WASHINGTON, June 15 (Reuters) - Even as President George W. Bush pledged to speed aid to Africa, U.S. foreign policy experts and at least one prominent private donor wondered if traditional aid has done more harm than good.
"Aid is the one commodity Africa has never been short of, and it has failed dismally time and time again," De Beers Chairman Nicky Oppenheimer said in a speech in London, which was replayed in Washington on Wednesday at a forum of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Oppenheimer, a member of one of Africa's richest families and an executive at its best-known diamond mining concern, said in the decades since colonial powers have left Africa, the continent has received more than $1 trillion in aid -- a figure much higher than the $400 billion others estimate.
But whatever the amount, Oppenheimer said the heavy flow of aid has sometimes hurt those it was meant to help.
"For all the talk of partnership between Africa and donor nations, aid develops dependence on the donor to the extent that in some of the poorest countries, where it constitutes more than 50 percent of the national budget, it has surely become a form of neo-colonialism," he said.
One path out of poverty for Africa is the lifting of trade restrictions, Oppenheimer and others said.
"It is more politically expedient to pour aid into Africa than for Europe and America to cut farm subsidies which enable their own farmers to dump their produce in Africa and impoverish African producers," Oppenheimer said. "While those subsidies and tariffs remain in place, the campaign to lift Africa out of poverty will remain mired in hypocrisy."
Oppenheimer's original critique came on Monday, the same day Bush told African leaders he would work to accelerate aid under the Millennium Challenge Account which offers assistance to nations that agree to make political and economic reforms.
Three years ago, Bush proposed $5 billion for the program, but at this point only $117,500 has been paid out, with $220 million committed to Africa. African leaders visiting the White House this week blamed onerous requirements and red tape.
Finance ministers from the Group of Eight industrialized nations agreed on Saturday to write off more than $40 billion of debt to some of the world's poorest countries, most of them in Africa.
NO RELIEF FOR 'LAGGARDS'
But debt relief, while valuable for some impoverished nations, is no panacea, said Edward Jaycox, a former World Bank official who now manages the private Washington-based Emerging Markets Partnership and chairs the Africa Fund, which invests in infrastructure development in Africa.
"I don't think it should be across the board, necessarily, particularly for countries that are not making any effort at all," Jaycox said at the foreign relations forum. "I think they should be denied debt relief, these laggards, and only humanitarian relief perhaps for that laggard group."
Both Jaycox and Oppenheimer stressed the need to differentiate between those African countries that are succeeding with reform and economic development -- 25 of the 50 in the continent, according to Jaycox -- and those that are failing.
"Debt forgiveness is an important step. It's not the be-all and end-all," Princeton Lyman, director of Africa policy studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview before the forum.
"We've had decades of aid (to Africa)... and the continent has become poorer," said Ian Vasquez of the libertarian Cato Institute. "A large part of the reason is the aid has gone to support governments with the worst economic policies on record."
Vasquez, speaking in a telephone interview, said sound economic policies -- including free trade, property rights and the removal of regulatory and bureaucratic obstacles to investment -- would help economic development in Africa.
"One of the big problems in foreign aid is the lack of accountability in the aid process," Vasquez said. "We should be asking ourselves what happened to hundreds of billions of dollars Africa received and why are things going to be different this time?"
