Measured in per cent of their Gross National Product (GNP), western industrialised countries currently spend far less on development aid than they did ten years ago. This is partly due to the very limited usefulness of the prevailing concept of development aid.

According to the purist view development policy amounts to the pursuit of its main objective as against those of foreign, economic and agricultural policy, i. e., to ensure that donor interests should give way as far as possible to this target. It is however self-evident that “practical...