Food Aid or Food Aids?

Published on 14th February 2006

Part 2

Stephen Hubbell, Middle East correspondent for The Nation  and a contributing editor of Harper's continues to interview Maren on his experiences in the “aid” industry.

The most devastating parts of your book (The Road To Hell) concern two organizations which I think most people probably feel pretty benevolently toward: Save the Children and CARE. When they go to people in the U.S. to advertise for their programs, they show a single image, almost always a hungry child. 

Starving baby pictures, yeah. 

What you're saying is that if the camera pulls back from the starving baby, there are other people standing around.

I was in New York during the beginning of the Somalia crisis {in the summer of 1992}, and I saw on TV all these people starving to death. I made a point of going to Reuters in Nairobi where they have all the raw footage and watched the entire tapes. What you see is the camera on the starving baby, which was the footage edited into the news program, but then the camera pans away or pulls back, and you see people going about their lives; driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and so on. In a refugee situation, you can use the camera to compress the hunger. You can package it, frame it, and it always looks worse than it is. It looks like you're taking part in the liberation, when in fact it's a lot more complicated. The starving baby picture is a lie but that doesn’t mean there aren't people starving in these situations; there always are and sometimes lots of them.

Standing in the background perhaps are militia members who skim off the top of any food aid that arrives, and village elders who themselves are tied up with the government and make sure some of the aid is funneled to the government.

Oh, sure. We tend to look at this as surplus food. You move that into a poor country, and it represents a lot: money, power and control. If you want to do business on the docks of Brooklyn, you’ve got to know who to pay off. And it's the same thing in any of these situations: You've got to go through the local leaders. They have to take their cut. There's never been a famine situation that didn't make somebody rich, and it's not always just local people on the ground but foreign contractors and shipping companies too. Most of the money ends up back in the U.S. in the form of cash, contracts and salaries.

In order to do humanitarian aid work in Somalia, Kenya, Liberia or Rwanda, you inevitably have to help one side in a civil war against the other.

You do. Biafra was the beginning; that was the real awakening to people, when the Nigerian government starved people to death in Biafra on purpose.Groups like the Red Cross wouldn't go work in Biafra because they couldn't cross the Nigerian government. That's always the case. No rebel group will let you cross its lines to help people who are supportive of the government, and vice versa, even if those people are starving to death.

So the possibility of doing aid work for the benefit of the common people in a situation of civil war is almost nil.

It is nil. You can't do it. You have to make a moral decision about who has to get fed, or at least admit that you're getting involved politically but very few charities are willing to do that. If there isn’t war, you're always supporting the government in power. If you're doing aid work in Kenya for example, you're supporting the government of Kenya which is choking off farmers by not allowing them to sell grains or coffee or whatever to the highest bidder.

Save the Children makes no mention of the political situation in countries where the aid eventually is sent. Do you get the feeling the NGOs themselves carry the same what-me-worry attitude on the ground in the countries they serve?

Well, there's a huge division in aid organizations between the people on the ground and the people at headquarters, always. I've been in a hundred situations where I'm in a country and I'm with a bunch of aid workers at night, and we're usually drinking after a hard, hot day, and somebody starts talking about maybe we shouldn't be here but they get up and go to work anyway. People in headquarters don't want to hear it. They have other concerns, which are more projects to keep paying salaries at headquarters and let's put a happy face on it for the public.

You describe a real unwillingness to accept that there is-in what appears to our eyes to be chaos-social order, a very sophisticated social order. And when the aid organizations come in, they ignore that social order and simply dictate terms as if what they've come into is abject chaos.

Yeah, the aid organizations do what they do wherever they are. They know how to set up refugee camps, so they do it. And they also horribly underestimate the skills and abilities of the local people to save  and  take care of themselves. If I learned anything in the Peace Corps, it was that people basically know what they're doing. Ads that we see for these organizations tend to give the impression that all these Africans are a bunch of infants. That they will starve to death if we don't send a bunch of 25-year old volunteers over there to take care of them. The ads really rely on something I find somewhat racist. The whole aid industry is built on this conceit that Americans can go into a village of Africa and, by virtue of some innate quality of American-ness, have something to offer people, something that you can teach people there as if these people couldn't survive without you.

What about the programs? Building schools, teaching people how to…

Development is done in terms of projects. Projects are designed by accountants. If you read a project proposal, it says it's a three-year project: In the first six months we will show this, after a year we'll be at this point and we'll have spent this much money. Anyone who's been overseas working knows that this is not development. This has nothing to do with helping people. It's about building stuff. But economic development has nothing to do with putting pipes in the ground or building buildings. Economic development is a way of thinking about your resources, and this is something that's not going to change because a bunch of Western volunteers are going over there. You're dealing with massive economic problems in countries that have no economies for the most part, countries that are paying out more than their GNP to the International Monetary Fund. By us sending volunteers in there to take over social services, we're really not making things any better for anyone. 

“Sure, in any enterprise there are bad apples, bad projects, some who are unwilling to see the negative ramifications of what they're doing. But we shouldn't abandon the whole aid project just because there are some bad apples here and there, in fact, most of the people in aid are well-intentioned, good-meaning types,"some would respond.

I think it's exactly the opposite. Every organization has some projects that are working well in some places, but I would say that most aid projects are absolute failures, complete wastes of money that succeed primarily at keeping Westerners employed. And the proof of that is if you look at the long term. I mean, you can always show that an aid project has succeeded over six months. If your goal in an aid project is to put pipes in the ground, then you can say, "Look, there are pipes in the ground; that's success." What you don't do is go back in five years and see what's happened to those pipes. Well, what happened to it? A couple of tough guys in the village came and took over the water system, and they're selling water to people. I've seen this happen over and over again. The poor people in the village aren't getting any water, and they're still walking down to the damn river and drinking awful water, because you're not looking at the political context into which you put those pipes. You build a road somewhere and the people who benefit are the people who have cars. But if you're shortsighted enough to think that the goal of the project is to get the road built, then you're going to look at the project as a success, and you're not going to look at the overall damages and the effect that project has two, five, 10 years down the line.

Are the aid organizations going to say, "OK, now we understand that we can't just look at the amount of pipe footage in the ground?"

No, because they don't have a time frame that's long enough. It's the kind of industry where personnel are changing very quickly, where there's always a new theory of development, a new way of doing things. When I first started out, everybody was talking about meeting basic human needs. So we put pipes in the ground and said we were meeting basic human needs. Within a few years, the new talk was about "women in development," and we were putting the same damn pipes in the ground and talking about how we were helping women in development. Then you had "sustainable development"-all this crap is just theoretical jargon marketed as a way of collecting funds.  

Well, fine, hospitals are for-profit companies, too, and they make people well.

Yeah, and that's the difference. Aid is about people here getting their hands on government money here. Seventy to 80 percent of all aid money stays in the U.S. It goes to salaries, to U.S. corporations; that's what it's about. There are companies like Brown & Root-which is owned by a company whose chairman is {Secretary of Defense under Bush during the Somalia intervention} Dick Cheney, by the way-made hundreds of millions of dollars off the Somalia intervention. The list of private companies making money is huge. We don't look at CARE in that way. We're not willing to say, CARE is making money from this as well. In fact, they are. They're paying their salaries, they're expanding, they're hiring new people, making capital investments-they're just not paying taxes on it.

Are sponsorship organizations by definition a fraud?

Any sponsorship is completely bogus. I just saw an ad for Christian Children's Fund on TV a while ago, and it says, "Little Imelda would've starved to death if not for a lady in Seattle who pledged 65 or 70 cents a day" or whatever it is. That is a lie. It’s not like a child is waiting to get into a program, a child is sponsored, a child moves into the program. That's not how it works. There's a whole chapter on  a sponsorship organization that shows that there were villages where they raised $10,000 in sponsorship money and spent only $400, on nothing of any consequence, and that's pretty much how sponsorship works. If they can't get grant money to do a project, they won’t accomplish anything.

The presence of Western NGOs means that governments don't have to carry out the obligations that governments should have to carry out.

Yeah, it lets us off the hook. "We're doing something. We're building schools over there. That's our obligation to this country"-when we're pursuing macroeconomic policies that are causing these problems to begin with, such as massive structural adjustments and debt burdens. That's really the problem, and that amount of money dwarfs the money coming in through these charities. You have to think about development in terms of larger economic issues. That's where the problems are.

What would happen if these aid organizations pulled out of these countries? 

I think if all of them went out of business today, there would be very few people who would be any worse for it, and a great number of people would be better off. People know what's best for themselves. They can do what they need to do. In most of these countries-I'm thinking of Africa-people are not developing economically because they're not being allowed to. They're being oppressed politically. If you look at the development that's taken place in Asia in the past 15 or 20 years, none of that can be attributed to foreign aid. It's all investment, it all came about through change in government policies that allowed people to invest their money. If the Asian model is going to apply to Africa, it's got to start slowly, and it has to start with good government. To a certain extent, NGOs and aid organizations in these countries now help fortify a lot of bad governments. 

From Might Magazine.

 


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