A recent talk on C-Span Book-TV makes the point that there is plenty of aid going to countries to cure things like child deaths from dehydration, where the cure is 10cent doses of sugar/salt mixture. And every time the west double the aid there is no change in the death rate. The dictators simply buy more helicopters and mansions.
Well, we could try administering the aid directly, on the ground, to the people who need it. Beef up the Peace Corp’s funding, or something. But that would be a lot more complicated than writing a check, possibly more expensive, and in any event would require the permission of the country’s government.
There is nothing easy about providing humanitarian aid.
In addition to monitoring aid disbursements on the ground ourselves, we could seek to “teach them how to fish” by helping them discover and create a market for resources within their own borders.
Good question. I think the simple and very cynical answer is “more of us in the developed world have to care enough to pay attention to what our governments and corporations are doing”. These dictators getting rich are very beneficial to other people who are getting rich. It makes it so much easier for them to drill for oil or strip mine, log, aquire a cheap labor force, etc. if you have a strong man in power. Even in countries where the problem hasn’t been exacerbated from without, our own system of aid is stuffed with so many middle men lining their pockets and not doing their jobs that only a paltry amount gets to the needy. I suspect that very frequently when we hear the well-publicized annoucement that we are ‘tripling aid to Tunisia or wherever’ that the bill comes out more like ‘we are tripling the amount we are giving Haliburton to do this aid work for us and not asking them to keep any reciepts’.
This is already a standard practice. We see a lot of images of people handing out bags of grain during famine, but a lot of aid work is done with stuff like teacher training and small business development.
But things get pretty hairy on a larger scale. Eventually, business development becomes handing out money to companies. And that is going to become instantly corrupt and may easily end up with a country losing control of it’s natural resources. Secondly, not a lot of people agree what industiries are good for a country. A large mining operation may bring a lot of wealth to a country, but it may cause great environmental damage and displace some of it’s poorest people. And since countries are essentially little companies you can take over with guns, that mining operation might just end up feeding the dictator anyway.
You got to keep in mind that these large aid budgets coming from countries are only marginally about helping people. They are much more about business and politics. You can’t threaten to pull an aid budget if you don’t have one. These may involve appeasing dictators. But we appease dictators all the time for other reasons anyway. It doesn’t really have a lot to do with aid at all and most the things that go on in this realm are the result of crazy poltical and historical structures we can’t really hope to understand. The real aid is coming from NGOs. But even those are often a guise for businesses or some other thing.
Anyway, there is no easy answer. Some money is going to get used corruptly. Some efforts are not going to help and are actually going to harm people. It’s not called charity because it’s easy.
The biggest issue is security. Famines never occur soley because of bad harvests, in fact in the modern world they don’t, the amount of aid the West can afford purely in terms of tons of grain will ensure that. Food in the west is so ridiculously cheap. The big cost is hiring the armed men who will ensure that other armed men, and that includes the goverment of the host nation, don’t just steal it as soon as it comes off the ship. There’s only one solution: Send in western armies, but it’s expensive in money and lives and most Westerners are too squeamish.
One clever technique the British use when conditions allow,
Fly the stuff in, auction it off at the airport. Take the money, and add ten percent. Give the money to the people in need who then can buy the stuff we flew in from the traders who bought it.
I think the problem might lie in sovereignty. You can’t just go into some other country and start distributing things as you see fit. Unfortunately, you have to just give to these nations and hope that their leaders have altruistic notions. Until that leader gets ousted by a coup or allows the aid to filther through to where it is intended, there’s always a mortal problem at hand.
On a much smaller scale, it’s like giving someone a gift. Assume for a moment that you believe that a gift, when given, has to be used for that purpose. You give a gift to a friend and they exchange it back and keep the money. People get upset about that because it’s what they didn’t intend, but as soon as they give over the gift, all control over it is gone.
This might precisely be the problem. It’s a public (with the humanitarian aid example) donation and a public display of what gets done with that gift. Therefore, one from a position of power (or at least advantage) exercises that power or advantage by giving their gift, expecting something to be done with it. They lose the power because the gift is out of their hands and they can’t tell the other party what to do with it.
This brings us back to a coup, or at least getting someone in control that will funnel these resources to their intended targets. If a government were to do such a thing (and I’m sure it’s happened many a time), that would mean their gift means little, because it’s just that initial country getting their way and having power over two countries, then (even for a limited time).
This takes us to having the people vote a person out of office, but this is also very problematic in some African countries (just using them as an example) because some countries receiving aid are controlled by warlords. An unarmed populace is going to have a hard time ousting a warlord dictator from their borders because of those facts. So, now we must examine what has been done in the past concerning such things. Send in the UN troops? Have a UN mandate? Take over the country and install a new leader? Do nothing? Give aid that you know will be abused just so you can tell others that you’re giving aid?
Personally, I would vote for the internatoinal community to do something about it in the form of the UN. According to Kofi Annan from The Economist in December, 2004:
If you are interested in the story behind that 10 cent sugar/salt mixture read the book RX for survival which is a companion book for the PBS documentary ‘RX for survival’ which was really good if you can get a hold of that. Another good book to look into is the end of poverty which touches on this issue a bit too. Sachs mostly claims the reason we don’t get major benefits is because alot of money goes to consultants, and very little actually gets to people.
The story behind the salt/sugar one is alot more complex. It wasn’t just knock on people’s doors and tell them then have the people enact the science and eliminate death. It was constantly retooling the methods of educating people because the success rates were constantly low and the people couldn’t make the solution properly. Some methods involved the parents not using it, some involved the teachers teaching it wrong, some involved improper usage of materials, some just had low compliance rates. It took a while to figure out how to teach people to use it. Even in the US there is tons of info on how to stay out of debt but people still do it.
There is also a book called Disease Control Priorities in Developing Countries which outlines the most cost effective ways to promote health. so giving money to those programs would accomplish more than giving it to other health programs. http://www.dcp2.org/pubs/DCP
At the end of the day interventions both domestically and internationally do work. About Between 1990-2000 almost a billion people got access to clean water or sanitation (but the percentage of the world getting it didn’t change much, it went from high 70s to low 80s for water). Around 20 years ago close to 1/4 of earth was chronically malnourished, now it is closer to 1/8th.
http://www.who.int/docstore/water_sanitation_health/Globassessment/Global1.htm
The thing is alot of the world’s poor live in countries with rapidly growing economies. the economies of China, India, Pakistan, Indonesia & Bangladesh all have economies growing at 5-10% a year, and they have a population of about 3 billion between them. So as the economies of these countries keeps growing more will be lifted from poverty. China has made rapid advancement in ending severe poverty due to economic growth in the last 20-30 years. Perhaps the economic growth of the 5 countries I listed above (which make up about 70-80% of the worlds population of poor people) will do alot. But that still leaves Africa as a place for poverty to continue unabated, hence the fact that people like Bono talk about Africa more than poverty in general, because places like Asia have globalization to lift them out of poverty while Africa doesn’t really benefit much from it.
http://www.urban.org/publications/410612.html
“Sala-i-Martin paints a picture of striking progress. He estimates that the share of the world’s population in severe poverty $555/year (hereafter I use 1998 dollars) declined by nearly two-thirds between 1970 and 1998, from 17.2% to 6.7%. Using the more generous poverty line of $1,110 per year, he finds an even greater percentage point decline, from 41% in 1970 to 18.6% in 1998. Most of the headway against poverty has taken place since 1980. Even though world population grew by 1.5 billion between 1980 and 1998, the number experiencing severe poverty declined by 160 million people. Still, as of 1998, 353 million people lived below the $1.52/day threshold and another 620 million lived below the $3.04/day threshold. The World Bank’s figures are higher, but both sets of poverty figures show marked reductions in poverty since 1980…Are these figures too optimistic? Could huge numbers of the world’s poor really have escaped poverty and could the gap with people in rich countries really have narrowed? Progress in Asia provides much of the answer. In 1970, 39% of the world’s poor lived in China and 37% lived in other parts of Asia. Of the 1.3 trillion people living on less than $3 a day, 85% lived in Asia. The Asian economic miracle of the 1980s and 1990s lifted the living standards of hundreds of millions of people—the majority of the poor. The percentage of those scraping by on $3/day in Asia fell from 48% in 1980 to 16% in 1998. China’s bullish performance was quite impressive but so were the improvements in Asia outside China, where $3/day poverty rates declined from 42% to 13% in the 1980-98 period.”
I know some guys from MIT did a study and found the most effective interventions, but I can’t find the study. Suffice it to say, its not like studies haven’t been done to discover what interventions work and what don’t.
One big problem with aid is that it’s usually given with no strings attached. If you look at private aid foundations, say the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it’s run specifically to prevent this type of problem. Money is disbursed with milestones and checkpoints.
Sometimes, even if the aid isn’t stolen, the effect isn’t what you hoped for.
http://www.galactanet.com/comic/195.htm (Be sure to scroll to the bottom.)
Humanitarian aid is a good thing, you just have to be careful about the fine details.
Yeah, but there are ways to get around that. Selling the food to local vendors who sell it at market value is one way around it. I’ve read about this problem but i can’t remember aside from selling it through local vendors how they get past it. The concept of remittances (when people leave poor countries and go to rich countries, then send money home) also has been known to make global poverty worse even though it pumps hundreds of billions into poor countries. Ending developed world subsidies would probably do more to end hunger than the world food program itself.
Besides, the concept of food aid (just giving food to people) is not something the int. community is really behind. Food aid is for a crisis like a natural disaster. The real goal is agricultural development. As for kids not getting it concepts like distributing food at school (which is doubly beneficial as it is an incentive to go to school) are used.
W. Easterly (of the OP) takes a hatchet to Jeffrey Sachs in the March 2006 Journal of Economic Literature. So what’s the answer?
Emphasis added.
I think your analogy is flawed. It’s more like you mailing a gift to someone, and discovering the mailman took it for himself.