Charity Is Bad. Netscape today carries a claim, in a news story titled "Economist Blames Aid for Africa Famine", that foreign aid actually produces the catastrophes it is intended to alleviate.

When aid money keeps coming, all our policy-makers do is strategize on how to get more," said [economist James Shikwati] the Kenya-based director of the Inter Region Economic Network, an African think tank.

"They forget about getting their own people working to solve these very basic problems. In Africa, we look to outsiders to solve our problems, making the victim not take responsibility to change." * * * Shikwati notes an additional problem: Even African countries that have food to spare can't easily share it because tariffs on agricultural products within sub-Saharan Africa average as high as 33 percent, compared with 12 percent on similar products imported from Europe.

"It doesn't make sense when they can't even allow their neighbors to feed them. They have to wait for others in Europe or Asia to help," he said. [Hmm. "Europe or Asia". I guess the U.S. and Canada don't count.] "We don't have any excuses in Africa. We can't blame nature. We have to tell our leadership to open up and get people producing food."

So tell us, Mr. Shikwati, your solution to the famines that periodically ravage this or that part of Africa. Should the outside world just avert its eyes and let Africans die if they can't solve their own problems? I assure you that hundreds of millions of people would be very happy to do that. But I suspect that, were the world to turn its back on Africa, you'd complain about that too.
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As the old expression goes, "Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
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It may be true that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for one day, whereas if you teach a man to fish he will be able to fish for himself the rest of his life. But what if there are no fish to catch, because the rivers have dried up because of desertification brought on by overpopulation, or have been polluted so badly the fish die? What if the population all around him has grown so large that it exceeds the capacity of the land to support, even in good times, but especially in times of ecological stress such as drought or locust swarm? What then, Mr. Shikwati? What then?
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The kids with distended bellies who are too weak to swat flies from their eyes didn't produce the policies that are killing them, and, absent outside help, won't live long enuf to demand change. Worse, there will never be enuf kids dead from famine to bring Africa's overpopulation and underdevelopment problems under control. Africa needs basic change, quite so. But until and unless it comes — and how long, pray, will that take? — somebody's got to save the kids. If their fellow Africans cannot or will not, who will?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,792.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:19 AM