Aiding poverty: the G-8's role in Africa's progress

Annan and the self-appointed aid ambassadors are right about one thing: rising food prices and failed harvests are horrible. Achieving food security in Africa remains one of the world's most important humanitarian objectives and the first Millennium Development Goal is to "eradicate extreme poverty and hunger" and halve the number suffering from hunger by 2015.

But the development industry is betting on the wrong horse when the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization demands that "rich countries dramatically ramp up their aid for agricultural development to curb rising food prices," to meet commitments made at the G-8 meeting in Gleneagles two years ago.

The images of starving children have been brought to us by corrupt and incompetent governments supported by aid.

Aid is now the biggest source of revenue for most sub-Saharan African governments -- more than 50 percent of budgets in some cases.

The results are shocking. Even though global food production has outstripped population growth by 50 percent in the last 40 years, a full third of African children suffer from malnutrition in the first five years of their lives.

The Commission on Nutrition Challenges in the 21st Century reported that during the nineties malnutrition fell by two-thirds to 10 percent in East Asia and halved in Latin America. In Africa, it increased by 20 percent.

A recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization conference in Nairobi estimated that, in the past decade alone, 20 percent of African government budgets have been used for "military hardware and other unnecessary luxuries." Unnecessary luxuries include Congo President Denis Sassou-Nguesso's hotel bill of more than US$300,000 and his US$7 million on Parisian homes for his wife and son. Yet, activists and President Sassou-Nguesso continue to call for debt-cancellation and more aid.