Are people in the world starving? Can't we help?

Great Debates
1

So, I’m reading the (much-recommended) “Our Dumb World”, the Onion’s humorous world atlas. Humor aside, the “Africa” section has got me wondering about how bad things really are, both in Africa and elsewhere.

While its meant as humor, the Onion’s atlas basically hammers home the point that a number of African nations are, well, dirt-poor. Jokes about “Guy who works 14 jobs and begs on the side”, “National Institute for the Development of A Sandwich”, and so on, while funny, have got me thinking about how bad it really is.

Are people starving to death out there? Yes, yes, I’m verging on activism – but really, I want to know. Is it as bad as The Onion folks say? Starvation is truly awful. Ever go a day without eating? Two? It gnaws at you like you wouldn’t believe. Try it, sometime – with the knowledge that food is only a few feet away.

What about those for whom it ISN’T just a few feet away? Hell, for a few million dollars, we could be dropping food-aid packages all over – yes, yes, there are political angles to this, but dammit, if people are hungry, I think this trumps all.

So, basically: how bad is hunger, these days? Should I – we – our nation-states – be doing more than we are? Is the problem being taken care-of properly? Could more be done? What’s the deal?

That’s all. Just thinking.

–Recliner

2

I know this is very controversial, and to some degtree inhumane, but I’ve always wondered if simply providing food aid to Africa has done more harm than good in the long run. Every famine gets bigger, you save the parent so that they can have more children that can then starve as well. What Africa needs is political stability and development, food aid is like putting a plaster on gangrenous wound.

How to get there? I don’t know. Stopping the insanity that is European farm subsidies would be a good start.

3

A very reasonable point – I kinda glossed over it by simply referring to “politics”. Still, in the sense of people literally starving – it seems that the humane thing to do is to provide food. Certainly, this should come along with continuing economic development, and the betterment of the countries involved – if I’m not mistaken, there are probably only about five African nations that are NOT ruled by a ruthless dictatorship, or mired in terrible wars – but yah, where people are starving, you can’t hope to change the long term before you satisfy this immediate need.

4

I’ve been thinking strongly about pledging Giving What We Can, and I think their page debunking Myths About Foreign Aid is very good.

5

There are places where people are literally just not getting enough physical food, but those are relatively rare and usually complicated by natural disasters, war, crop failure etc.

What is far more common is that people simply don’t have access to nutritious food. Grain or starch (like cassavas) is usually pretty available, but protein and fat is not. There are people who go days without eating anything other than starch or grain, with maybe a spoonful of oil to dress it up. It makes you weak and eventually makes you sick. Hunger tends to be a chronic issue. Children and women suffer worst, since the most nutritious food goes to working adults. It’s just a chronic, low-grade, constant hunger caused by just not quite having enough. Most hunger deaths are from diseases that the hunger-weakened body can’t fight off.

Surprisingly, it’s not controversial at all. Maren’s classic The Food Aid Racket was a commencement speech in 1993. People have known that direct food aid is basically a scam to subsidize western farmers for ages. That said, there are ways to clean it up, and it has improved quite a bit.

Aid is complicated, and there isn’t a huge historical precedent for how we give it. We’ve been learning as we’ve gone along. A lot of the places where aid is failing are places that got mixed up in Cold War proxy politics, when we used Africa as a battleground and basically supported anyone, no matter how bad, who said they’d like us more than they like Russia. We messed stuff up pretty bad back then, and now we have these situations where you really can’t win.

Also remember that a lot of aid is political, and everyone knows that. Aid is used as a tool in the “war against terror,” to help secure access to natural resources, and to get some leverage over the worst leaders. This kind of aid is often not very helpful, but it does arguably advance US interests. The US is always going to advance its interests when it can.

Anyway, it’s all quite complicated. There are no easy solutions, but there are things that work. Well-planned aid saves lives every single day. It sends kids to school, builds businesses, and strengthens communities. There is plenty of good to go with the bad.

6

This is the sort of blanket statement that undermines generosity.
I grew up in a third-world country during the cold-war era. I saw first-hand the shennigans played with aid, including things like re-labeling boxes as a little advertisement for a different source. There was stuff that needed cleaning up, and I don’t deny that.

But the view that direct food aid “is basically a scam to subsidize western farmers” is so ideologically perverse I find it offensive. It’s wildly inaccurate. Of course it’s true that buying grain–for whatever cause–increases demand, and demand can increase prices for the producer. And of course it’s true that the machinations around how we price farm products in developed countries are complex and sometimes ridiculous. It’s also true that it would be great if we could get countries with hungry people more competent at feeding themselves. Their persistent corruption and marginal competence at anything is by far the biggest barrier to that, particularly with African countries. Over the years billions of dollars have been poured into those countries by governments and NGOs alike in a good-faith effort to make them something other than net beggars, but they remain their own worst enemies.

Calling direct food aid a “scam” is, in my opinion, simply reflective of a liberal ideology that insists on blaming everyone and anything but the recipient country for the persistent failure of those countries. It is, quite literally, biting the hand that feeds them.

Most scam shenanigans are on the receiving end. Most severely under-developed countries are horribly corrupt and incompetent. Labeling a container of food as a scam to help the farmers in developed countries is hurtful, misinformed and wildly off the mark.

7

I thought the “liberal ideology” would be “Oh those poor Africans need someone to take care of them!” I imagine I could say pretty much anything and get branded a liberal-ideology zealot.

There are forms of food aid that are not scams, of course. I know people who are working on really cool soy projects- soy is great for soil, provides much-needed protein. and is easy to grow. They teach techniques for growing it, teach people how to use it, provide low-startup-cost seeds and create outlets to buy it at fair market prices after the harvest. That sort of thing works great.

But wholesale handing sacks of US grain to whatever dictator asks for it? Total scam. It allows dictators who cannot feed their populations to keep on ruling, undermines whatever is left of local food markets, and causes all kinds of market distortions. Aid professionals have known this for decades, but politics win every time.

8

The problems in Africa are so big that dropping food does no good.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Now, to make myself understood, I think “Giving What We Can” is foolish, naive, and generous. I don’t discount or fail to lauf their goals and efforts, but pretending that aid to the hungry has actually fixed anything is very stupid if not willfully deceptive.

Think about America. When was the last time we had a famine? It’s not easy to even go hungry if you’re willing to suck it up and go to places which will help such things. And it’s not just America: famine is completely unknown among the developed nations of the world.

But that’s not all. WHen you look closely, you see a huge and provable connection between famine and several other traits - and poverty isn’t really on the list. It’s part and parcel fo the famine. The traits which cause famines are ethnic/religious oppression, government corruption, and brutal autocracy. These forces are unfortunately not something generosity can overcome. You can send all the food you like - but it does not good in the long run because even if it somehow reaches the poeple it was intended for, the government will simply keep doing the nasty things which prevent people form getting something to eat.

North Korea is pretty much direct evidence of this. There’s stil hunger there, though it’s not as bad as it used to be owing to the fact that well, people died and there are fewer mouths to feed, and the government finally relaxed very slightly.

9

I wouldn’t say “no good”. And I’m pretty sure people do die from poverty in developed nations, especially the US.

10

Bono might know.

11

This works for certain famine situations - the Ethiopian famine that spawned Band Aid/Live Aid etc was a result of there being no food due to tragic droughts. In that situation, then food aid is a necessary short term response.

But many, if not most, famines aren’t like that. It isn’t necessarily an absence of food, just an absence of food where it is needed. Often that is a result of war/government malfiesance. Dropping food supplies into a war zone will often just result in better fed fighters. There’s also the effect on local farmers, the ones who will be needed to feed the people of the country on an ongoing basis. If you flood the market with grain, for example, the price of grain falls. And you have then got a bunch of local grain farmers without the ability to pay back the loans they took on to become grain farmers. And so they stop farming. And so the food supply situation gets worse.

While there is a place for short term food aid (and saying it does “no good” is completely bollocks), it has to be as part of an overall development package. Microfinance, infrastructure support, debt forgiveness, etc. Fair commodity prices would help too.

12

For just 0.43 cents a day, you can save the life of a human being in Africa.

Let this post be enough assurance that I will actually spend the money I receive on the children starving in Africa and not pocket it.

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Please donate

13

Depends on what you mean: if you take it as technical as possible, nobody dies fmr poverty. If not, then everyone dies from poverty for the lack of resources to develop super-immortality technology. As a practical matter, though, the poor can easily afford all the food they want and public services offer it to those who might go hungry.

Secondly, you should be able to prove the assertion that giving does specific good simply by showing that the poor were then able, as a result of the food, to become self-sufficient.

14

Try Feed My Starving Children (unless you are worried it’s part of Even Sven’s scam programs).

On an unrelated note, I’ve started my own charity to help combat obesity here in the US: Starve My Feeding Children. :wink: You send me money; my organization swipes food from fat kids, and then we ship it overseas. Win Win.

But seriously, there are ways to participate in directly helping people not be hungry, here and elsewhere. Even if it doesn’t fix their crappy politics. Find out which one is right for you.

15

The problem with food aid is that it is of limited help. It keeps people alive, and that is indeed a noble thing, but it does nothing to solve the reason they were starving to begin with. Political instability, poor crop management, civil wars, AIDS & malaria, just plain bad government, poor transportation, etc. are all still there. Because of that, Africans will still be starving tomorrow.

Fortunately, there are groups trying to solve these problems. However, you hit a point where you can’t do more for political reasons. I don’t necessarily mean US politics either, in parts of Africa there are civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and government so bad that you can’t even imagine it (read up on Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation sometime. It’s absolutely unbelievable). Without peacekeeping troops or outright overthrowing the government, the options are rather limited in those areas.

As for doing more, George Bush actually did great improvements in aiding Africa (yeah yeah, I know, this is the straight dope, no claiming Bush did something good is allowed). More can always be done, but in general those parts of Africa that don’t have political complications like I mentioned are getting assistance and improving.

Africa is basically a real life proof of the old saying “give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he spends a lifetime telling people about the one that got away” or however that phrase is supposed to go. From a ‘what can I do’ standpoint, I’d say donating food is fine. But don’t stop there, research NGO’s devoted to solving Africa’s underlying issues and support them as well.

16

While I may not agree with #7 I’m going to have to say it’s more of an ideological stance rather than a myth.

Odesio

17

Certainly. There are periodic starvation events as well as chronic malnutrition in areas of Africa as well as other countries (large numbers have starved in North Korea at various times, for instance).

Certainly, although the reality is that ‘we’ already do help a lot. Many nations, including the US, give a staggering amount of aid to various impoverished countries each year (billions of dollars and tons of food). The trouble is that much of the aid never gets close to the people who are really in need. There are a lot of reasons for this including war, corruption and just basic logistics and infrastructure issues (it does no good to send tons of food or medicines to a country in trouble if the supplies rot on a dock or sit at at a depot and never get distributed because the country doesn’t have the logistics or infrastructure to move it outside of the major cities and into the regions where the problems are).

That said, you can always give more to various local, regional or international charities. My wife’s church, for instance, regularly donates to impoverished countries in central and south America, and when there are disasters they usually organize fund raisers and food drives to put together pallets to send to the stricken areas. Not being religious myself I have to say that their efforts are laudable, but I’m unsure how helpful they actually are, since there seems to be several disconnects between gathering the aid, sending it and <disconnect> having it arrive at the location where the folks in distress actually are. I know there was a lot of questions about the aid they sent after the tsunami disaster, for instance.

The main issue I see is political, not the desire or ability to send aid. The trouble is that sending aid really doesn’t help if you have no means to insure the aid actually gets to the folks who need it…and, afaict, much of the aid a country like the US sends out never reaches the people who really need it.

-XT

18

Much of the aid the US (or anyone) sends out isn’t really meant to do much. Government foreign aid is first and foremost a tool of diplomacy. If you don’t believe me, look up what countries we give the most aid to. It might surprise you.

I wouldn’t also be 100% ready to say that “bad governance,” wars, etc. are not influenced by foreign forces. There are stil a lot of hands in Africa’s pot. I just wrote a paper about how Chad’s astoundingly unpopular and incompetent Idriss Deby has been directly saved by French military support during coup attempts. He absolutely would not be there if it were not for France stepping in (hell, he was even installed by France.) This is not insane conspiracy theories- this is a matter of fact, which everyone involved admits pretty openly. Western aid keeps governments in power, including a number of really bad ones. We give food with one had and guns with the other.

That said, there are reasons to be hopeful. They just released today that malaria deaths have decreased 50% in 11 African countries. Child mortality is falling. Things are getting better. There are lots of good people, both foreign and African, working really hard to solve some big problems.

There are still a lot of quagmires, too. There are many notable cases where aid is indeed making things much worse. The alternative isn’t “no aid.” It’s smarter aid- aid that is wanted by the host countries, accountable to the recipients, not primarily influenced by political or commercial concerns, designed to make sure it reaches the poorest, etc.

I’m a big fan of Bill Easterly’s Aid Watch blog. Easterly is aid’s most loving skeptic. His book is the essential counterpoint to Jeffrey Sachs.

19

Who is “we”?

IF you mean the United States, DFINITELY NOT! The United States can not give anything, because the United States is deeply into debt, and has nothing extra to give.

Maybe Europe, Asia, or some of the Middle eastern countries can give something to the starving people?

20

Europe, East Asia and (to a lesser extent) the Middle East do indeed give tons.

Foreign aid is a security concern. Do you think the Taliban would have made it so far in an Afghanistan that wasn’t a hellhole? Do you think it helps our economic growth when entire continents are relatively useless as trading partners?