It’s been a long while since debates over Canada’s foreign aid policies have received so much airing in the mainstream media.

Some of the attention stems from Canada’s decision earlier this year to re-prioritize its aid recipients to a smaller group of developing countries, with more emphasis on Latin American countries than on Africa.

It has also been a topic of discussion because of a broader debate over the merits of foreign aid, largely brought on by Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid (which I’ll sheeplishly admit I haven’t read yet..yikes). More on her book and argument in a moment.

But first, Canada’s revamped policy. Over the weekend the Globe and Mail came out with an article examining the impact of Canada’s decision to prioritize Latin American countries over African countries, with a focus on Malawi. Malawi will no longer be a primary recipient of aid from Canada, which has left some in that country puzzled over why the long-standing relationship between the two countries, which has seen some $445 million sent to Malawi over the last 45 years, is in jeopardy:

In the corridors of power, Africa is no longer fashionable. The government of Stephen Harper, which feels that Mr. Martin was a naive romantic about Africa, has taken a cold, hard look at Canada’s overseas aid. A new list of priorities has been drawn up, with 20 countries or regions on it. Deleted from the list were Malawi and seven other African countries, including Rwanda, still recovering from genocide; Niger, struggling against terrorists who kidnapped two Canadian diplomats last December, and Burkina Faso, whose leaders helped to negotiate the release of the diplomats in late April.

The deleted countries will still receive aid, but on a much smaller level, since 80 per cent of Canada’s $1.5-billion in annual bilateral aid will go to Caribbean and Latin American countries and others on the new priority list. The reasons are obscure. There is rhetoric about “effectiveness” and “focus,” but nobody from Canada has given an explanation to the people who will feel the brunt of the cuts.

This is encouraging to see. Given that Geoffrey York is charged with covering all of Africa for the Globe and Mail (as the only Canadian newspaper correspondent in all of Africa), it is easy for someone in that position to be caught up covering only coups, death, despair and violence. The continuous cutting of foreign coverage by North American and European newspapers has left the remaining correspondents with little time to explore important questions of policy and development. These discussions continue to occur within the policy-writing, political and development communities, but it is of course critically important that they be exposed to mainstream discussion as well.

The Globe story falls short in a few ways. It doesn’t get much high-level input/response from Canadian representatives (likely because they aren’t talking), nor does it include much by way of high-level response from Malawi officials or officials in other countries affected by changes to Canada’s foreign policy. It would be interesting to have someone in Latin America examine some of the projects Canada’s foreign aid will be funding there, and compare them to what Canada has traditionally done in Canada.

But at least the issues are getting mainstream attention (and also here [PDF] , where the Toronto Star praises the Conservative government but essentially argues that Canada can do better). Which leads me to the Munk debates earlier this week (which Louis already provided an excellent detail of here [PDF] , where you can find out what a titan of foreign aid looks like).

Dambisa Moyo has rocketed into the development community with her argument that foreign aid to Africa should be cut off in five years. Hardly the argument that the likes of Jeffrey Sachs and Bono are proposing.

The Munk Debates in Toronto featured heavy hitters representing both arguments, where they went head-to-head.

In one corner: Moyo and Peru’s Hernando de Soto, an economist and author of The Other Path. Their argument, to quote Patricia Adams, executive director of Probe International and author of Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption and the Third World’s Environmental Legacy: ” we have two people from the Third World, one from Africa, one from South America, who tell these Westerners, and all the paternalistic people they represent, to stop the harm: Stop undermining our economies with food aid that destroys our farmers’ ability to compete, they say. And stop the other development aid whose main effect has been to empower our dictators against our people by supplying the dictators with the largesse needed to maintain their secret police while rewarding their cronies and themselves.”

Ouch.

In the other corner, Canadian Stephen Lewis, former ambassador to the UN and special envoy on African crises, and Paul Collier, author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It.

The debate was interesting (watch it here). Perhaps little in the end resolved, but these are the sort of high-level debates, with experts on both sides represented, that occur so rarely outside of academic and political circles. What is difficult to do is bridging the concepts debated thoroughly amongst the group of four, and the ground-level arguments made in the Globe article. Who could argue that Canada’s funding of those water wells in Malawi did not help thousands of people? But is that really the question? Canada should be doing as many of those ground-level projects as possible. But there should be thorough debate about what big-picture effect Canada’s aid policies are having, good and bad, in all corners of the world. That is, in ways, what the Munk debates provided. Hopefully that will spill down to the media coverage we see of the topic.