British Prime Minister Tony Blair got the agreement he wanted on a massive new European Union aid package for sub Saharan Africa last week but questions still remain as to whether the United States and Japan will back the proposals. Six weeks ahead of the critical G8 summit at Gleneagles, the EU as a whole has committed itself to double its aid programme to Africa by 2010 with an additional promise to reach the UN goal of 0.7 per cent of GNP being spent on aid by 2015. Total aid to developing countries, including Africa, will rise from $40 billion this year to $80 billion by 2010.

The EU needs to confront the structural ways in which its trade policy can inadvertently promote instability. In particular, EU trade policy could do a great deal more to encourage growth and equality in the developing world, to help countries move away from reliance on volatile commodity revenues, to mitigate the adjustment costs of liberalisation, enable developing countries to support sensitive domestic industries, add value to their products, and to push the world trade agenda towards more conflict sensitive policies. This is according to a paper by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) that investigates the impacts of EU trade policy on violent conflict in the developing world.

This Christian Aid briefing paper challenges the entrenched assumption that developing countries can only work their way out of poverty through radical economic liberalisation, calling for an end to aid conditions on such policies. It discusses the extent to which governments' aid decisions are based on positive economic assessments from the World Bank and the IMF, which are in turn based on levels of trade liberalisation within potential aid recipients. It notes that developing country economies have either declined or dramatically slowed under these policies, and that poor people dependent on farming or commodity production for their livelihoods have been adversely affected by liberalisation.

On June 1, Paul Wolfowitz will become the 10th President of the World Bank Group. "Around the world people have expressed great concern about Wolfowitz's new role and the new kinds of war he will be waging. When he takes office, anti-war and global justice activists will have the opportunity, and the challenge, of demonstrating the coherence of a global system where the odds against the poor and marginalized are kept stacked not by nature, or by accident, but by deliberate policy choices. No better illustration than Paul Wolfowitz is likely to come along soon," write Njoki Njoroge Njehu and Leslie Cagan, Director of 50 Years Is Enough: U.S. Network for Global Economic Justice, a coalition opposing the World Bank and IMF, and National Coordinator of United for Peace & Justice, the U.S.'s largest anti-war coalition, respectively.

"The Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), a socio-economic justice network of Civil Society Organisations in Zimbabwe, joins the many Global Social Movements in protest against the nomination and confirmation of Mr Paul Wolfowitz, as president of the World Bank Group. Wolfowitz was foreign policy advisor to the president of the United States. Wolfowitz’s recent past is well known: he is one of the architects of the “pre-emptive” war strategy used in Afghanistan and Iraq beginning in October 2001."