By Najib Saab, Issue 30, September 2000

British parliamentarians were the last party to join a growing group of official and public bodies urging radical reform in international aid programs. They described those programs as crippled by delay, confusion and political interference. In a recent report, the British Parliament's International Development Committee said that the European Commission needed urgent changes to its assistance programs and an implementation plan. "The Commission should give up its addiction to half measures and have the courage to reform for the benefit of the world's poor," the report asserted.

We couldn't agree more with this warning, which follows similar remarks contained in a report previously published by a fact-finding committee appointed by the US Congress. The report accuses the World Bank of failing in promoting economic stability and easing poverty, describing its assistance programs in developing countries as "inefficient, repetitive and marred with corruption and waste."

Examples of such confused international aid programs in the environmental sector are abundant in the Arab region. Millions are wasted on cloned projects that lack proper control and accountability. As if the ultimate goal is to spend budgets on meetings, reports and intermediaries are commissioned with the execution of fake jobs, with no real benefits reaching those grassroots to whom the projects were initially planned.

A group of guardians has developed around those international aid programs that take advantage of the chaos to collect commissions and distribute grants among bogus groups operating under a variety of names. This explains how fake business in development flourished, as benefits are being shared among a closed circle of individuals appointed to phony boards and committees.

Development aid wheeler-dealer type entrepreneurs assemble fake boards, which are often multinational, to attract financial support from agencies. They later buy the silence and loyalty of their ostensible committees by distributing among them a small portion of the collected cash and arranging paid invitations to meetings and conferences around the world. Thus a web of personal interests groups is created, including a bizarre combination of individuals, stretching between employees of international agencies and their local associates. They all share the common goal of protecting the corrupt international aid system, to preserve their lazy earnings and personal benefits.

Many European Union initiatives in the Middle East are related to the Mediterranean and come under a variety of names. Those and others crisscross with United Nations initiatives such as the Blue Plan and the Mediterranean Action Plan. While coordination is expected, overlapping and repetition are the norm. Poor preparation and vague targets often plague these programs.

A $500,000 European Union initiative to establish a so-called Lebanese Environment and Development Observatory is now under implementation. Whereas the observatory is supposed to provide a database of environmental information in Lebanon, those who planned it didn't realize that creation of basic data should precede the collection phase and then proceed with it for timely updates.

How can you collect data that does not exist in the first place? Data on the state of the environment, be it pollution of soil, air and water, or information on climate and natural resources, can only be created by reliable laboratories and research centers, which either do not exist or are not well equipped. An initiative to support creation of data should have been a prerequisite to establishing a program to collect non-existing data. Information on a small section of the Lebanese coast that dates back to 1950 and has never been updated, for example, would be confusing and misleading if used as the basis of a coastal planning in 2000.

Air pollution data available is selective and not reliable. Information on water pollution is old. No reliable inventory of resources is available. This being the situation, what credible information would the database of the planned observatory then contain? In the absence of proper supervision and accountability, some aid entrepreneurs abuse international grants in a blunt and shameless manner. We have recently received a newsletter named Muntada Al-Bia, dated April 2000, and it states on page 2 that the Mediterranean Action Plan of the United Nations Environment Program has financed it.

The same page displays a long list of supervisors, editorial staff and board members. To our astonishment, we found that this issue was an identical twin of another newsletter dated December 1999, which only came under another name, Al-Mutawassitiyah Al-Mustadamah (Sustainable Mediterranean). While the material of the 16 pages was a mere photocopy of the other newsletter, the editorial board had different names except for the chief, and the financers were, this time, the European Environment Office and the Mediterranean Information Office. Interestingly, the back cover of the April 2000 version included a copy of an advertisement announcing a conference and an exhibition, which supposedly took place in December 1999, sponsored by another group of international agencies.

Was this advertisement, which came five month too late, invoiced to the sponsors also? Is this the way international aid is supposed to be spent, and isn't it a scandal that such situations are allowed to flourish for years under the eyes of donors, who even fail to notice that money has been collected from two different parties to produce a copy of the same material? When we have previously uncovered reports, which were copied, multiplied and sold many times to different UN agencies, it did not even raise the eyebrows of those concerned. Under the pretext of supporting non-governmental organizations, funds are wasted and credibility of international agencies is deteriorating every day.

Another European initiative is an alleged union for environmental media under the name Med-Ecomedia Network. We at Environment & Development magazine know about this network only from a newsletter we occasionally receive, containing no information and lacking any notion of professional journalism, let alone the amateurish style of its Arabic section. From time to time, some acquaintances who are neither writers nor journalists, tell us about meetings of that media network that they were invited to attend as representatives of their countries.

But who gave them the credentials of environmental journalists, or the authority to represent their countries, and by which right are they invited to attend international environmental meetings as media representatives? Or is this type of mediocrity a precondition to complete the folkloric attire of modern environmental gatherings?

We question again why would the European Union spend its funds to create this type of a Mediterranean Media Network, which groups laypersons not related to the media and excludes genuine environmental journalists who know about it only through a substandard newsletter. Along similar lines, a group of local and international officials have recently introduced to the media, in a lavish press conference held in Beirut, what they claimed was a manual on environmental and health education. The manual, carrying the names of five international agencies, which supported it financially, was described as a "breakthrough in environmental education."

A review of the work reveals a few general educational concepts, which can usually be found in introductions of textbooks. It contains 4,000 words spread over 36 pages, whereas the statements delivered in its launching ceremony were much longer. The contents of the alleged work manual are restricted to a general plan and vague concepts, which might apply to geography, history, arts and sciences, as much as they apply to health and environment.

The fact is that what remains of the "network" that most of those programs claim to create is the "net," which often strangles serious initiatives in developing countries by promoting amateurish approaches. Meaningful "work" is, unfortunately, left outside the net, and thus outside the well-protected web of mutual benefits.

It is high time to stop subsidizing poor-quality programs and cease financing pointless projects designed to support greedy middlemen instead of helping deprived communities. Those small entrepreneurs, living on squandering aid money, must learn to earn their living through proper work