Year In Review - The Top 15 Newsmakers of 2005 - #12

In early July, Liam Neeson started appearing on our TV screens to remind us, along with brilliant economic minds such as Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake, that a child dies from poverty somewhere in the world every three seconds. This launched the Make Poverty History campaign and culminated in the Live 8 concerts over the July long weekend, which took place in numerous cities across the world to urge Western governments to take steps to improve the lives of those in the Third World.

One of the more memorable moments from that event was Will Smith leading the assembled crowds across the world in a snap of the fingers every three seconds. For me, it brought the situation to ground and Smith was able to do it without looking like a typical celebrity do-gooder. Leading the charge along with Bob Geldof was U2's Bono, who recently came to Ottawa and reminded PM Paul Martin that he said he would live up to his pledge to donate 0.7% of Canada's GDP to foreign aid.

Despite all of the activism, the two campaigns were long on sentiment and short on prescription. Not once did a spokesperson mention the role of corruption, lack of freedom, and barriers to trade as part of the problem.

In my opinion, instead of throwing money at countries who don't possess good governance structures, the West could really help Africa by reducing farm subsidies. This editorial in the New York Times gets it absolutely right:

Helping poor countries is not just about debt relief and aid. It also means ending the trade-distorting giveaways that rich countries have sustained for years to coddle special interests, particularly farmers.

The developed world funnels nearly $1 billion a day in subsidies to its farmers, encouraging overproduction. That drives down prices and leaves farmers in poor nations unable to compete with subsidized products, even within their own countries. In recent years, farmers from America, Europe and Japan have dumped products on world markets at prices that do not begin to cover their cost of production. Europe's system is particularly odious; the United States' farm subsidies are only a third of Europe's. What's more, tariffs in agricultural products are obscenely high, in another attempt to keep the farm products of poor countries out of the supermarkets of Paris, Frankfurt and Chicago.

It's past time to fix this broken system, and make trade rules work for the world's poor.

Instead of earnest pleading from celebrities and grandiose rock concerts, the root of the problems needs to be tackled. And that has more to do with healthy political institutions in the Third World and sound economic practices here than good intentions.

Ending farm subsidies would be the best thing we could do for the Third World. I would love to see a politician in North America tell the truth about this issue.