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Cargo cult reborn: once-stingy America offers cash pot to deserving poor
The devotees of one of the world’s last surviving “cargo cults” are a patient bunch. On the remote Pacific island of Tanna, in Vanuatu, they’ve been waiting since the 1930s, at least, for their share of the apparently endless supply of material possessions which first began arriving with European colonial settlers.
During World War II the movement reached its peak when some 500,000 American troops rotated through Vanuatu’s bases. The US troops had huge quantities of absolutely everything; Jeeps, aircraft, refrigerators, Coca-Cola and cigarettes.
On Tanna the “cargo cultists” call themselves the John Frum movement, possibly a reference to a US airman who might have once introduced himself as “John from America”. On another nearby island, there’s cult worship of the “Duke of Edinburgh”, the prophet expected to organise their next miracle delivery.
Today, Vanuatu is one of the world’s poorest nations. The “cargo cults” were reshuffled into political parties after independence in 1980, but they didn’t give up. Christians, the cargo cultists argue, have been waiting 2000 years for the return of their messiah. What’s 70 or years so?
Imagine the astonishment, then, in Vanuatu’s capital, Vila, when President Edward Natapei recently heard from a “George from America”.
George’s emissaries had some fantastic news. Vanuatu had been picked in the first round of winners in a new American aid lottery of sorts. No application form required. The new Millennium Challenge Fund, the post-September 11 foreign policy baby of US President George Bush, was coming to the Pacific in 2004.
Eventually, a $US5 billion ($7 billion) pot of new funding is to be made available globally to poor nations which govern justly and invest in their people, rather than the lifestyles of their families and friends. Of the 16 nations selected this year, out of 74 countries poor enough to be considered, only two are in the Asia-Pacific: Vanuatu and Mongolia.
Vanuatu began a major reform program in 1997. All Vila needs to do now is nominate how it wants to spend the windfall.
If Iraq is the big stick, the fund is Washington’s new foreign policy carrot. It’s what diplomats call “soft power”; a means of influencing the world by being nice.
Mr Bush seized on the idea after the September 11 attacks as a way of demonstrating to a cynical world that American largesse is not just about shoring up its strategic interests; as was the case, for example, with the massive $US600 million aid program to Pakistan, in exchange for its co-operation in the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s also intended to answer critics who accuse the US of ignoring the underlying causes of anti-Western sentiment like the the yawning global wealth gap.
An extra $US5 billion a year is a significant injection into the global development aid kitty and will double Washington’s current contribution. The US is already the world’s largest single aid donor. But, as a percentage of national gross income (GNI), America’s aid program is both stingy and politicised. It falls well short of a United Nations target of 0.7 per cent of GNI at about 0.14 per cent. Australia spends 0.26 per cent of GNI.
The philosophy behind the fund matches that driving Australia’s new Pacific policy. The problem with development aid is that it’s not just the dollar figures that matter. In the Pacific, in particular, billions of aid dollars have been lost to incompetence and corruption. Australian support is now linked, like the fund, to getting the funds to the people who really need them.
In theory, the fund is good policy. But whether is will actually meet its stated objectives is, unfortunately, questionable.
In Sydney last week, a US State Department representative, Larry Nowells, said the fund was designed “to be separate and immune from US strategic and political interests”.
Yet he also conceded Vietnam, which was denied Western aid for years following the communist victory in 1975, had qualified in the first round, but the fund’s directors vetoed its inclusion.
East Timor missed out because of missing data; data which simply doesn’t exist because the nation is less than two years old.
By 2005, the pool of fund candidates will widen to 87 nations. Earlier this year, Washington announced the Philippines is expected to qualify in round two next year. But this was before Manila withdrew its troops from Iraq to secure the release of a Filipino hostage, drawing Washington’s ire.
The test of the fund’s independence lies in whether the Philippines remains on next year’s list.
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