Jeffry Sachs' The End of Poverty lays out simple facts and a straight forward plan to eliminating extreme poverty. Unfortunately, one of the basic principles, the commitment by the world's leading nations, including the U.S., is unclear at this time. I think the world economic crisis is causing developed nations to focus on their own economic strategies and constraints rather than parts of the world that will be most affected if their international aid is undermined. It is quite unbelievable that the U.S. can come up with $700 billion to "bail out" the richest companies yet, cannot and has not come up with more plans to relieve the extreme poverty which is taking countless lives across Africa and Southeast Asia. Even if the U.S. is solely focused on its own problems, where were the hundreds of billions of dollars when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast? Hopefully, the next administration will focus on the UN Millennium Development Goals and renew their commitment to help end extreme poverty by 2015.

Experience, common sense, and Jeffery Sachs all indicate that the current economic crisis can do nothing but significantly cut levels of foreign aid. This could be a disaster for the developing world, unless you believe the critics when they say that foreign aid doesn't make much of a difference.

Foreign aid may be something of a double edged sword: with it, corrupt regimes may stay in power and profit from the aid; without it, the people we least want to suffer may be punished.

Despite the dismal Catch 22 surrounding foreign aid, it seems there may actually be some good news to emerge on the credit crisis's effect on African economies. Yesterday the BBC's Martin Plaut wrote that the continent may actually come out ahead in the crisis, because:

Africa's banks have been so conservatively managed that they have almost no exposure to the sub-prime market that has caused such havoc elsewhere in the world.

The article generally predicts that Africa's banks will be safe from the fate that has befallen many of the rest of the world's financial institutions. Additionally, Plaut argues that the hit the natural resource markets will take won't be devastating because of the seeming endless demand (especially from China). Overall, it seems Africa is looking more economically stable than it ever has before (perhaps just by comparison to the rest of the world).

Maybe with African financial institutions holding strong and foreign aid waning some countries will begin to increase their economic independence. Self-reliance is certainly easier to talk about than to achieve, but perhaps this is an opportunity for governments to use what aid they receive more efficiently and capitalize on the relative immunity Africa has to the credit crisis. Recently 26 African nations joined together to form a regional market; could this be the beginning of a new, independent economic power in the world?

Andrew Leonard on salon.com had an interesting response to the parallels drawn by some between feeding those in the developing world and the $700 billion Wall Street bail out (and one that I've been thinking for some time but much less eloquently.)

But suppose that the U.S. and various European governments had decided not to bail out their banking systems, and in consequence, credit markets completely collapsed and world trade ground to a halt. It's quite possible that global poverty and hunger would drastically worsen. If farmers have no access to credit, they are unable to pay for seed and fertilizer and labor. If shipping companies have no access to credit, food doesn't move across the oceans. If enough banks collapse, mass unemployment is sure to follow.

Of course it's true that $700 billion dollars could go a long way in fighting poverty and disease, but if in the end there's no functioning economy for those individuals to work within, what's the point?