Dr Ram Sharan Mahat owes an explanation to the nation about what exactly he achieved by flying halfway across the globe to Monterrey's UN International Conference on Financing for Development during the middle of a national crisis and a cabinet moratorium on foreign travel. But considering our donor dependency, attendance may have been mandatory.

Nepal's experience with the foreign aid has been no different from that of the other powerless countries that attended Monterrey. Perhaps the first instance of foreign aid, if it can be called that, was the British grant of "an unconditional annual present of rupees ten lakhs to be paid in perpetuity" for the valuable help rendered by Nepal for four-and-a-half years during the First World War. This was subsequently doubled when Nepalis fought even more loyally for the British during the Second World War. Since the country was Rana property at that time, the money probably paid for their excesses here and abroad.

King Mahendra restored the begging bowl status to the Nepali state by dispensing with the institutions of democratic governance. But what was really baffling was his success in persuading President Eisenhower to bankroll his absolute rule with the pledge of $15 million extra assistance in 1960.

To be fair, the aid did partially pay for the literacy drive and the malaria eradication campaigns. Other donors such as India, Russia and Britain worked together to fight their fear of Chinese influence in the Himalayan Kingdom with investment in infrastructure projects, but the unintended consequence of this largely unsolicited largesse was the institutionalisation of a culture of dependency. By the end of seventies, the country had lost the will to do anything on its own.

The stated purpose of the Monterrey meet last week was altruistic: to double the $50 billion of foreign aid each year to halve poverty by 2015. The United States, which was giving only 0.01 percent of its GDP as aid (compared with the UN recommended 0.7 percent), announced a doubling of aid by 2006-partly to offset criticism in Monterrey. But post 9/11, aid is suddenly being prescribed as an antidote to terrorism. There are loud hints emanating from the White House that the real intent of the Mexico summit was to seek vows of allegiance from the world community for Globocop George W.

The "International Monterrey Fund" and the World Bank dominated the show, and the final Monterrey declaration was a sugar-coated version of the Washington Consensus. The new euphemism for privatisation is "battling corruption", globalisation will henceforth be known as "adopting solid economic practices", and the loss of economic sovereignty will now go under the guise of "spending funds efficiently". With these conditions, poor countries have been promised a little more dole, but to expect any meaningful change after these commitments would be to ignore the chasm between the developing and the developed world. The grip of rich countries over the world economy is so tight-fisted that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Well-administered aid can indeed do wonders for the countries mired in the vicious circle of illiteracy, ill-health, poverty, lack of growth and the resulting soft state, as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says. But constant meddling by the lords of poverty in policy formulation ends up having exactly the opposite effect.

In recent years, the focus of the Washington Consensus has shifted from humanitarian aid to international trade and development loans. Poor countries were made to borrow to pay for the expensive projects they had signed on to earlier. The drying up of direct aid and an increase in conditional loans from multilateral agencies inevitably led to the institutionalisation of corruption as the new elite from the recipient countries was co-opted into the international suppliers' network.

haThe journey has been downhill ever since, with countries like Pakistan forced to borrow even to pay the interest on earlier loans. Nothing short of writing off all past loans can check the further pauperisation of the world's poor. Administering the IMF prescriptions over last two decades has aggravated the ills of poverty, marginalisation and exclusion in the developing world. More doses of the same potion are unlikely to work.
When Brett Schaefer of the Heritage Foundation studied World Bank and IMF data from countries that had received international development loans between 1980 and 1999, he discovered that "recipients are more likely to be worse off after the loans than they are to experience significant economic growth." Coming form the bastion of conservatism, that self-indictment could be a gross understatement, but it does indicate the enormity of the problem at hand.

So Monterrey turned out to be just another photo-op. Over 50 heads of state and hundreds of other lesser world leaders made pious pronouncements on the problem of global poverty, and then dispersed after nearly a week of pomp. All we have at the end of it is a couple of solemn vows from rich countries. Thus spake Dubyaman: "We must do more than just feel good about what we are doing. We must do good." Amen. When Americans decide to do good, the rest of the world had better head for the burrows.

Scepticism over the Monterrey meet is grounded in the reality of failed expectations. Despite the dazzlingly intelligent and glib arguments of development economists, global poverty hasn't decreased, and the inequality between the poor and the rich has in fact increased. Clearly, the emphasis now has to shift from free trade and development loans to humanitarian aid and institution building. Teaching a person to fish is no doubt a worthwhile task, but no less important is to keep the fish alive until the new fisherfolk can catch fish by themselves.

So, Dr Mahat. Tell us, how was the seafood?