Third World Economy: Is Foreign Aid Destructive?
CategoriesForeign Aid comes with a feel-good factor. We can be satisfied that we are - our countries are - contributing to the economic well-being of starving people in the Third World. Even if only a small percentage of our money goes to that aid, at least we did something positive. Or did we?
Zambian writer Evans Munyemesha does not think so. In an article titled International Aid, published in The Zambian, he charges that development aid, "has financed the creation of monstrous projects that, at vast expense, have devastated the environment and ruined lives". Rather than getting down to "the hard task of wealth creation", Munyemesha says, "easy handouts" have been substituted "for the rigors of self-help", leaving the receiving countries economically crippled and their people worse off than before. If we look at results, African 'aid' has been an unmitigated disaster:
"[Africa] has lost self-sufficiency in food production that it enjoyed before development assistance was invented, and during the past few decades, has become instead a continent-sized beggar hopelessly dependent on the largesse of outsiders---per-capita food production has fallen in every year since the 1960s. Seven out of every ten Africans, are now reckoned to be destitute or on the verge of extreme poverty, with the result that the continent has the highest infant mortality rates in the world, the lowest average life-expectancies in the world, the lowest literacy rates, the fewest doctors per head of population, and the fewest children in school."And the situation in other parts of the world does not seem much better.
You might say, that with all the money we're paying, there must be something wrong with the receivers of our aid. The temptation is to cast around for logical reasons why our good intentions don't bear fruit. Corruption ... lazyness ... hold it for a moment. Apart from the on-the-ground view of our Zambian observer (you can see the whole article further down) we have another witness - John Perkins, a highly paid economist formerly working for an international development consultancy. In his book titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then take over their economies.
"Basically what we were trained to do and what our job is to do is to build up the American empire. To bring -- to create situations where as many resources as possible flow into this country, to our corporations, and our government, and in fact we’ve been very successful. We’ve built the largest empire in the history of the world. It's been done over the last 50 years since World War II with very little military might, actually. It's only in rare instances like Iraq where the military comes in as a last resort. This empire, unlike any other in the history of the world, has been built primarily through economic manipulation, through cheating, through fraud, through seducing people into our way of life..."said John Perkins when he was interviewed by Amy Godman. You can find a transcription and get the audio on Democracynow.org. Much of the responsibility for the disaster, says Perkins, is the World Bank's and the International Monetary Fund's, but he is also optimistic that the situation can be changed, saying "I believe the World Bank and other institutions can be turned around and do what they were originally intended to do, which is help reconstruct devastated parts of the world. Help -- genuinely help poor people."
Well, we certainly would have to find ways to make the 'aid' actually arrive at the people, and to help them become self-sufficient, not lead them into further dependency.
Thanks to Neal Perochet of Environmental Restoration International, for bringing the article of Evans Munyemesha to my attention. Neal has been working on the ground in Africa and elsewhere, to make communities self-sufficient through environmental restoration.
Here's the article, first published in The Zambian, which does go quite a way in shaking our feel-good factor on foreign aid or, as it's also mistakenly called, "development aid"...
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International Aid
first published 20 October 2003 in The Zambian
With international ‘aid’ to soon reach $100 billion a year (from $60 billion), it will be the final kick in the teeth of the poor, crippling further their Third World economies. Indeed, (as I have found out after researching through reports and what-not), it’s often profoundly dangerous to the poor and inimical to their interests to have ‘aid’ imposed upon them: It has financed the creation of monstrous projects that, at vast expense, have devastated the environment and ruined lives; it has facilitated the emergence of fantastical and devious bureaucracies staffed by legions of self-serving hypocrites; it has sapped the initiative, and creativity and enterprise of ordinary people and substituted the superficial and irrelevant showiness of imported advice; it has sucked potential entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the developing countries everywhere into non-productive administrative activities; it has created a ‘moral tone’ in international affairs that denies the hard task of wealth creation and that substitutes easy handouts for the rigors of self-help; in addition, throughout the Third World, it has allowed the dead grip of imposed officialdom to suppress popular choice and individual freedom. Call it what you will---but I will call it for what it is: Noble Colonialism! Ain’t that a ‘female dog’?
‘Aid’ [they call it] has its defenders, not least the highly paid public-relations men and women who spend millions of dollars justifying the continued existence of the agencies that employ them. Such professional communicators must reject out of hand the obvious conclusions symbolized by the white elephants of international ‘aid’ agencies: that ‘aid’ is a waste of money and time, that its results are fundamentally bad, and that ---far from being increased--- it should be stopped forthwith before more damage is done.
Whenever such suggestions are made the lobbyists throw up their hands in horror and consternation. Despite some regrettable failures, they protest, ‘aid’ is justified by its successes; despite some glitches and problems, it’s essentially something that works; most important of all ---the emotional touch, the appeal to the heartstrings ---they argue with passion that ‘aid’ must not be stopped because the poor could not survive without it. Such wealthy lunacy! The Brandt Commission provided a classic example of this thought as it loudly screamed and I quote: ‘For the poorest countries ‘aid’ is essential to survival.’
Such statements, however, patronize and undervalue the people of the poor countries concerned. They are, in addition, logically indefensible when uttered by those who also want us to believe that ‘aid’ works. Throughout history and pre-history all countries everywhere got by perfectly all right without any ‘aid’ at all. Furthermore, in the 1950s they got by with much less ‘aid’ than they did, for example, in the 1970s--- and were apparently none the worse for the experience. Now, suddenly, at the tail end of almost sixty years of development assistance, we are told that large numbers of the same countries have lost the ability to survive a moment longer unless they continue to receive ever-larger amounts of ‘aid’. If this is indeed the case ---and if the only measurable impact of all these decades of development has been to turn resolute and tenacious survivors into helpless dependents ---then it seems to me to be beyond dispute that ‘aid’ does not work. Despite the rich, flowing, and seductive language of the Brandt Commission reports, there is a stark lack of concession that prudent management of resources, a willingness to share responsibility and power among nations to fulfill common needs, ensure the right of personal livelihood, improve living standards, and guarantee the well-being of each and every individual in our global village are simply missing in the international ‘aid’ agendas.
Irredeemably out of touch with the poor, and the tedious day-to-day realities of their lives, it’s little wonder that the dignified gangsters in the fraudulent scheme of foreign ‘aid’ for Third World development so unfailingly come up with bizarre and extraneous projects like donating huge supplies of slimming products and frostbite medicine to starving Somalis in the 80s---projects that are worthless, even harmful, to those they are intended to benefit. All that these projects do is meet the bureaucratic needs of the agencies themselves, the career needs of their staff, and the commercial needs of suppliers from whom equipment and services are procured.
It’s not outside our grasp to note that the ‘well-intentioned’ efforts of our ‘well-wishing’ guests in the business of international ‘aid’ have been a sinking ship; a red-faced failure: This is clearly evidenced by the continued existence of the ‘aid’ agencies. If they were doing a good job of promoting development among the poor [which is what they actually tell us], then, presumably, they should have put themselves out of business by now. Over fifty years they should have dealt systematically with the problems that they were established to solve, closed up shop and stopped spending public funds from developed countries. But, no, they want to discuss malnutrition in Uganda while having steak dinners flown in from London; they want to discuss irrigation in Kenya while scuba-diving along the Kenyan beaches; they want to eradicate tsetse flies in Mpongwe, Zambia while sipping Scotch-over-rocks imported duty-free from Wales.
In fact they have firmly planted their roots among the poor despite the rapid changes that have taken place over time. Most of them have grown from year to year with ever bigger budgets, ever more projects to administer (and then abandon) and ever more staff on their ever-expanding payrolls---all this in the name of helping the poor!
They never cease to seize a moment to plaster their faces in front of any visiting camera in sight while blabbing about the great mission they have embarked on in the interests of the lowly and deprived. The poor would be less poor if their foreign benefactors would not waste generously donated funds by g
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