ABSTRACT: The 15,000 billion lire Italy earmarked in the last six years as public aid for developing countries have not made any significant contribution to the fight against hunger and underdevelopment. Blanket intervention in hundreds of countries without the possibility of any significant impact. The sending of equipment and food stuffs according to the needs of the producers and not of the beneficiaries. The need of urgently reforming the law on co-operation.

(NOTIZIE RADICALI No. 54 of March 5, 1986)

Italy's policy heretofore followed on aid to developing countries has failed. This is the point that should be formally made in the political debate seven years after the passage of law 38 on development co-operation and after a year since law 73 came into effect for emergency action against starvation in the world.

Precisely during the months in which the major effort to effect a change was to be made, work went on in the old way, wasting political opportunities, resources and legislative tools. This is true both for law 38 and the Department for Development Co-operation (DIPCO) as well as for law 73 and Under-Secretary Forte. And it poses the question of the political responsibility of the Foreign Minister and government as the central point, above and beyond that of the omissions and errors of those carrying out the policy. In the last five years Italy has set aside 11,000 billion lire for public aid to development which makes 15,000 billion if one includes the current year. The Hon. Mr. Forte has been the recipient of 1,900 of these billions. The amount is laughable if compared to the total of international aid or the size of the foreign debt of the developing countries. But it is very large in consideration of our budget problems or, even more, the slender resources at the disposal of the poor countries.

What purpose have all these billions served? What effect have they had on the areas in which they have been used? An analysis of the available documents allows for only one answer: these billions have not been able to break the vicious circle of underdevelopment in even a single country where they have been invested. In a word, they have been wasted.

In this sense the case of Somalia, for which 1,500 billion have been or are about to be spent, is no exception, notwithstanding the priority that country has been afforded. But it is an indicator of the general uselessness of our aid policy whether concentrated or employed in a blanket fashion.

In truth, seen from the viewpoint of the fight against underdevelopment, Italy's policy is a non-policy. A solemn mien expressing good intentions and declarations of principle covers a tenacious practice of wheeling-dealing and old-style foreign policy.

Officially among the avant-garde of aid, the Italian government is characterised by its easy handing-out of money, its inefficiency and disorientation. The most visible traces of its activity are the amount of resources that fatten "aid lords", Italian and international experts, enterprises and institutions, agencies and associations, producers and carriers of goods, and local oligarchies.

Seen from Africa, the Farnesina looks like a supermarket, not like a centre of political direction. Any one who likes can come in. Is there a need to place hundreds of trucks, preferably military? Airports? Telecommunications systems? City planning for towns composed mainly of huts? Nuclear laboratories? Chemical plants? Freeze-dried foods or sardines in oil? The Farnesina supermarket will get it done. All you have to do is follow the DIPCO procedures and be patient about the long bureaucratic waiting time - or else, in the case of the Hon. Mr. Forte, a more direct and less cumbersome route, but the outcome does not change.

For many years the chance of causing a turn-around was blocked by chattering the banal phrase: "fishing rods, not fish". Well, we have sent them many and many a fishing rod - the very large majority of our aid is certainly not in foodstuffs. So how is it that in those countries there is still no fishing and no fish? And where today are those critics? Why do they not say anything about how the co-operation funds are being spent, those being managed by Mr. Forte and those much larger ones that go to DIPCO?

The general reply is that law 38 on co-operation is in urgent need of reform. But this is not a serious answer if no light is first thrown on the policies followed in all these years, on their effects and their errors (not even the information study by the Senate was ever completed), and if one does not manage to define clearly what kind of concrete policy one wants to realise. Otherwise the reform of law 38 will only be subjected to some bureaucratic retouching.

Worse: Thanks to the bankrupt administration of law 73 (and to the instrumental use that the supporters of the Department make of it) a dual administration will be established. On the one hand we will have the humanitarian facade of emergency measures against starvation, and on the other hand the normal wheeling-dealing form of co-operation and the support of exports. Aid policy will thus be the prey of patronage and power-sharing of the kind that oppresses the RAI [Italian state radio/TV, ed.] with powers divided into two "channels": the smaller, emergency kind entrusted to the Socialists on duty, and the "normal" kind firmly in the hands of the DC [Christian Democrats]. Obviously there will be no lack of smaller or larger crumbs thrown to the Communist Party [PCI].

No, a true reform of aid policy is still far from the desire and the ability of the political parties. In the end, does anyone really care about underdevelopment and hunger?

The Department For Co-operation

In the last two years the Department has improved its efficiency by reducing the wild dispersion of investments and increasing its spending ability. But in no way has its planning abilities been improved - on the contrary, the absence of a policy is always more evident.

The renunciation to a lack of programme has already been justified by theory: law 38, they say, allows the Department to finance only projects presented by the governments who receive the aid. This however is an arbitrary interpretation of the law which in art. 14 imposes this condition only on studies and projects and on studies for general and specific projects.

With regard to its own initiatives, DIPCO has behaved very discreetly, even secretively. Certainly, after the Radical campaign of 1984 it began to lay more of its cards on the table and to put its accounts into better order. But even so they were scandalously unforthcoming and reticent.

As the Audits Court said in its report on the activities of 1984, even the reports of the deliberations conducted by the CIPES [Interministerial Committee for Foreign Economic Policy, ed.], the Executive Committee and the Consulting Committee, "were deficient in form and notably generalised and fragmentary in content". In a word, hardly anything is understandable.

It is a chore even to establish the annual funding with certainty and the Department's reports do not even indicate the relative items of the budget. An example? In the report on the activities of 1984 on two pages close together the DIPCO furnishes different figures for the amounts earmarked for the Co-operation Fund with discrepancies of 18 billion for 1981, of 37 billion for 1982, of 33 billion for 1983, and of 65 billion for 1984. There are discrepancies between the calculations of the Department and the Audits Court. The spending capacity, for example, declined in recent years according to the Court going from 71% in 1980 to 61% in 1981 to 49% in 1982 to 43.5% in 1983 to 43.4% in 1984 arriving at an average for the five year period of 45.6% of available funds. For the Department, on the contrary, the annual average not only increased but the total average would amount to 65%.

The actual funds available in cash are not known inasmuch as the Department does not offer precise figures on the money which was not spent in the past. Rather, they say that there were practically no residual funds so that it would be impossible to take on new commitments for the current year.

In reality, according to our figures, the Co-operation Fund had available as of January 1, 1986 about 480 billion lire that had not been spent in preceding years to add to this year's funds for a total of about 1,300 billion lire.

With regard to the Fund for Renewable Aid Credits, the Audits Court states in its latest report on the current year that, on June 30, 1985 the cash availability was 1,222.3 billion lire. Therefore the residue this year should be more than 700 billion.

Now let us come to the disbursements that show a constant improvement. Leaving aside multilateral initiatives, which means transferring credits to international organisations, we have the following data referring to the Co-operation Fund: in 1981 150,205 billion were set aside and 87,351 billion spent; in 1982 317,133 billion were set aside and 199,708 billion spent; in 1983 570,000 billion were set aside and 339,276 billion spent; in 1984 765,078 billion were set aside and 496,125 billion spent.

In 1985, according to confused reports, the Department would have spent about 830 billion - more, therefore, than the annual quotas which were reduced by law 73 to 600 billion. An analogous amount was also spent in 1985 by the Fund for Renewable Aid Credits.

How were these goals reached? The partial data contained in the report on the current year by the Audits Court, indicate that the major factor in the increase of expenditures was the multi-bilateral sector, that is to say initiatives not coming directly from the Department but from international organisations using DIPCO financing. (164 billion spent by mid year as against the 87 billion spent in all of 1984).

Probably the preference for the multi-bilateral method includes the fact that decisions for expenditures made in this way do not have to pass through the special section but depend exclusively on the DIPCO director.

In theory there is nothing to be said; but in practice the absence of a clear policy risks exasperating, by means of multi-bilateral actions, the causality of the action and its disorganised character. What is more, it is a question of expediting the expenditures but not the activities.

Similar considerations should concern the other main items, the programmes of professional training on the spot which are useful in theory but in practice useless if they do not enter into organic development projects. (In 1984 170 billion were spent, 78 in the first half of 1985.)

Decisively to be rejected, on the other hand, is the proliferation of training programmes taking place in Italy for which in the first half of 1985 29 billion were spent as against the total of 39 billion spent in 1984.

The risk taking shape is that DIPCO will be constantly more reduced to a centre for disbursements which will definitively detract from the possibility of our co-operation policy's forming organic actions with clear goals. This impression is confirmed by the expenditures breakdown according to the types of activities made by the Audits Court in the report cited.

Another confirmation is the mediocre way the initiatives directly undertaken by the Department are going. One example that will serve for all is the Sahel Programme launched with great ado in 1982 with an estimated expenditure of 700 billion in 5-7 years, but which is still marking time to the point that DIPCO has been induced to admit that "the greater part of the projects financed are still under way".

In effect, the increased capacity for spending does not correspond to an increased capacity for planning and, on the contrary, the question of how and what the money is spent for has been put into much greater relief. This is a problem difficult to resolve, also because it is not possible to evaluate the real utility of the funds that DIPCO annually transfers to international organisations (from 657 billion in 1981 to the 1,140 in 1985) nor even less the effective role of aid credits which remains a dark chapter and distorted by interests. It is not by chance if Mediocredito Centrale has no data bank and it is thus impossible to do a cross analysis of the credits for export and the credits for aid.

What then has become of this money and to what purpose? DIPCO does not contest our right to ask, on the contrary: "It is quite understandable" they write in their last annual report, "that one asks what the results have been; there is no doubt that a substantial reckoning of the results thus far obtained must be made", in particular for "the impact on the socio-economic realities of the beneficiary countries... "

The results, however, are zero. They announce the setting up of an automatic control system, but the only report forthcoming is the number of undertakings begun in 1980 (385 work projects, 256 ended within the year, 77 still under way). The white paper presented at the second IPALMO conference contains a list of projects country by country, but the data are so generalised as to make any judgement impossible.

Conclusion: the Department has learned to spend more of its money, but continues to be incapable of evaluating the utility of what it does.

The Special Service of the Hon. Mr. Forte

At the beginning the images and fantasies abound: Under-Secretary Forte with the broad gesture of one scattering seeds; Under-secretary Forte vaccinating children in Kordofan (Sudan) on board a kind of Foxcat or Eagle glider (the UNICEF Heron mission) with attached refrigerator... But the facts have soon imposed a hard judgement regarding the implementation of law 73 of March 8, 1985.

Even too soon: a decisive step for the failure of the law has in fact been taken with the CIPES' decision of May 31, 1985 that has nullified law 73's criterion of concentrated aid and given the under-secretary the faculty of roaming widely in the universe of underdevelopment.

The first of the four-monthly reports (July 1985) showed an under-secretary enmeshed in petty rivalries and spitefullness with DIPCO, having difficulty even in getting himself a decent office, and more concerned with avoiding accusations of irregularities than preparing programmes for immediate implementation.

Still during the summer of 1985 there was announced with great clamor the creation of two consultation committees to "control" the actions of the under-secretary. Alas, they were not controllers but consultants some of whom were paid by the person to be controlled himself.

In the end, the second four-monthly report and the general programme of activities confirmed the worst predictions. What was most obvious was the great capacity of the under-secretary to content the most diverse interests in the field, thus creating a kind of protective climate around his own operations.

Among experts, companies and subjects of various kinds entrusted with the undertakings, there emerges a section of the national sharing-out system that includes all political areas, including the Communists, the major industries, co-operatives, the regions, cities, trade unions, volunteer associations, etc.

But the most serious factor is the nullification of the aims and directions of law 73 which - let us remember - foresaw the concentration of aid, the purpose of "guaranteeing the certainty of food and sanitation", "the aim of assuring the survival of the largest possible number of people threatened with hunger and malnutrition " and thus the attempt to have some effect on poverty and, above all, the mortality rate. As in many of our laws the norm is too general and thus allows for all kinds of attempts at being dodged.

It is hard to say, however, what is left of these objectives when the under-secretary acts in support of a foreign policy which has always considered the question of underdevelopment something extraneous. This is the case of Somalia which also arouses particular criticism with regard to the type of undertakings decided upon. It is certain, for example, that the construction of the Garoe-Basaso road, 450 kilometres long, could enter into the Department's long-term programme, but this is not allowed by law 73 and the relative decision of the CIPES.

In the document of May 31, 1985, in fact, the CIPES commits the under-secretary to adopting programmes of a kind "that can be implemented quickly and flexibly" with "the consequent exclusion, because of this need for quick action, of realising large infrastructures which would require too long a time for the aims of the law and whose first effects would likewise be long in making themselves felt".

Despite these very precise indications, the agreement signed on October 31, 1985 with Techint foresees time periods that go far beyond the expiration of law 73 itself and of its relative emergency powers: December 31, 1987 and beyond.

The agreement with Italtekna, signed on July 25, 1985, also foresees the continuation of services beyond the law's expiration date.

Nevertheless, the worst lack, or better, the most serious distortion of law 73 is in having renounced programming to evaluate the total impact expected of the undertaking in the chosen areas. With which fact the special under-secretary has put himself on the same level as the Department.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) The Farnesina - The seat of the Foreign Ministry, hence the ministry itself.