Don't break out the champagne yet

I don't want to piss on anyone's parade, but don't tire yourself out cheering about the new debt relief agreed too soon:

For all the impressive figures, though, the deal strikes a middle ground. For some it's too small: At most, it cancels less than one-sixth of Africa's $295 billion debt - and leaves out crucial countries like Nigeria.

For others, it's too risky: By erasing bad debts - and allowing struggling nations to apply for new loans - it could spark a new cycle of dependency.

This is one of the more pernicious myths about African debt: the idea that it was irresponsibility on the part of African governments that led to the current debt crisis. It's a nice myth, one that allows us in the west to pretend that they "deserve" their fate, the way we ascribe "irresponsibility" to AIDS victims. It's a psychological defense mechanism, one that allows us to escape our role in this mess.

The third world debt crisis has it's roots in the Arab oil embargo of 1973, and the later oil shocks. As bad as it was in the west, it was absolutely devastating for the third world. For reasons totally beyond their control, these economies suddenly found themselves sending millions of dollars (in small economies, remember) to the Persian Gulf. It's not like they can simply stop using oil - the one energy source a lot of these countries had - so the only possibility was to go deeply in to debt.

Of course, this is happening at the beginning of the neoliberal revolution, so this is also when we see the World Bank and the IMF being used for the first time for explicitly political purposes - the so-called "structural adjustment" policies begin at this point. In most societies, charity would require that you help out a stranger in need, not take advantage of a desperate situation for your own gain. In the real world, we took countries that were rapidly being impoverished by high energy prices and forced the doors open for our own domestic industries. Across the Carribean, it's often cheaper for these countries to import American-grown food than the locally-produced food, thanks to American subsidies.

Let's be clear: Corruption is a real thing, and many governments have squandered what little opportunities they had. But we in the west have used our control of the IMF and World Bank to turn a bad situation (high energy prices and the need for foreign capital) into decades of poverty and death. To say that the debt crisis is the result of African "dependency" is blaming the victim of the worst kind.