Food Aid or Food Aids?
Part 1
Maren today lives in
"Are you saying that we should just let people starve to death?"
There's nothing in anything I've written that says we should let people starve to death, that we shouldn't help people. What I'm saying is that what we're doing isn't helping people, and, in fact, it's hurting people. People are having trouble making that conceptual leap-that helping people is hurting people. They want to believe that Save the Children saves the children, that CARE cares, that Feed the Children is feeding children, whatever.
When did your ‘trouble’ with foreign aid and development assistance begin?
About a year after I got there I realized that as a Peace Corps volunteer in this little village, I was a political pawn. This was in Kenya, a village that at the time was very isolated. I was there to teach, and what I learned was that I was at that school because The people in the village bribed some people from the Ministry of Education when they'd learned that white teachers were available. Everybody wanted a white teacher, and schools competed with each other for students, so when they knew there was a white teacher coming to that school, they got a lot more kids applying, and a lot more money. They were supposed to build a new classroom for me, and a bunch of material:cement, stones had arrived but the next morning, it was all gone because the headmaster was building a little shop for himself in The market. And nobody cared; The people just rolled over for this stuff. And that's when I started thinking about development and what it was. What I realized was, there was this thin kind of layer of pond scum over the village social pool, a group of people who were more westernized. They knew how to operate the mechanisms, how to talk to the government, they spoke English very well. They were the people who were contractors, owned shops in the village, happened to be the headmaster of the school, the preacher and all. They were part of the patronage system that kept the whole country running, and they were the people who benefited from any projects. If money came to the village, it came through them. And I was part of them.
To what extent, if at all, did your Peace Corps handlers have any sense that your presence in this village was only tangentially educational?
They knew. Peace Corps volunteers used to get together in our time off and talk about how you couldn't teach, the whole system was idiotic. I was teaching "The Merchant of Venice" to kids who could not read a second-grade primer. And this was the national curriculum. We were teaching physics to kids who'd never seen a light bulb. It was a waste of time, and they weren't equipped to learn, and it was too late to back up and give them 10 years of education at that point.
So you decided, even though the Peace Corps was jading, that the circumstances of the life weren't bad, and you went into aid work. At which point your expertise added up to...
To nil. I was a smart guy, but I had a degree in English, and I heard by chance that Catholic Relief Services (CRS) needed somebody who knew the countryside to take this job starting up work programs in Kenya. There was a million-dollar budget and tons of food coming in, and we were going to build roads and dig wells and go to villages with bags of food and all kinds of stuff. My job was to drive around the country going to places where projects had been proposed and approve or disapprove them. My real job was to just approve them and keep the food moving. Don't turn down projects was the idea. But I did take it somewhat seriously and turned down a couple of projects, which got me in trouble. They wanted me to go and make sure the projects actually existed, and they'd ship the food out. A lot of money was involved, which CRS had to spend.
Let me understand a little more thoroughly why it is that an organization like CRS or the Peace Corps spends so much money in payoffs, bribes-costs that are prior to actually doing business in a country.
It's not fraud per se. I think one of the misconceptions about these charities is that they run on donations from the public. They don't. They run on contract. CARE, CRS, World Vision, Save the Children --they are government contractors more than charities. They get government contracts to do stuff, and the more they do, the more money they get. Contracts always include a certain percentage that goes to salaries, to pay administrators and office costs back home, so that they're perfectly willing to take on anything, because it's cash flowing through the organization.
I had this picture of development and aid workers being often insufferably pious, a little sanctimonious about what they do. Sure, they inhabit this special zone of privilege, but at the same time, they view themselves as deliverers of a kind of civilization.
Well, it's missionary work, essentially. The thing is, it's more than pious. There are some really good people out there doing aid work, but I have to say-and this mostly comes from experience as a journalist-that without a doubt, some of the most sanctimonious assholes I have ever met in my life, some of the worst people, and I mean really bad people, work for charities and aid organizations on the ground.
What attracts them to it?
Power. They have very few special skills; they have strong desires to be in places like that; they have a sense of adventure. But there are no specific skills that are really necessary. You walk in there and you have life-and-death power over people's lives. And all of a sudden you have a 22-year-old aid worker telling 12,000 refugees to get over here, to get in line. It gives you a real sense of power. I'd get to these villages, and people would know I'd be coming, and whoever wanted the project would meet me with dancing children singing songs with my name in them and stuff. They'd give me goats; they sent hookers over to my room at night.
What did you do with the goats?
I didn't do anything with the goats or with the hookers. The goats I always refused or asked to give them to the poorest person in the village, because I didn't know what to do with a goat. I went to a village one time, and I had a pickup truck with my sleeping bag and a bunch of other stuff in the back. I came back one day and there was this goat sitting in the back of my truck eating my sleeping bag, munching on its feathers, and I was really pissed off. Nevertheless, I was having a very good time. The cost of owning your own vehicle in Kenya, especially at that age, was prohibitive to most people, and I got to drive around for an entire year. It was magnificent. Pot was about 535 a ton, so I drove around and smoked big reefers and listened to rock-and-roll and watched animals and camped out.
So after CRS you stayed on in Kenya?
No. I really wanted to stay, but if you're going to move up in the ranks of development, the hierarchy is volunteer, which I did, and then Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), where the money is a lot better. There was a big growth opportunity in Somalia at the time- this was the end of 1980, early 1981-and I jumped on it, being a food monitor. They had tons and tons of food up there going to ethnic Somali refugees from Ethiopia who'd been living in refugee camps in Somalia, escaping the Ogaden war of '77-'78. And the U.S. government requires that if they're gonna ship food into a situation, there must be food monitors to count the bags and make sure that all the food, or as much as possible, was getting to the people who were supposed to be getting it.
So you were keeping everybody honest, essentially.
Well that's what I thought. I took the job fairly seriously, and I got a really nice house in Somalia on the beach and was in charge of the refugee camps' food, as a U.S. government employee. And it didn't take me too long to figure out that about two-thirds of the food was going missing, and it wasn't just the food. I mean trucks would leave the port and disappear. They'd never find the trucks again. Or {the food} was getting to the camps, and a lot of it was getting stolen in the camps. {Later, during the U.S. intervention}, there were almost no cases of private stores being looted, private trucks being attacked by gangs. It was all aid convoys. Because people's attitude was, "They will take it over to those people, we might as well take it." And it was also a big scam because there weren't nearly as many refugees in the camps as {the NGOs} said. And I wrote all these reports, and after a while realized what my job really was, which was to write the damn reports and shut up. The law required that the reports be written, but nobody would do anything about the reports. I wrote a long memo to the U.S. Agency for International Development {USAID} right before I quit. And I just said, this is being manipulated for political purposes and they're not necessary and they're hurting people. They're turning what were refugee camps into pounds that were being used cynically by the government to move various ethnic groups around.
In order for an NGO or a governmental organization like USAID even to be in country, there has to be the permission of the local government. Are you assigned some parallel relationship with an existing Somali government organization?
One of the things that happens when you're doing aid work in a country like Somalia- when it did have a government-you had to deal with the ministries of planning, agriculture, finance, any number of ministries. The idea was to make aid money flow to as many places as possible, which gave them more opportunities to skim it, which was the point as far as they were concerned. The aid money kept coming in because the U.S. government had a political and strategic interest in Somalia: It was all about a military base in northern Somalia, and so the U.S. was would not tell Siad Barre, the dictator, that he could not have his food aid. So all this aid money came through from the U.S. government that was subcontracted to NGOs, largely CARE. But what became obvious was that they were delivering through refugee camps that should not have existed.
The conditions that made it necessary to have the camps no longer existed so they should have been shut down.
They should have been forcibly shut down by 1981, when there was peace. But there was a memo that I found from CARE, dated '85 or '86, where they boasted they finally had the food-delivery mechanism running smoothly. They're worried about making the system work, not about taking care of these refugees and getting them out of the camps. And anyone who's ever been in a refugee camp knows that they're very politically charged places. Refugee problems are political problems. NGOs look at them as logistical problems. If you're an NGO, a refugee camp presents you with [issues such as], how do you move the food, how do you do medical care, how do you do this well so there's more money, more money, more personnel, more Land Cruisers, we need more trucks, we need more Land Cruisers and by the way we need more Land Cruisers. And that's how NGOs think about these problems. They don't think about the political problems: How do we get the government to shut these things down? And then the refugee camps in Somalia, as in other places, also became armed camps [for] the Western Somalia Liberation Front that was supposed to be fighting for freedom from Ethiopia but was essentially a government hit squad. The camps were put in strategic positions on land generally inhabited by clans that the president was having political problems with. There was one clan that was the president's sworn enemy in this one town, and he literally displaced the entire town with refugees from the Ogaden clan-his mother's clan-and all this was assisted by NGOs that at first didn't realize what they were doing. But anyone who was paying attention would've known. And there were memos flying around that showed people did know that the situation was completely political and that what they were doing was feeding the problem, and still nobody did anything about closing the refugee camps until 1989. And by then it was too late-the government was collapsing, and Somalia had been pushed over the edge by these political problems caused in part by the refugee camps.
From Might Magazine
To be contined...