start making stuff and exporting stuff cheaply and African governments need to be stable.
It is sad for me to see that textiles in my country (South Africa) are imported from China. The reason for this is that the government is controlled by labour unions and it costs more than twice as much to employ someone from SA as someone in China. The cherry on the top is that unemployment is 40%+.
In summary: 99% of Africa’s problems are caused by African governments. You can throw money at the countries but development will not take place until the governments are removed.
> I'd settle for clean water, vaccines, and malaria nets, which are clearly not being implemented in a scalable manner in the status quo.
HIV/AIDS is the big killer. People may die from Malaria or TB but AIDS is the underlying cause of 90% of the deaths. Even problems such as Cholera (which is caused by unclean water) a large part of the people die because they have decreased immune system.
As another example – the most recent Cholera outbreaks in my country were at border camps for illegal immigrants from Zimbabwe. The cause of these deaths may have been Cholera. But the true root cause of it is Mugabe.