Trade beats aid . . .

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Who could say anything negative about a movement to aid Africa that brings together stars as diverse as President Bush, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Brad Pitt and Madonna? Well, there's always Libyan President Moammar Ghadafi.

Madonna, Coldplay, Elton John, Mariah Carey and other superstars performed at Bob Geldof's globally televised Live 8 concert to urge the world's wealthiest nations meeting this week at the G-8 talks hosted by Blair in Gleneagles, Scotland, to double their aid to Africa.

At the same time, Col. Ghadafi, hosting a semiannual meeting of the African Union's 53 member governments in Libya, urged his fellow African leaders to come together, solve their own problems and stop "begging" for outside aid.

Though few African leaders were willing to openly join Col. Ghadafi's longstanding opposition to Western involvement of any kind in the continent, his comments express an extreme answer to a question many ask: At a time when the wealthy nations are remarkably united in their desire to help Africa, what's the best way to do it?

Most African leaders are quite willing to embrace Mr. Blair's aid proposals, at least in public, but not without some reservations. Well-intentioned as it is, the current push for the wealthy nations to "Make Poverty History," as one campaign calls itself, uncomfortably strikes many African ears as echoing the condescending missionaries and explorers who came from Europe in past centuries to "save" Africans from themselves.

A Nigerian analyst at the Libya meeting told Reuters, "Africa's image is that of a child. We are infantilized by this campaign."

Yet, much of Africa has desperate needs. More than 40 percent of Africans live on less than $1 a day; AIDS kills more than 2 million Africans a year. Many others are killed by malaria or by wars, that broke out in some 186 coups d'etat and 26 major conflicts after imperial pullouts a half-century ago.

Some African governments like Mozambique and Ghana are making impressive economic and political progress. Zimbabwe and other kleptocracies behave like the proverbial brother-in-law on the couch: You keep waiting for him to get a job, straighten up and get his act together.

Mr. Blair and other antipoverty campaigners are pushing for a doubling of aid to Africa, backed by major reports from the United Nations Millennium Project and Mr. Blair's own Commission for Africa. Mr. Bush has rejected Blair's target but offered to double America's 2004 level of Africa aid to $8.6 billion by 2010, more than any previous administration.

But, more important than aid to meet short-term needs is the developed world's long-term approach in helping Africa develop.

For example, in April I visited Dakar, Senegal, the bustling West African port city whose Hong Konglike financial district surprised me with its gleaming high-rise glory. I found a rising generation of educated and enterprising Africans in blue suits and wingtipped shoes who wanted trade, not aid, especially under fair international rules and cleaner African governments.

And the new generation is not alone in looking at how market capitalism, entrepreneurship and education reforms have improved the countries like China since the late 1970s, India since the early 1980s, and Vietnam since the late 1980s.

"All of these were homegrown policy reforms, which allowed countries to get richer by making money, not by receiving it," an editorial in Britain's the Economist rhapsodized on the eve of the G-8 summit.

And all three now trade with the United States, providing cheaper goods and services and, it must be said, ominously competing with American workers for outsourced jobs.

Such is the magic of the marketplace. It has its winners, its losers and some who can't seem to get into the game. That last category unfortunately is where too much of Africa continues to languish.

A new debate is emerging, not over whether to provide foreign aid to fight global poverty, but what kind of aid is best. In many ways it resembles America's welfare reform debate; some critics say conventional foreign economic aid actually hurts those it is intended to help, if it does any good at all.

As the Economist concludes in an editorial, more aid may not "make poverty history" but it will do at least some short-term good. In the long term, however, the partnership between the developed and underdeveloped world will work best under the old proverb: Give someone a fish and you feed him for a day; teach them to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.