Over to you Africa...

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"We are still getting orders from abroad, all the factories are," said Wei. "But no one is taking them because we would make a loss. The foreigners do not want to pay a reasonable price. We have not made any profits for two years."

 So reports the Sunday Telegraph in a piece about the impact of economic growth, higher wages and cost pressures on Chinese clothing manufacturers. And the big deal here is that the businesses can't produce the clothes cheaply enough to satisfy the cost demands of Western brands and retailers.

Now, however, the Chinese factories have hit a wall. The workers who were once happy to work for as little as £30 a month now want ten to 15 times that sum.

Young men with the latest mobile phones and foppish hair cuts stood around two outdoor pool tables on the streets of Dadun avenue, gambling on the games. Their factory is only paying them for six hours a day in a bid to trim its costs.

More and more workers are choosing not to travel to the South to find work, preferring to try their luck at one of the new factories or construction projects popping up in inland China, where life is cheaper and they can be closer to their families.

Familiar? Yet the first response is to suggest that the answer is for us to pay more for our jeans!

The days of so-called "throwaway fashion", where stores could sell garments cheap enough to be worn for a just a few months and then discarded, could be over, he said.

"Companies should be very scared, as throwaway fashion is now dead," he claimed. "For years they wanted to get more and pay less. They have pillaged the system in China. But now they are going to suffer."

Elsewhere in the world there's a huge continent with millions of people crying our for economic opportunity, crushed by the agricultural protection of Western democracies and patronised by aid NGOs.

It's called Africa - I reckon they'd be pretty good at making jeans? Don't you?

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Thoughts on why bilateral aid doesn't work

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I have always tried to avoid writing about international aid – not because it’s a subject without importance but because, frankly, my neighbours in Cullingworth don’t put it in their top ten areas of concern. Indeed, there are plenty of folk out there who believe that charity starts at home. But I sense, in the debate about cuts, an imminent upwelling of righteous anger at the audacity of ordinary people who’d prefer their taxes spent on schools, hospitals and coppers rather than on buying 4X4s for ‘aid workers’ to drive around Africa.

Although to be honest, that’s not where the aid cash goes as the biggest (by far) recipient of UK aid is India (nearly £300 million in 2008). You know, that poor country that owns Jaguar and our steel industry (at least the bits it hasn’t closed down yet). Perhaps we should have sent some of that aid to Redcar instead?

OK, I hear you saying that all this can be fixed, a good government will shift the aid programme away from supporting Britain’s foreign policy to targeted support for the poorest countries. Somehow, I doubt this – the purpose of the aid budget is not to alleviate poverty but to purchase the continued support of the recipient countries (although how much this actually works remains moot). That and bilateral aid programmes continue to distort the development of poor country economies because they are not associated with requirements for policy changes.

It is in this last point that multilateral aid differs as the intervention of the World Bank and IMF is always associated with requirements to change economic policies, develop better legal enforcement structures and perhaps try to collect a few taxes. The aid is still market distorting but it provides the recipient nation with a pathway to better governance. That pathway includes things like ending arbitrary land seizure, repatriating overseas sovereign funds, collecting taxes and repaying (yes, repaying) some of that debt.

But when the donor nation doesn’t like the medicine prescribed it just sidles up to a giver of bilateral aid, reels out its sob story and lo, the aid is forthcoming. And nothing is done to give people property rights, no efforts are made to end graft and governments continue with market distorting programmes of urban food subsidy, price-fixing and nationalisation.

The changes that are beginning – slowly – to improve Africa are happening in spite of aid programmes. In truth aid programmes can actively discourage the development of a strong business culture – why bother developing the necessary infrastructure of a free economy when the aid fairy will drop some cash on you tomorrow? If we worried less about so-called fair trade, social justice and other such nonsense – and concerned ourselves with promoting free markets in Africa then we’d be doing a damn sight more for poor folk than all the billions of bilateral aid money.

But if we’re going to spend that money let’s use it to change things rather than prop up corruption, graft and the old third world disorder.

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A little flavour of West Africa made simple for us lazy white folk!

My wife spent her young childhood in West Africa - firstly in Sierra Leone and subsequently in the delta area of Nigeria. Now the memories of someone who left the continent for England at the age of seven are very different to those of older folk. And Kathryn's memories are of small things - of the fence that grew into a hedge, the wild cat on the suitcase, the "bad snake" in the hotel room, and of floating down the river on a lilo to Abraka - then a small little town now a bustling university city! Among these memories are those of the cook pounding groundnuts (rather like the boy in this picture) and killing chickens!

From this West African experience comes this recipe for Groundnut Stew. It's no more a real African dish than my mum's lovely curry is an authentic South Asian experience! But it is really easy to make and quite delicious.

Groundnut Stew

Ingredients:

11/2 lbs of dead animal cubed or chopped (I use shin beef but any good beef, mutton or goat will do)
One large onion (roughly chopped)
2 oz butter (or equivalent in vegetable oil)
Couple of teaspoons mixed up ground cumin & coriander (optional)
Salt & ground black pepper
2 pts stock (I tend to use a good beef stock cube but any rich meat stock will work fine)
2 or 3 heaped tablespoons coarse peanut butter (you can of course get your ground nuts and pound them into an oily paste & mix with ghee if you prefer but peanut butter is quicker!)

Heat the oil and fry the onions until soft. Add the meat and seal. Add salt, pepper, cumin & coriander and mix well. Cover with the stock and simmer for about an hour or so (until the meat is tender - for some meat this can take longer of course). Make sure there is plenty of liquid - you may want to add a little more stock.

Mix in the peanut butter thoroughly and heat through. Serve with freshly boiled white rice or in bowls with bread or nachos.

Enjoy!

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