From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 20:56:02 MST
Thanks to Max Rasmussen for pointing out three eye-opening URLs:
> http://www.netnomad.com/f-reviews/nytrev.html
Some excerpts:
If famine and war seem to be the fate of African nations, those heart-wrenching full-page newspaper ads, television commercials and
direct-mail solicitations are our response. But Michael Maren warns you to resist letting your heart strings pull your pocketbook.
Aid is not only ''incompetent and inadvertently destructive,'' he concludes in ''The Road to Hell.'' ''It could be positively
evil.''
Mr. Maren, a magazine journalist, knows whereof he muckrakes. He first went to Africa in the Peace Corps, in 1977. Then, thinking
that he might be able to make a difference, he stayed and worked with some of the most reputedly humanitarian of the humanitarian
organizations; most of the time he worked in Somalia. With that experience, supplemented by years of exploring the subject of
humanitarian aid as a journalist, he has concluded that the billions of dollars spent on alleviating famine and helping refugees
have made people dependent on food aid, discouraging them from growing their own and destroying communities and cultures in the
process. Aid has driven local pharmacies out of business, unable to compete with free drugs given by large American companies. And
it has perpetuated refugee camps, instead of encouraging people to return to their homes.
...
Mr. Maren focuses most of his damning details on CARE and Save the Children. It will be argued, of course, that it is not fair to
taint all humanitarian organizations because of the transgressions of a few. Sadly, however, the performance of those two groups is
representative, as anyone who has seen the aid agencies at work in the field knows. During the refugee crises in Rwanda, for
example, more than 100 humanitarian groups invaded, creating the most indecorous scenes of public relations officers shoving and
pushing to get their group on television or into a newspaper, and bad-mouthing the work of competing charities.
> http://hallbusinesses.com/biographies_primers/1000.shtml
From Booklist , December 1, 1996
Maren attacks the bureaucratic tangles through which foreign aid is channeled. Drawing on two decades of experience in East Africa,
Maren directs his criticism at the corruption of good intentions. He starts with his Peace Corps job in Kenya, proceeds to his work
for Catholic Relief Services, and then for USAID in Somalia. Western altruism failed most completely in Somalia, Maren argues,
because the aid spigot washed away the local economy, which degenerated into a kleptocracy. Assistance rarely reached the intended
recipients; most was stolen, an unpleasant fact the author maintains aid organizations squelched out of self-interest, lest their
own survival (on charitable and government largesse) be imperiled.
> http://web.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/1/5.htm
According to Maren, relief aid to Somalia in the 1980s and 1990s was manipulated by local authorities, hoodlums, and even refugees
who grew rich diverting food and other donations or by using these resources for political ends. Despite this, Western aid agencies
continued to solicit funds and carry out relief and development activities because they benefited financially.
Well, notice that the logic Maren uses also accounts
for the results of urban welfare programs in the U.S.
too. Maren "concluded that the billions of dollars spent
on alleviating famine and helping refugees have made
people dependent..." and discourages them from dealing
productively and creatively with their own situations.
(But here, as opposed to there, the incentive is not
stealing dollars, but buying votes.)
Lee
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