Everyone knows the saying, give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him to fish, feed him for life. My question is why our foreign policy does not follow this simple phrase.
We pour billions of dollars in aid, subsidies, and products to other countries - but why is it that we aren’t exporting our knowledge with it? For the first time in history, nations have reached a point where famine is a memory, not a daily threat, but most of the world has yet to cross this threshold. We have engineered crops, sophisticated technology, scientific land management, and working chemicals that increase yield severalfold over the rather primative techniques being used in, say, most of Africa, or Central Asia, or Latin America.
Shouldn’t our foreign aid to these countries be in the form of educating their farmers on not overfarming the land, on giving them the technology and machinery to efficiently increase their harvest, and the science behind land management and crop selection? Try to slow desertification at the source, increase regional productivity so they can feed their populations effectively.
The same applies to other fields - oil production, for instance, Mexico gets billions in loans, and has large oil reserves, but why not go in and help them rebuild their infrastructure?
Pouring in money simply leads to more corruption, less effectiveness.
Leadership, plain and simple. Or poor leadership, anyway. Nations that were developed on paper, like Canada and the US, or nations with a strong scientific community and background, like Renaissance Europe where democracy really was reborn, had a massive leg up on the rest of the world in that we had developed a culture and mentality of progressiveness, law-acceptance, and peaceful relations with our fellow citizens in the interests of commerce.
Nations that have never had these things do not develop them because someone shows them how. Look at Iraq. An ancient civilization, yet after the fall of its leadership, it is now in chaos. You can’t just mandate change and development for a people who are used to tribal and factional living, and who follow archaic codes of conduct and belief (that’s not a knock against Islam). A culture has to develop it’s maturity through acceptance of modern ideology with regards to personal rights, individual freedoms, and peaceful resolution of disputes. This starts at the top.
I guess what I’m saying is, that it wouldn’t do much good to export best-practices teachings, or modern ways of refining production and sustaining it, to third-world developing nations if their leaders will simply co-opt this teaching for their own uses and not help their people, or not provide a stable environment for the people to effectively use the ideas that would really help them. Citizens of a mature nation need to have a stable and safe environment within which to practice their trades and freely exchange ideas and commodities. Without an effective and legitimate forum for dispute resolution and an acceptable level of safety and security, plus a significant level of faith in the security and legal establishment, people will never feel secure enough to grow and accept these new and innovative ideas. That’s the biggest problem facing developing nations, the lack of effective leadership to provide this environment. YMMV
I think you may be mistaken on how most foreign aid – excluding aid to Egypt and Israel – is actually farmed out. Out of about $19 billion in foreign aid, only about $2.5 billion of that are cash grants, half of which is given to Egypt and Israel.
After subtracting about $4.5 billion for military assistance, the vast majority of the remaining $13 billion or so is for programs, not cash. These programs are things like contracting with NGOs to develop labor programs, agricultural technology, and so on.
I repeat: with the exception of Middle Eastern countries, the overwhelming amount of foreign aid given out by the US is most certainly NOT cash.
Bingo. The original post is based on incorrect assumptions. A better argument would be whether the programs that actually are in place are as effective or recieve as much support as they could or should be.
I think that the US in particular and the world democracies in general are making bad decisions regarding foreign aid. Programs designed and executed to help countries under a dictatorship inevitably end up simply giving the dictator more power. Foreign aid to these countries isn’t really helping the people that it is meant to help.
Therefore, I think we should send foreign aid only to democratic countries. If a non democratic country is experiencing famine (which is always due to a totalitarian regime controlling food distribution…if anyone can provide an example within the past 50 years that this was not the case, I invite them to correct me) harsh enough to warrant immediate aid from foreign countries, I think that it also warrants a removal of that regime by a league of democratic nations. Of course international laws regulating these actions would need to be written and enforced by the world community, lest they be abused by nations looking for an excuse to invade. That’s a whole different argument, though.
In short, I think the whole system is fucked. Bottom line, however, is that we should not send any aid that will end up in the hands of a dictator.
Well, even people in dictatorships need help. In fact, the people who often need help most of all are the ones in the middle of a war between a dictator and a group of ostensibly “democratic” rebels.
One word: Infrastrucure. This is what we have which desperately poor countries haven’t, and this is what many of those programs mentioned above seek to address. If the infrastructure developed year on year, genuine progress would be made.
Unfortunately, infrastructure is often destroyed almost as soon as it is built, by poverty, corruption and war. People so poor that they don’t know where their next meal is coming from would think nothing of eg. digging up communication lines to sell for the copper. Iraq’s “oil for food/medicine” program foundered when Iraqi officials either sold the food and medicine or left it rotting in a warehouse because nobody would pay their price. And war is the ultimate destroyer: one might ask an Iraqi doctor how functional his hospital is these days.
However, one other enormous obstacle to Third World development is debt, of which the interest payments alone far outweigh aid income. This debt is unserviceable - if these countries had been corporations (many of which have a bigger “GDP”) the World Bank would have let them declare bankruptcy decades ago and start afresh.
I would advocate humanitarian military intervetion in time-sensitive crises in order to amelirate the worst effects of war, such as in Sudan right now. I would also advocate a one-off, never-to-be-repeated wiping of the slate for the world’s poorest countries, with a promise only to invest in future in schemes that might feasibly be paid off. Selling them a bunch of weapons they’ll never pay for is not a responsible approach, especially if 100 guys with assault rifles can bring down a government.