More and better aid?

Development remains the greatest challenge facing us today: the process of tackling the grinding poverty and growing inequality faced by billions around the world. According to UNICEF, today – and every day - 30,000 children will die due to poverty.

This dark reality is a humanitarian disaster, which diminishes us all. But the biggest scandal is that it is entirely preventable. Were there sufficient political will globally, it would not be difficult to rid the world of such poverty. More and better aid, properly targeted, and with a particular focus on women, is certainly part of the answer – but only part.

Bigger aid budgets will be of little consequence if, at the same time, the EU continues to pursue global economic policies which undermine the benefits which aid might bring. EU trade policies are all too often about maximising profits for European corporations rather than about the needs of our trading partners in the South. We urgently need to stop forcing open the markets of some of the world’s poorest countries, and attacking their legitimate domestic regulation as “non-tariff barriers”. Trade justice, based on fair trade, not free trade, should be the way forward.

But it is perhaps environmental degradation – principally driven by climate change – which poses the biggest threat to development of all. It is a cruel irony that the poorest countries will be amongst those hardest hit by the effects of climate change, even though they have contributed least to the problem. That means that we, in the North, have a major responsibility to dramatically reduce our emissions. People living in poverty deserve justice – and we all have a role to play in ensuring they get it.