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The article discusses international economic assistance to development countries, including the politically corrupt Malawi government's stealing aid money. An overview of the percentage of international economic aid that reaches poor people in developing countries is provided.

The article focuses on U.S. President George W. Bush's foreign aid program known as the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). George W. Bush's flagship foreign-aid programme is under fire. Since 2002, when the president promised to set it up, the Millennium Challenge Corporation has found only four relatively small poor countries to give money to. Last week, the MCC's chief executive, Paul Applegarth, announced that he was quitting. The MCC is unloved by both left and right. A Republican-led House of Representatives sub-committee has just recommended nearly halving its budget, to $1.75 billion next year. American liberals suspect it is part of Bush's conspiracy to conservatise the world. And Europeans mock the MCC as slower, meaner and more ideological than their own aid programmes.

Comments on the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development held in September 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Contention that topics discussed, such as new aid packages from rich countries, were rehashed from previous meetings; Allegation that the meeting was not supposed to raise new issues, but consider well-known problems; Promise made to reduce the number of people living with inadequate water and sanitation; Effort to reduce the number of people living in absolute poverty.

The article argues that the United Nations' proposed list of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set out how to improve the lives of the poor people in emerging countries, needs to be shortened and redesigned to focus on reducing poverty, improving health, and boosting education. According to the article, the SDGs are the successors to the development targets that various governments agreed to in 2000. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and good intentions are examined.

THIS year's report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the state of humanity's health concentrates on the" 3 by 5" anti-AIDS initiative that the agency, and several collaborators, announced last year. That might not sound much, given that at least 34 million people are now thought to be infected with HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, it would, in fact, be a huge leap forward. The plan is to create easy but efficient ways of delivering life-saving treatment. Obviously, pills would have to be provided in larger numbers. But drug regimens would also be simplified. Care and counselling would be delegated from doctors and nurses to paramedical" community health workers", to avoid wasting scarce skilled manpower. And there would, inevitably, be "mobilisation" of poor-country governments, charities, religious bodies, companies and United Nations agencies. Richard Feachem, the head of the Global Fund To Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, another of the international bodies involved in combating the infection, reckons that " 3 by 5" on its own will cost $2 billion-3 billion a year.

This article presents the opinion that deploring economic injustice is ineffective in bringing relief to the world's poor. Surely there is no more commanding moral imperative for people in the West than to urge each other, and their governments, to bring relief to the world's poorest. And what a tragedy it is, therefore, that many of the kind souls who respond most eagerly to this imperative bring to the issue an analytical mindset that is almost wholly counterproductive. They are quite right, these champions of the world's poor, that poverty in an age of plenty is shameful and disgusting. But they are quite wrong to suppose, as so many of them do, that the rich enjoy their privileges at the expense of the poor--that poverty, in other words, is inseparable from a system, capitalism, that thrives on injustice.

Comments on the absurdity of the rituals of cargo cultism, in which the world's poor pray for the materialist gods of the rich white nations to bring them alms. Argument that the alternative to supporting cargo-cultism is to allow free movement of people; Examples of cargo cultism; Rejection by most wealthy countries of economic migrants.