Despite its bold vision and practical solutions, implementation of the Africa Plan is far from certain. The US Administration has not committed its support to the Africa Commission proposals, noting that America is already helping Africa through its Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief and its Millennium Challenge Account. Nor are the measures for debt relief, the doubling of aid, creation of an IFF, and the elimination of agricultural subsidies especially popular with the US Congress, which is distracted by increased military spending, an escalating fiscal deficit, and divisive partisan debate. Canada and Japan have also been cool to significant increases in aid and establishment of an IFF, while Germany, Italy, and France have voiced caution about ending government subsidies for their farmers. The Blair Report’s proposal for comprehensive debt relief was tabled by the G-8 Finance Ministers in February 2005, and its recommendation for more equitable African representation in multilateral institutions, including the IMF and World Bank, seems to have little support in Western capitals.

Big Business, which generally embraces the idea of Public-Private Partnerships, is skeptical of global regulation and accountability (the Africa Plan endorses PPP’s, but skirts the issue of holding multinational corporations legally responsible for their labor, social, and environmental practices in developing nations). At the same time, NGOs in Africa, wary of Western failures to deliver on past promises, have expressed concern that the Africa Plan calls on wealthy nations merely to modify – not end – their policies of forcing liberalization on developing nations through ‘conditionality’ (quid pro quo stipulations) in debt relief, aid, and trade. It is also unclear if Russia, which chairs the G-8 in 2006, will sustain international momentum on these reforms for Africa into the future. Meanwhile, the global public – ‘the world’s second superpower’ which responded so energetically to world injustice in anti-war protests two years ago – has been slow to recognize that ending poverty in Africa is not only in the interest of international equity, but also in the interest of global security, peace, and prosperity.

For these reasons, some observers say, the Blair Report is too radical and politically unrealistic. But others maintain that the Commission for Africa’s proposals do not reach far enough. Noting that the Brandt Commission coupled its emergency relief programme for developing nations with comprehensive measures for restructuring the global economy, many analysts worry that the development reforms proposed in Our Common Interest may fail because they do not address the world’s systemic macroeconomic problems. Hence, implementation of the Africa Plan would not be enough to change the economic balance of power and truly benefit developing nations.

For example, establishing a formal link between debt cancellation and poverty eradication is of crucial importance, say financial specialists; but even with comprehensive debt relief today, the clock on interest rates would start ticking again on new loans tomorrow, and in another 50 years debt levels would be back to where they are now. Likewise, the proposals to double foreign aid and reduce aid ‘conditionality’ are welcome, say critics, but without multilateral oversight of aid collection and dispersion, bilateral assistance will remain subject to the foreign policy objectives of contributing governments, the ‘tying’ of aid flows to commercial interests, ineffectual targeting by institutional donors, and the administrative incapacity of poor nations to absorb incoming aid. In the realm of finance, development economists warn that because the proposed International Financing Facility would borrow money through the sale of development bonds – scrupulously targeted to ensure maximum yields at a minimum of risk – the necessary capital requirements would skew these funds toward safe commercial investments in the wealthier developing nations, discriminating against human and social development in poorer states and diverting future streams of development finance from governments in rich nations.

In the area of trade, development agencies point out that the initiative to end agricultural subsidies in developed nations is much needed, but its benefits to farmers in developing nations may be cancelled out by the continuance of IMF structural adjustment policies that require indebted countries to dismantle their own agricultural trade barriers; nor would major increases in foreign aid adequately compensate producers in developing nations for the depressed prices of their coffee, tea, spices, cotton, sugar, rubber, and other commodities in global markets, as the report seems to suggest. Finally, the proposal to repatriate illicit funds back to Africa is a brave step, many economists agree, but there is no legal or political leverage to require international banks to identify suspicious accounts or force companies to stop making shady deals with African strongmen – while many other problems in international finance must still be addressed, including the lack of oversight on global transactions, rampant speculation, unpredictable and unstable international investment flows, and volatility in exchange rates.

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