Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-02-Speech-4-198-000"
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"en.20120202.31.4-198-000"2
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"Madam President, in the European Parliament in Strasbourg recently, I met a very clever man from Nigeria called Thompson Ayodele. He talked me through a number of statistics on foreign aid, and the figures were pitilessly clear. He showed that international assistance was not useless; it was actively harmful. If you compared countries in receipt of it with countries not in receipt of it over the same periods, the countries not in receipt grew faster, were more democratic, developed more impressively, and for the obvious reason: foreign aid breaks the link between taxation, representation and expenditure. It allows governments to remain in office without the support of their populations.
There are lots of things we could be doing to help developing countries. We could open our markets; we could abolish the common agricultural policy; we could encourage their exporters to sell. But the one thing that is absolutely not going to help is giving this kind of assistance, especially when we do not have the money. This is the crazy thing! We are borrowing money we do not have in order to give it to countries whose situation would thereby be worsened, all in order to make ourselves feel virtuous."@en1
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