Did Bob Geldof, Bono et al really think that they could "make poverty history" by campaigning during Tony Blair's presidential year of the G8? Yesterday's report on Live 8 a year on revealed a record that, in Geldof's words, is a mix of "the good, the OK and the ugly". The truth is that it is always worth campaigning for more aid, especially for debt relief, famine relief and health care, and also worth shaming governments that don't live up to their promises.
This week's news that America's two richest men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, plan to combine their wealth to try to ease the problems of disease and poor health care in the poorest countries shows the power and lure of publicity, but also the fact that private initiative can produce greater flows of money than governments answerable to taxpayers who suspect that behind every poor African there is a budding asylum-seeker. With Gates's managerial acumen, his Foundation might even manage the money more effectively than either governments or NGOs.
In the end, however, what is necessary if poverty is truly to be dumped in the history books is for campaigners to spend their time and effort mainly on the third part of Geldof's verdict: the "ugly" record that is trade. That means, however, not only that rich-country governments need to be bludgeoned into freeing up agricultural trade (which they must) but also that the public at large - and especially the activist public, in NGOs and so on - need to be persuaded of the poverty-reducing merits of a process of which they are currently highly suspicious. That process is globalisation.
Globalisation means freer trade which means more trade which, in all historical experience, has been the only sustainable long-term way in which poverty has ever been reduced. But it brings with it issues about which many campaigners feel uncomfortable: "food miles", for example, namely the notion that free trade in food will damage the environment and so we all ought to buy food locally. Fine, if you believe that, but don't then claim you also want African farmers to gain better access to European markets.
Industrialisation, and with it increased investment by multinational companies is another. That is the method by which China has cut its poverty numbers at the fastest rate in history. It is also ultimately the only way in which India or indeed much of Africa is really going to cut poverty substantially. You'd better swallow hard if you think multinationals are agents of the devil, or that industrialisation in the third world is bound to destroy the planet. You can believe those things, but if so you are simultaneously deciding that poverty will always be with us.
In sum, the bold campaigners of Live 8 are right to say that the record on trade is ugly. Geldof, Bono and others need now to become all-round evangelists for globalisation.
