External aid, though vital for Africa's development, has become unpredictable and of low quality, UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) executive secretary Kingsley Amoako said Monday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

“The unpredictability of aid is widespread in Africa as donors too frequently make unilateral changes in aid agreements without consulting the recipient countries,” Amoako told foreign ministers at the opening of the fourth ordinary session of the African Union Executive Council.

Noting that donors were imposing excessive conditionality on aid and insisting on extensive reporting requirements, Amoako said the situation led to high transaction costs for recipient countries.

“Unpredictability results in serious disruptions of important national programmes and creates uncertainty about how to plan for the future,” he said.

Though the HIPC initiative of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund provided significant debt relief to a number of African countries, the ECA chief said that by itself is inadequate to overcome Africa's debt burden.

He pointed out that decline in prices of commodities were wrecking havoc to government revenues and "throwing African farmers into deeper economic distress”.

According to Amoako, the future of the multilateral system of trade negotiations is surrounded by great uncertainty while incoherence in policy towards Africa and the rest of the developing world has been a cause of major setbacks.

However, he disclosed that the ECA was working on a ‘Mutual Review of Development Effectiveness,’ to assess trends in aid flows, aid quality, debt forgiveness and policy coherence.

Amoako apparently further said agricultural subsidies for farmers in the developed world cost African cotton producers an estimated $300-million in revenue from 1999 to 2001, and noted that African countries would find it difficult to meet a set of UN goals to reduce poverty, hunger and disease by 2015 if the continent's exports continued to be subjected to unfair international trade practices.

In 2002, the US, a major cotton exporter, provided $3,9-billion in subsidies to its cotton farmers, three times the amount of aid it provided to African countries.

Africa's share of overall world exports fell from 6,3% in 1980 to two per cent in 2000, according to report issued last month by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.