Red Cross calls for 'humanitarian Belt and Road' to boost Chinese aid
The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross has called for a "humanitarian Belt and Road" as he urges China to match its extraordinary economic growth with more generous aid donorship.
Former Swiss diplomat Peter Maurer said traditional donor countries such as Australia, the United States and European nations were under fiscal pressure but newly wealthy countries were not yet filling the void.
That meant "we are struggling with both of them", he told Fairfax Media during a recent visit to Australia.
As president of the world's oldest aid organisation, Mr Maurer has sent a special envoy to Beijing. Referring to China's trillion-dollar Belt and Road global infrastructure-building project, he said Beijing needed a humanitarian equivalent.
"We wanted ... to have an internal voice promoting this thinking of humanitarian sensitivity in Chinese foreign policy. I think we are certainly not there yet that China is a big donor, but we have, I think, productive and interesting discussions with China," he said.
Chinese aid is opaque but the most comprehensive study to date, by the US-based AidData project, found Beijing had spent $US354.4 billion in development funding around the world between 2000 and 2014 - not far off the $US394.6 billion spent by the US.
But the bulk of the Chinese development money was not strictly aid, rather more commercially driven loans.
China had offered funding for ICRC work. The amount was "still modest in terms of volume but important in terms of symbolics", Mr Maurer said. Encouraging China was a long-term endeavour for the ICRC.
Mr Maurer said aid donors had never given money unconditionally, but national interest was increasingly driving spending.
"Some of the rhetoric [in wealthy countries] is not looking particularly generous," he said.
But there remained a strong understanding - including in Canberra - of the need for independent humanitarian work.
More than 90 per cent of the ICRC's budget comes from 30 countries - what Mr Maurer called "traditional donors" such as Australia, the US and Europe.
But shifts in wealth globally, particularly towards Asia, raised questions about "international burden-sharing".
"I'm not surprised by the fact that the changing power relationship and the changing weight of economics today leads to the question who pays for what and who is participating to what extent in the creation of global public goods."
The Coalition government has slashed Australia's foreign aid by nearly $1.3 billion in today's dollars over the past five years, a real decrease of 23 per cent. US President Donald Trump has reportedly eyed foreign aid cuts of about $US3.5 billion as part of his "America First" agenda but has run into difficulties with Congress getting that done.
Asked whether non-democratic countries would be as generous as democratic countries, Mr Maurer said: "This is for me an open question. I wouldn't take it for granted. But I wouldn't exclude that we are able to convince by facts that there is value in mutual and impartial and independent humanitarian work which is less conditional on state interests.
"How sustainable this is in terms of politics, I don't know. Traditional donors have their difficulties today and new donors have difficulties with the concept. We are struggling with both of them."
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