Deadly Help
By Mitch Berg
Kenyan Economist James Shikwati sums up his view of western food aid, in an interview in Der Spiegel:
Shikwati: … for God’s sake, please just stop.
Why?
Shikwati: Such intentions have been damaging our continent for the past 40 years. If the industrial nations really want to help the Africans, they should finally terminate this awful aid. The countries that have collected the most development aid are also the ones that are in the worst shape. Despite the billions that have poured in to Africa, the continent remains poor.
This, of course, has a parallel with much other western aid – economic, military and so on – to the Third World. Paul Johnson in Modern Times chronicled the awful effect that western economic aid had on the Third World, spurring immense, wasteful, un-needed developments (the Aswan Dam, the Bangladeshi military, immense government works projects) that served as monuments to sitting dictators in countries that needed simple things like education and better farming practices.
Shikwati notes that the international food aid bureaucracy isn’t, at its heart, a whole lot different than the Minneapolis Public Schools:
Shikwati: Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa’s problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn’t even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.
He also explains the paradox – aid causes starvation, because international aid is run by groups that act just like governments and bureaucracies always act:
SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them.
Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who help these people. When there’s a drought in a region of Kenya, our corrupt politicians reflexively cry out for more help. This call then reaches the United Nations World Food Program — which is a massive agency of apparatchiks who are in the absurd situation of, on the one hand, being dedicated to the fight against hunger while, on the other hand, being faced with unemployment were hunger actually eliminated. It’s only natural that they willingly accept the plea for more help. And it’s not uncommon that they demand a little more money than the respective African government originally requested. They then forward that request to their headquarters, and before long, several thousands tons of corn are shipped to Africa …
SPIEGEL: … corn that predominantly comes from highly-subsidized European and American farmers …
Shikwati: … and at some point, this corn ends up in the harbor of Mombasa. A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unsrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign. Another portion of the shipment ends up on the black market where the corn is dumped at extremely low prices. Local farmers may as well put down their hoes right away; no one can compete with the UN’s World Food Program. And because the farmers go under in the face of this pressure, Kenya would have no reserves to draw on if there actually were a famine next year. It’s a simple but fatal cycle.
Which is not to say that one shouldn’t feed the hungry – merely be aware that merely sending food has unintended consequences that are hidden from you, the donor.
The parallels with American welfare are obvious, of course; subsidizing poverty, like corporate welfare, is inherently debilitating.
June 15th, 2007 at 4:20 am
The problem is that the Westerners who care about Africa are convinced that its problems have their own, half-century past colonization at its source.
typical liberal navel-gazing.