Charity and Solutions

Great Debates
1

So as not to hijack the Plumpy’nut thread, I thought I’d post my response as its own topic.

Personally, I see there as being a difference between disaster relief and on-going charity. It’s like the difference between going on unemployment versus communism. One is temporary, as a response to a sudden and unexpected emergency, while as the other keeps coming even if you sit there picking your nose for years on end. Disaster relief, you should be able to say up front that you’ll be giving X amount of aid this month, X-1 amount of aid next month, X-2 the next, and on until there’s zero aid 3 or 6 or however many months later.

If you can’t envision a particular future where you can diminish and remove aid, if people are starving long-term, that’s not an issue of patents or “aid management”, it’s an issue of governance and infrastructure. If you don’t have a plan to replace the local government, to go out killing lions and flies and building roads and aqueducts, you’re really just prolonging the problem. Starvation is ugly, but at the same time, what use is there in supporting a larger population than the local resources can feed? If you save a hundred starving children, but then the next day the local government or bands of thugs come through and burn the village down, you haven’t really succeeded in anything.

Food isn’t a solution for a systemic problem. You may as well just drive around the Projects throwing money out the windows. In a systemically impoverished/war torn/collapsed/corrupt nation, most aid will end up feeding thugs, who use their health to go about stealing more food, money, or pharmaceuticals from everyone else. The local governments will get in on the action and make money selling the supplies on the black market cause hey it’s free money.

Now you can say that I’m wrong and lives are still being saved, but come on, really? An average life expectancy of 25-35 years less than the modern world is not success. I doubt that cutting aid is all that likely to change that number, and that’s what really matters. Good intentions are not a reason to do something. Especially not if it risks maintaining the status quo and drains money from healthy economies.

You need a plan to solve the root issues. If you want to spend billions of dollars a year on aiding foreign nations, you need to have a larger game plan than handing out free goodies.

I can understand trepidation against nation building and colonialism, etc. But at the same time, we have a lot of history to look back on and learn from. The problem isn’t that we tried, it’s that we keep trying to pursue overly enlightened goals or, historically, that we were just a group of sociopathic bastids. There is a middle ground. It’s just an issue of finding it.

Personally, I would say that those lessons are:

  1. If the locals don’t want you, don’t even try. Leave and let them starve and kill each other as they want. It’s their country, it’s their choice, and more importantly you just aren’t going to succeed without major local support. Fiddling about with free gifts just aggravates the local situation because it inserts artificial strength and locks both sides into a perpetual state of giving and receiving for no ones benefit.
  2. Borders need to be established on tribal lines. Trying to maintain the lines that are on the current map is silly. Split that sucker up and do like Clinton and bomb the hell out of it so that people flee in the direction where their tribes are the most prevalent if they don’t go on their own.
  3. An effective government is more useful than a modern one. It’s not going to end up as a modern republic regardless of what you write in their constitution. It will become a monarchy or a dictatorate, so focus more on finding a guy who won’t kill everyone and who can make stuff happen.
  4. You need an infrastructure for trade and communication more than you need modern education. Trying to teach modern values just splits the populace and/or gets you kicked out. They’ll start wandering towards modern life themselves when they are secure enough to worry about it.
  5. People without a stable source of food and weapons can’t revolt (so you need to make sure they can farm at better-than subsistence rates and that they have legal access to weapons). Down the line, when they’re ready to modernize, this is what ensures it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be a revolution, just that the government will have a reason to follow what the people want.
  6. The military will try and overthrow the government. Shut that puppy down and make them depend on foreign security and de-centralized, local policing until it feels safe to let them have their own.
  7. You’re in for the long-haul. Expect to be there 20 years before you can pull out. Ideally, you can share duties with the rest of Europe.
2

In general, charity organizations do not do the sort of thing you are railing so passionately against. Believe it or not, you are not the first person to think of these ideas. The people who spend their lives doing this stuff indeed take these ideas into account. Development is actually a pretty rigorous field that crunches a lot of numbers to find out what is working and what is not.

“Sustainable” is a current buzzword for development. “Sustainable” means that the project can continue without direct intervention from the parent organization. For example, the company that makes Plumpy’nut provided the initial training and start up funds for Plumpy’nut factories. In theory, these factories should be able to continue making and selling Plumpy’nut at a profit, leading everyone involved to greater prosperity. Sustainability is why micro-lending created so much buzz. It’s a way to improve people’s standard of living without actually giving them a thing.

Another popular idea is “skill-enabling.” Basically this means if you are going to to teach someone something, you should also teach them how to teach it. For example, I knew people who worked promoting improved cook stoves- a simple clay stove that would replace the traditional three-rocks-and-fire method with a less wood-intensive way of cooking. This saves money, slows deforestation, and frees up household members to do more important tasks than looking for wood. But the people who promote this do not run around to villages trying to get people to use them. Instead they train potters to make them, salesmen to sell them, etc. Furthermore they teach even more people how to teach all this, in theory allowing the idea to spread even further.

“Appropriate technology” is another big one. Basically this means working to develop simple and easy to maintain technology instead of giving countries expensive technology that requires a lot of foreign-exchange draining maintenance and a lot of foreign-bought parts. For example, I knew a lot of people in Cameroon who worked on micro-dams. These are fairly simple to build and can provide huge long and short term benefits to local farmers. This is a much better solution that complicated high-tech irrigation systems.

Anyway, all modern charity pays attention to this stuff.

Big Foreign Aid is another story, and really a totally different debate. Nobody really expects Big Foreign Aid to help, and nobody is really surprised when it is siphoned off by corruption. The goal of Big Foreign Aid is to line the head hancho’s pocket so that he gives us a discount on his oil/uranium/tropical hardwood/whatever instead of the Chinese/Russians/Whatever. Big Foreign Aid is a dirty little tool of diplomacy and will always be used as a shady move in a shady game to get shady things.

3

As for nation-building, haven’t oh say all of America’s recent adventures proved that we suck at that? We have a habit of choosing who we back based on short term geo-political goals, which is how we end up in embarrassing situations like having helped Saddam Hussein get into power in the first place. Hell, who do you think helped install all these guys after independence, anyway? Half of the worst dictators are there because we were playing cold-war Risk with Africa as the board. Anyway, in the end we will not be mucking about in Africa’s political systems unless it suits our geo-political goals, which probably will not happen soon. If China starts moving in fast, we may have another round of Cold War style proxy fighting in Africa, but it’d be foolish to think that’d have any positive effect on people. Anyway, these political things are in the hands of the politicians, not much we can do about it.

So where is the hope? Where can we go?

First off is we need to get AIDS and malaria under control. Although the number of people dying from these two plagues is serious, what is mind-boggling is how these things cripple the economy. When I was in Cameroon, I was sick all the time. Everyone was sick all the time. People could not do their jobs well because they were too sick. I missed a month of school to malaria. Pretty much every teacher, student, administrative staff, doctor, engineer, etc. misses months of productive time because of illness. A place where everyone is sick all the time is going to be a place that moves forward very slowly.

Next comes roads. I saw mounds of food rotting in hungry provinces due to bad roads. Unfortunately, the road system most countries were left with were designed with one purpose in mind- get raw materials to a port and out of the country. That’s great if you are a farmer near a bauxite mine, but not great for anyone else. Anyway, roads are commerce. Commerce is wealth.

Finally comes education. I would like to see education that is better focused on needed skills (farming, etc.) rather than the rather poor imitations of European schools many countries have. I’d like to see more farming, more local language, and more allowances for local conditions (like the fact that most kids miss months of the year from malaria.) But even to farmers education makes a difference. The educated people I knew had a broader outlook, more creativity, and were better at making things happen.

Anyway, making improvements n these three grounds is not an impossible goal.

4

Personally, I disagree with almost everything in the original post.

Actually, I think that the person who saves a hundred starving children has succeeded in something. They’ve succeeded in saving a hundred starving children. That’s a good deed. Even if a band of thugs burns down the village, it does not change the fact that it was a good deed. It’s true that the best good deeds are those which lift people permanently out of desperate poverty, while temporary relief is a somewhat lesser achievement. That goes back to the old “give a man a fish vs. teach a man to fish” cliche. Giving a hungry man a fish is still an excellent thing to do.

The real disagreement between the two of us is priorities. You say that extending life expectancy is “what really matters”. I say that extending life expectancy is great, but other acts of charity towards the third world are also great. No true act of charity that makes a person happy is a loss or a waste, even if its effects are only temporary. If you had been born to a life of desperate poverty in the slums of India or Ethiopia rather than first-world wealth, you would be quite grateful to anybody who fed you a good meal or treated you when you were a sick, and you would not dismiss it by comparing it throwing money out windows.

As for the list of seven points that you’re offering, I’m not going to respond to each individually. Some are good advice, some are bad advice, some are true but can’t be achieved. (How exactly are charity organizations supposed to shut down national militaries or change national borders?) As even sven pointed out, the good ideas that you came up with are what charitable organizations have already been doing for quite a long time. Everybody who does work in third-world relief knows that the governments are corrupt and that politicians will steal aid funds if they can. That’s why charities don’t work with third-world governments. Nor do they pursue your extremely bad idea of trying to distribute weapons to the poor. That would bring down government violence in about five minutes.

5

If I recall correctly, you’re working with an organization like Peace Corps. I am aware that there are groups which are concerned with building and teaching more than in handing out goodies, like yours. But, even there, those groups are operating in a nation that is corrupt/disorganized/etc. They aren’t a military and will never oust the government and replace it with something else, popular or otherwise. I’m still not certain that much can be accomplished by trying to establish order from the bottom and without support from the central government.

But so how exactly are you differentiating between “charity organizations” and “big foreign aid”? So far as I’m aware, Red Cross, etc. are mostly providing doctors, medicine, food, etc. Is that not a charity organization? Or is my understanding of what they do incorrect?

I addressed many of what I believe to be the shortcomings of ours and others attempts through history. You don’t seem to be disagreeing in particular.

6

Well, since the only important point is point 1, I guess we can close this thread. The locals don’t want you, or at least what you’re proposing in the OP. So leave them alone.

7

Big foreign aid would be the massive amounts of money that countries regularly hand over to each other. Depending on your point of view, WTO aid and the like might fall under this umbrella. This kind of aid is basically a large infusion of foreign funds to be used for large projects such as dams and transport systems. Generally it comes with lots of strings attached and is often used as a sort of soft-nation building tool. Nobody is too surprised when lots of it gets embezzled.

I am a Peace Corps volunteer, and absolutely we do not get involved in government affairs. Peace Corps is a community based aid organization, meaning volunteers live as part of a community, learn about their problems, and work with motivated individuals and organizations within the community to address those problems in a sustainable way.

Trust me, we ask ourselves all the time “what are we doing here” and “are we really helping?” Plenty of prominent people involved in Peace Corps have written pretty harsh critiques of the program. Without getting into too much detail about PC specifically, I’ve done plenty of soul searching and concluded that Peace Corps does do quite a bit of good, both in the countries it serves and for Americans.

Anyway, can you improve people’s standard of living without massive structural change? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. My latest obsession is Guinea worm eradication. Guinea worm is a horrific parasite that lays it’s eggs inside of you where they develop into worms that eventually eat their way out of your calves in an agonizing process that takes weeks. A few decades ago it affected 3.5 million people a year. Now, we are on the road to eradicating it. It will be only the second disease that mankind has wiped off the face of this planet. And this is all basically because on one organization, working in some of the world’s most corrupt countries.

8

Since we are on the subject of recovery from poverty and all that, what role do remittances play in helping people escape poverty?

Remittances are bigger than all NGO and government aid combined. And I get the impression a good deal of it goes to fund education, health care or food consumption (food that I assume is grown locally).

I remember Jeffrey Sachs once saying he didn’t count remittances as a form of aid, and I forget why. But it seems they should be a pretty effective anti-poverty effort. The money wouldn’t go to any community efforts (roads, a corruption free judicial system, etc) but it would go to fund individual education, nutrition, health care, etc which should increase productivity.

Also, this article claims that for profit technologies originating in India and China are starting to revolutionize African productivity and quality of life. Is there any truth to that on the ground? Are India & China selling products in Africa that they perfected in their home market that are revolutionizing the continent?

9

A remittance-heavy economy is going to be unbalanced in a number of ways. Some of this is based on my experience in the Philippines.

One problem is about labor. On one hand you have brain drain, where the brightest people will be using their talents to contribute to foreign companies in foreign economies. Sure, maybe people get an education, but that’s not very useful if the educated people immediately leave the country.

On the other you have lots of perfectly capable people who are now living entirely on remittances and no contributing to society in any way. There are entire neighborhoods in the Philippines full of bright and educated young people who spend their days doing absolutely nothing because they consider themselves above the low-level jobs that do exist in their area, and can live perfectly find on their remittances.

So basically money comes in, but the local economy still never gets developed. In order to see change we’d need this money to be used founding local businesses, which is not what is happening.

Another problem, of course, is dependence. You don’t want your entire country’s economy to be subject to the whim of outsider’s labor regulations. Could you imagine what would happen to Mexico’s economy if we got serious about illegal immigration? It’s not safe or stable for a country to be that dependent on one thing.

10

I don’t think these products are “revolutionizing” anything. Is the “Teipei Times” some kind of mouthpiece?

For example, the article mentions a solar cooker. Well, aid organizations since the beginning of time have been trying to get people to adopt solar cookers. This is nowhere near some new India specific technology. The truth is, nobody wants them. Nobody in history, besides specific situations in the high plains of Tibet, has ever adopted solar cooking en masse. It hasn’t happened, it’s not gonna happen, and it has nothing to do with India.

It’d be bizarre to call artesunate a “Chinese made” drug. It was used in Chinese traditional medicine for centuries, but was actually hidden by the Chinese government in recent times. Finally China decided to share this drug with the world, and it turns out it’s a magic bullet against malaria. I believe now most artesunate based therapies are manufactured in the west- most Cameroonian medicine came from France. Yes, there is cheap Chinese medicine available, but nobody trusts it and it’s often expired.

This article failed to mention that fake Chinese medicine is responsible for many deadly drug resistances. Basically manufacturers put just enough active ingredients that it passes the tests, but not enough to be therapeutic. Right now artesunate-resistant malaria is showing up in Thailand thanks to Chinese counterfeit medicine. If this spreads to Africa (which has deadlier strains of malaria) the result will be a unimaginable, with millions dead.

Micro-dams are well known technology and not particularly Chinese.

What China is doing is bringing in a flood of cheap plastic stuff- the same stuff we get in America. Your average African bazaar is going to be half full of bright plastic washtubs and the like. People regard this as a mixed blessing. On one hand it’s cheap and somewhat durable. On the other hand, it’s replacing locally-produced products and putting people out of work.