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Aid Societies
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| gehzumteufel |
I was reading an article in the LA Times this morning about Darfur and the aid that is desperately needed there and it got me thinking.
Are we basically, with our funds, encouraging this in a way that was not intended? I have seen a few articles where native Africans say exactly that. Discuss. |
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| boris_the_bear |
yeah. it comes to the point where Palestinians threaten to commit new terror attacks if not timely supplied with aid :rolleyes:
maybe the other day someone should supply em with AIDS :stongue: |
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| Nrg2Nfinit |
| quote: | Originally posted by boris_the_bear
yeah. it comes to the point where Palestinians threaten to commit new terror attacks if not timely supplied with aid :rolleyes:
maybe the other day someone should supply em with AIDS :stongue: |
HAHHAHA
your a ing ukranian minority to russia. What a hypocryte. |
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| drivingforce |
| actually there is an african economist who argues that all aid to africa should stop. Saying aid actually hurts their overall long term economy because it causes a form of reliance upon other nations instead of upon themselves. Another economist American I believe, says the same thing but for different reasons. Its a sinking ship theory in the way he explains it. America in his theory is a life boat and can only hold 9 other people. In the water there are over a 100 that need help. This representing poor or poverty stricken nations in need of aid. So the rub is who to help. According to his theory you should help none. Discriminating and determing who's situations are more dire creates bias and ultimate controversy. If you help 9 the others will swarm and bring the life boat down to (america). It was interesting none the less, theories on why not to give aid. Learned it in one of the many econ classes i had to take hahah. |
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| gehzumteufel |
| That was exactly what I was referring to. |
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| Arbiter |
I tend to agree with respect to the more common forms of humanitarian aid (food, medicine, etc.) I fail to see how decreasing the mortality rate--and therefore increasing the population--is leading in the direction of independent sustainability.
I'm not so sure, though, that the same is true of all types of aid. For instance, supplying birth control might tend to inhibit rather than facilitate population growth and thereby yield a net benefit. It also differs from goods like food or clothing in that the stream of aid in that particular market does not tend to squeeze out local producers and thus undermine the development of local markets.
The issue is a complicated one, so I would tend to reject categorical claims that all aid is detrimental. However, I think that we should certainly be more circumspect with regard to how we carry out these sorts of activites. |
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| boris_the_bear |
| quote: | Originally posted by Nrg2Nfinit
HAHHAHA
your a ing ukranian minority to russia. What a hypocryte. |
so what:conf: |
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| gehzumteufel |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
I tend to agree with respect to the more common forms of humanitarian aid (food, medicine, etc.) I fail to see how decreasing the mortality rate--and therefore increasing the population--is leading in the direction of independent sustainability.
I'm not so sure, though, that the same is true of all types of aid. For instance, supplying birth control might tend to inhibit rather than facilitate population growth and thereby yield a net benefit. It also differs from goods like food or clothing in that the stream of aid in that particular market does not tend to squeeze out local producers and thus undermine the development of local markets.
The issue is a complicated one, so I would tend to reject categorical claims that all aid is detrimental. However, I think that we should certainly be more circumspect with regard to how we carry out these sorts of activites. |
I am of the thought that aid in the form of medical supplies and emergency food is good, but sustained food supplies are basically pointless. Point being, they continue to depend on this aid as they aren't given a way to become more self-sufficient. Along the lines of the give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, teach a man to fish you will feed him for a lifetime thought. Giving these people the tools necessary to rebuild via loans, jobs, etc, will go a lot farther than just money that is supposed to be "distributed" by the government.
I am not a fan of continued and endemic financial support. This doesn't produce anything as we have seen in many African nations. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by Arbiter
I tend to agree with respect to the more common forms of humanitarian aid (food, medicine, etc.) I fail to see how decreasing the mortality rate--and therefore increasing the population--is leading in the direction of independent sustainability.
I'm not so sure, though, that the same is true of all types of aid. For instance, supplying birth control might tend to inhibit rather than facilitate population growth and thereby yield a net benefit. It also differs from goods like food or clothing in that the stream of aid in that particular market does not tend to squeeze out local producers and thus undermine the development of local markets.
The issue is a complicated one, so I would tend to reject categorical claims that all aid is detrimental. However, I think that we should certainly be more circumspect with regard to how we carry out these sorts of activites. |
I disagree. There's a big difference between humanitarian assistance and developmental aid. Humanitarian assistance is typically emergency food and medicine needed to simply sustain current populations. Failure to deliver this type of assistance results in epidemic and famine, as we're about to see in Darfur now that humanitarian relief suppliers have been booted from Sudan.
Food aid, on the other hand, is a whole different topic, and one in which I'd be more inclined to agree. In fact, so would most development agencies, including the World Food Programme - food aid tends to distort local markets in a way that most recognize as unfair to local producers. Though popular in the seventies and eighties, the last decade has seen a growing trend for food aid to be monetized - in other words, money is given to African states, who can then use the money as they deem fit - to provide agricultural subsidies for poor farmers or to purchase agricultural goods not provided by indigenous growers.
I think CARE and OxFam led the effort to monetize food effort in Mozambique, where these types of programs have led to a burgeoning agricultural sector, and recent years have seen a decline in the amount of international aid flowing into the country.
Medicine is another story - a whole dissertation could be written about pharmaceutical companies, intellectual property rights, and the availability of knockoff drugs in Africa, but the fact remains that people are still dying of preventable disease across the continent. Furthermore, though decreasing the mortality rate may seem to have the undesired effect of increasing growth rates, this isn't always the case - especially in the case of infant mortality rates. Low infant mortality counterintuitively leads to fewer, rather than more, births, simply because families don't need to factor in child deaths when planning family size. Women will be more likely to have only four births when they know all four will survive. When survival is unsure, the women might have seven children, on the off chance that three don't make it.
For more, I think there's a discussion somewhere in this thread:
http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...6&forumid=66&s=
In any case, development aid and assistance is definitely a complicated topic, and one worthy of wider discussion. I wish I'd seen this thread earlier. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by gehzumteufel
I am of the thought that aid in the form of medical supplies and emergency food is good, but sustained food supplies are basically pointless. Point being, they continue to depend on this aid as they aren't given a way to become more self-sufficient. Along the lines of the give a man a fish, you will feed him for a day, teach a man to fish you will feed him for a lifetime thought. |
Yes, and many development organizations have come around to this way of thought as well:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/art...1653360,00.html
(a really fascinating article, highly recommend)
| quote: | | Giving these people the tools necessary to rebuild via loans, jobs, etc, will go a lot farther than just money that is supposed to be "distributed" by the government. |
Well... this is where you lose me. "Giving" the people tools they need seems a little paternalistic, no? Development, in its ideal form, is about empowering both people and government institutions to stand on their own. Loans are dangerous - the Grameen Bank has had a lot of success in South Asia, but the World Bank has flirted with disaster in Africa. Structuring loans in "pro-poor" ways can alleviate some of the burden of debt and repayment, but it still creates a system whereby people are dependent on Western largesse for the foreseeable future.
The ideal form of development is as follows:
Improving the institutional capacity of state governments in developing countries to provide for the basic public services populations need, in a way that is transparent, fair, and efficient. The goal here is to create states that can provide for their own people and that aren't dependent on outside agency for food, healthcare, education, infrastructure development, etc. Governments that are accountable to their people and people who surrender private capital for public goods.
| quote: | | I am not a fan of continued and endemic financial support. This doesn't produce anything as we have seen in many African nations. |
But the type of support matters - not all development assistance goes unused or unsuccessful.
A rundown of just a few success stories for US-funded development efforts in Africa (these constitute just a small fraction of the spending on development worldwide):
http://www.usaid.gov/regions/afr/ss02/index.html
And that's from 2002 - growth in most African countries has actually improved since then.
In 2008, four African states experienced Real GDP growth rates of 10% or higher:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(real)_growth_rate
15% in Angola! Compare that to projections that show US GDP growth this year to be about .7% or so. These countries have small economies now, but some of them are rapidly expanding - which, as mentioned in the thread that I linked to in that last post, can lead to a whole host of new problems. |
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| gehzumteufel |
| One major road block to developmental aid though is the governments are squandering it. Using it for personal gain. Unfortunately without major change in these governments, even emergency food and medical aid is at risk. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by gehzumteufel
One major road block to developmental aid though is the governments are squandering it. Using it for personal gain. Unfortunately without major change in these governments, even emergency food and medical aid is at risk. |
Which is why I focus on institutional development and political reform. :)
The best route toward a better quality of life and a lower rate of relapse into conflict is inculcating a sense of public service in bureaucratic institutions. The idea of the "public good" is one that is absent in much of Africa - creating a civil service that aims to serve its population can reduce corruption and increase the amount of aid (and public spending) that reaches peripheral populations (in the form of education funding, health care, utilities, etc.).
If a government cares about it's people, the people are likely to be better off. And if the people don't have a reason to hate the government, they're less likely to support violent opposition movements. |
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