Another great polemic from Giles Bolton’s book Africa Doesn’t Matter (The UK version is called Aid and Other Dirty Business). Here he focuses on the problems with trade (where current tariffs and subsidies screw both people in Africa and taxpayers/consumers in the West):

If the major problem with aid is that the West isn’t doing enough for Africa, the problem with trade seems to be that the West is doing little at all for the world’s poorest continent. We explicitly fail to manage trade in such a way that they could benefit from it as well as us, the impact of this failure dwarfing the money you spend on aid. Just as with aid, we know what we need to do differently and yet we still don’t do it.

The weird thing is that these trade rules that injure already fragile countries don’t work for shoppers and taxpayers in the West either. The subsidies that fail Africa’s farmers cost us extra in taxes as well as at the checkout, even as most Western governments are presently defaulting on their promises to conclude a world trade round in the interests of poor countries. We are dipping into our pocket with one hand to fund trade arrangements that hinder Africa, and then clumsily dipping into the same pocket to try and aid them with the other.