Scribbles

Bad news all around in the aid world. It is difficult, as an aidworker, to remain positive these days, and to see a light at the end of the tunnel of poverty.

Oxfam, one of the leading UK aid organisations, released “The Right to Survive”, in which they estimate almost 250 million people around the world to be affected by climate-related disasters in a typical year. They project that by 2015 this number could grow by 50% to an average of more than 375 million people.
To cope with this increase, the world needs to increase its humanitarian aid spending from 2006 levels of $14.2 billion to at least $25 billion a year. (Full)

According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) the world is already spending a whopping amount of money on development and aid:
US$136.2 billion (2003)
US$175.4 billion (2004)
US$319.8 billion (2005)
US$323.5 billion (2006)
US$470.4 billion (2007)

These figures (which include “humanitarian aid” to which Oxfam refers) combine government aid (so-called “ODA”), private donations and aid-motivated economic assistance (Source).

I have always compared the “aid world” to the “commercial world”. In the latter you have a supply and demand mechanism that comes to a certain level of economical balance, in the “aid world” you have a similar balance between “a need for help” and “a supply of assistance”. While this balance always ended up with a deficit, it seems the world’s “need for aid” is rapidly overwhelming the world’s “capacity to give” even more.

In the past year, the need for assistance increased to unprecedented levels because of the rocketing food prices which affected the poorest the most, the effects of global warming – as Oxfam stressed in its report, – and now the faulting world economy.

I do not believe, despite the best fundraising efforts, the world’s “capacity to give” can increase to meet the demand. The only thing we can do, and must do, is to ensure the aid funds are spent with better targets, with a higher accountability and short term aid measures MUST be combined with longer term development.

If not, we will continue providing plasters on wooden legs. As clearly we have been doing in the past decennia.

Pictures courtesy Logan Abassi (MINUSTAH)

This post is somehow a follow-up on my early thoughts in The shrinking digital divide and other aid fairy tales.

I have been reading in “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moyo, a book I have mentioned before.

First a common misunderstanding about this book: Moyo distinguishes three forms of aid:
- humanitarian aid, in the form of assistance in natural or man made disasters;
- charity aid, in the form of mostly smaller, localized and targeted assistance; and
- government aid.

In her book, she is only attacking “government aid”, not the other two. Many misunderstood this.

I support her thoughts on the ineffectiveness of government aid even though it would be truly worth while to write a sequel to this book to also put the effectiveness of humanitarian aid and charity aid under the magnifying glass, but that is for another post.

Now, one of the points she makes is that in the past, aid to African governments (but I would generalize that to “any government”) had political goals. She specifically mentions how aid was targeted to stop the hail of communism by the freshly independent African states in the 60ies and 70ies. And how the West poured aid money over any government as a form of financial assistance in exchange for their loyalty to the one and only true belief: Western Capitalism.

Little did the West care about the human rights abuses, the corruption or (God forgive) the inappropriate use of aid by the African governments. This grew to an institutionalized support of corrupt and often cruel dictators, for as long as they sang the song of the West, and not that of Moscow.
The fact that we also got cheap oil and minerals in exchange was definitively a good bonus. And the fact they were a good market for many of our cheap products (including Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola) and arms made us all sugar-happy. Hey, the other -Red- side did exactly the same too. Little did Moscow care how aid was used.
But this also made many African states aid dependent.

In my view, this is quite correct. And it was not only the anti-communist aid flavour which is worth to be mentioned, but we also clearly saw and still see an “anti-muslim aid flow” trying the stop the advances Islam made southwards through Africa.

Draw a horizontal line just north of the equator and you more or less have drawn the line between Muslim and Christian Africa. Check out those states on the border line. And see which have been able to count on the political, military and financial support from the West. South Sudan, Kenya, DRC, Uganda, CAR… (True the line goes a bit further North in the West). Interesting, no? So were all the secret US arms shipments stacked on Moyo Kenyatta airport in Nairobi and Entebbe airport in Uganda. And the tons of unlabeled cargo planes with registration numbers starting with “N”. (which country has plane registrations starting with “N” again? Hmmmm.. the US, right?)

I always had -idealist as I am – an issue with the “politization” of aid. I have felt this first hand in Afghanistan and Iraq after both countries were invaded by the alliance of the willing (and their puppy dogs). As a humanitarian aid worker, not only did my conscience struggle, but I have seen the first hand consequences where the affiliation of aid agencies with ‘occupying’ powers made the former a target for hostilities. Many of us have died because of this alliance.

And what stopped us? Well.. we were not going to bite the hand that fed us, were we? Why would we, aid agencies and aid workers bite the hand of donors? Who are we to question the intentions of those who give us money? In the end, we are helping the poor, curing the sick, sheltering the homeless and feeding the starving masses, no? Would we question that many of these are caused by the same fraud political systems who donated us the money?

Yes, of course we realize that not everything was kosher, but shhht.. this is a well hidden secret, and not something to be talked about. The hand that feeds us, you know!

Now here is another thought: the same goes for the countries we work in. How much are we willing to compromise our conscience and work with corrupt and sometimes completely abusive or repressive governments because if we upset them, we ‘might just as well be thrown out of the country’?

Asking the wrong questions is often already enough. Protesting loud enough for aid cargoes stuck at airports is enough reason to PNG. Pointing to corruption and syphoning off aid funds and goods is always a winner to get thrown out. That would not help the poor, we reason.

I am not cynical, I am realistic. We *have* to make compromises. We do have to close our eyes, bite our lip, and sit on our hands sometimes. But up to what point? Up to what point is this still ethical? As of what point are we becoming part of a corrupt system ourselves? We, the do-good-ers. We, the world changers. We, who mean well.

Sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Alertnet just published two excellent articles by Jan Kellett on this subject. Further food for thought: “Darfur: A humanitarian compromise too far?” Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy!

Rice is the staple food of Haiti and up until the 1980s Haiti was self-sufficient in its production. In the mid-1980s Haiti’s domestic rice production decreased rapidly. By the 1990s rice imports outpaced domestic rice production. This displaced many Haitian farmers, traders, and millers whose employment opportunities are extremely limited.

Import tariff reduction is a critical piece of the trade liberalization policies that are strongly advocated and many times mandated by international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the loan packages they negotiate with developing countries. In 1995 Haiti agreed to the pressure of the IMF to cut on rice import tax from 35% to the current level of 3%.

Though it earned Haiti a score of 1 on the IMF’s 1999 Index of Trade Restrictiveness, making Haiti the least trade restrictive country in the Caribbean, Haiti has also remained the least developed country in the Caribbean. It is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Three-fourths of Haitians live on less than $2 a day and 70 percent of the workforce is jobless or underemployed. More than half the country’s children don’t get enough to eat. The connection?

Following the adoption of the import policies local production of rice in Haiti dropped dramatically. Rice import tariff reductions in Haiti has made it more difficult for local rice producers to compete with imports.

Some argue that the resulting flood of relatively cheap rice imports originating mostly from the United States has had a negative impact on Haiti. The decline in the demand for Haitian rice has been devastating to an already desperate rural population. Rice farmers are some of the most vulnerable members of the population; the alternative employment options for farmers in Haiti are extremely limited.

Furthermore, competition between Haitian and American rice growers is not exactly fair. While US rice production is “subsidized through a variety of mechanisms”, the small, struggling domestic rice industry in Haiti receives no support from the government. Several Haitian and international NGOs have claimed that the US is guilty of dumping rice in Haiti. The US now dominates the rice market in Haiti. Most American rice exports are handled “by a single US corporation — American Rice Inc. — which has enjoyed an almost monopolistic position in Haiti.” (Full)

Picture courtesy Newsday/Moises Saman. Graph courtesy american.edu