This Week:

Quote of the Week

Websites and Books of the Week: Foreign Aid

A Mini-Lesson In Information Gathering in 2003

Foreign Aid Series, Final Part: Aid As Obstacle

Greetings,

Can you imagine someone stealing another person’s life savings, then offering them in compensation a coupon for a free meal in a local restaurant? That is, in effect, the lay of the land in the world of international aid. The U.S. has created and continually enforces a global economic structure that systematically transfers wealth from the poor to the rich countries. The U.S. then offers “coupons”—that is, foreign aid—to some of the poorest countries in order to take the edge off of the rage and desperation produced by this system. And, as I have pointed out, most often the foreign aid “coupon” must be redeemed at a U.S.-based multinational corporation!

This is the reality, a small piece of which I have been describing for the past few weeks. This is the last week I’ll talk about it for a while. But rest assured that activists and allies are far from done acting to question, disrupt, and transform the current unjust reality that global elites call the “Free Market” system, and that we call global capitalism. This week’s “Websites of the Week” gives contact information for several of the more active groups. Please support them if you can.

Now that I’ve finished with international affairs for a bit, I’ve got some other interesting tidbits up my sleeve, including pieces on Medicaid reform, media criticism, language, and so forth. Or, maybe something else.

Until next week,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

“The official aid agencies’ diagnosis is that the poor are poor because they lack certain things — irrigation, credit, better seeds, good roads, etc. But we ask: Why are they lacking these things? In studying country after country, it becomes clear that what the poor really lack is power, power to secure what they need. The aid agencies focus on the lack of materials; we focus on the lack of power. Therein lies the fundamental difference.”

-- From the introduction to the wonderful book “Aid As Obstacle: Twenty Questions About Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry,” by Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and David Kinley

Websites and Books of the Week: Foreign Aid

In putting together this series on foreign aid, I looked closely at almost a hundred sources and ran across many, many items of interest in the process. Most of those items didn’t make it into the final articles, but I thought it might be good to pass on the internet addresses of a couple of the most accessible of those sources for those readers who might want to take some action on these issues. Even for those who don’t plan to become active on these issues specifically, I think a close look at the great issues of global hunger, poverty, and “aid” can help any person of good will to understand more clearly how the world works. This “big picture” analysis is important for people working in any field, if economic and social justice is in any way your goal.

• The CITIZENS NETWORK ON ESSENTIAL SERVICES “works to democratize national and global governance by supporting citizens' groups that are engaged in influencing policy decisions about basic services: water, power, education, and health care.” Their website is: http://www.servicesforall.org/.
  
  
• The 50 YEARS IS ENOUGH CAMPAIGN is a coalition of over 200 organizations “committed to the fundamental transformation of the IMF and World Bank.” The “50 years” part refers to the time period since the current international financial structure was set up by the “winners” in the wake of World War II. Find them at: http://50years.org/index.html.
  
  
• A perpetually wonderful group is the INSTITUTE FOR FOOD AND DEVELOPMENT POLICY, also known as Food First, “a member-supported, nonprofit peoples think tank and education-for-action center.” Find them at: http://www.foodfirst.org/.

I feel bad about leaving out so many other wonderful sources, but I chose these three partly because all of these websites provide many links to other great stuff. The Citizens Network site, for example, lists no fewer than 92 links to other activist and other organizations related to global economics and justice!

Two books upon which I drew heavily for the overall framework of this series are published by the Food First people. The first is the 1981 book cited in this week’s “Quote” of the Week: “Aid As Obstacle: Twenty Questions About Our Foreign Aid and the Hungry.”

The second book is a 1998 book, also by Lappé and Collins, in conjunction with Peter Rosset and Luis Esparza, called “World Hunger: Twelve Myths.” I highly recommend both books, especially for those who are just beginning to look into the social realities of hunger and poverty.

For a shorter, but excellent, overall introduction to the issues and what is being done about them, I recommend “A Q&A on the WTO, IMF, World Bank, and Activism,” a good primer written by ZNet’s Michael Albert. Find it on the web at: http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/jan2000albert.htm. ZNet also has a more general “Global Economics Crisis site,” well worth a look.

A Mini-Lesson In Information Gathering in 2003

Last week I mentioned that one of the criteria for receiving aid under the Bush Millennium Challenge Accounts is “COUNTRY CREDIT RATING,” as defined by a group called “Institutional Investor Magazine (IIM).” I said a few things about this criterion, but there is a small and poignant story behind what I did not say.

I wanted to know exactly how Institutional Investor goes about their business. The Bush administration specifically chose them as the source for evaluating recipients of U.S. aid, so I thought that getting a better understanding of their process might help us to understand a little better how the Bush administration thinks.

First stop: The Internet. I quickly found IIM, but it turns out that they don’t publish their country credit ratings on the web. You can get access to them only if you subscribe to IIM, which costs $399 per year. Not in my budget. So, off to the library I went, as I so often do.

I tried to get at IIM through the University of Minnesota’s library system, since they have helped me out many times in the past, having access to resources that I could never afford. It didn’t seem to work with the regular reference librarians, so I consulted with the business reference desk. They said that, due to budget cuts, they are increasingly unable to subscribe to these sorts of resources. They thought they used to get the IIM information. They were very apologetic.

Option three would be to have a friend who works at a high level in a bank or investment firm that does business in the international markets. They would likely have access to IIM. Unfortunately, I do not seem to have friends in such places. The end result is that I don’t know what it is about the Institutional Investor Magazine that the Bush administration finds appealing. So, that’s what you did not read about in these pages last week, and why.

It’s just a little story. But I could tell more stories (and I probably will at some point) about the various ways that formerly-accessible public information is being transformed into a commodity that must be purchased. The result is that it’s a little bit harder—sometimes a lot harder—for independent, low-income journalists to find out what is going on with the people and institutions that shape our lives.

Foreign Aid Series, Final Part: Aid As Obstacle

It is understandable that people of good will believe that the wealthy nations—and the U.S. is by far the wealthiest—should give more “aid” than they do to the world’s poor nations. This might make sense, too, if the aid were given in a way that would help those nations emerge from poverty.

But, as I have been endeavoring to show over the past three weeks, U.S. aid has not helped to address global inequality and poverty. And that’s so because it was never intended to do so. U.S. foreign aid has always been used to enhance the “interests” of the United States. And the “interests” of the United States are to preserve U.S. power and wealth, which necessarily involves preserving the gross power inequality that prevents poor people from taking the actions needed to alleviate their poverty. By serving our own interests in this way, U.S. aid has been worse than ineffective; aid has truly been an obstacle to human development in much of the world.

Let me quote here from Frances Moore Lappé, Joseph Collins, and David Kinley, in their book “Aid As Obstacle:”

“To ally themselves with the interests of the poor, [U.S. foreign aid agencies] would have to support those groups throughout the world that are confronting the issue of power—the issue of control over resources. To do so would pit these agencies against the interests of the elites dominating most governments in the world today. To do so would go headlong against the formidable lobbyists of multinational corporations. To do so would be to risk supporting democratic economic alternatives abroad that might lead more Americans to question how unjust their own economic system has become. Obviously, no U.S. government agency is about to do so. This is why we conclude that agencies of the U.S. government are incapable of arriving at a correct diagnosis of the root causes of hunger—a diagnosis that puts control over resources in the central position.”

Those words were written 20 years ago but, sure enough, when Mr. Bush announced the Millennium Challenge Accounts initiative in his speech of March 14, 2002, he once again mis-diagnosed the cause of global poverty as insufficient economic “growth” and not enough “private enterprise.” He said (as usual, forgive the tortured syntax; this is the actual transcript):

“I have an ambitious goal for the developed world, that we ought to double the size of the world's poorest economies within a decade. [The audience applauded here.] I know some may say that's too high a hurdle to cross—I don't believe so, not with the right reforms and the right policy. This will require tripling of current growth rates, but that's not unprecedented.”

To this end, the “President” said, “All the development banks should adopt a growth agenda, increasing their support for private sector enterprises.”

“The Wrong Kind of Growth”

In stark contrast to Mr. Bush’s prescription, here’s a quotation from a paper by “InterAction,” the American Council for Voluntary International Action, which echoes the point made by Lappé, Collins, and Kinley: “The wrong kind of growth can exacerbate inequality and leave poverty rates untouched or even worsened.”

An example used by the “President” inadvertently underlines this point. In his March 14 speech Bush praised the nation of Bangladesh. He said that this “nation that was once a symbol of famine, has transformed its agricultural economy; rice production is almost up by 70 percent since the mid-'70s.”

It’s true that Bangladesh now produces more rice than it needs, but the “President” was citing that country as an example of a successful effort to “lift people out of poverty,” and that doesn’t follow.Mr. Bush’s own State Department, in their country profile of Bangladesh, says it plainly: “the country [Bangladesh] is largely self-sufficient in rice production. Nonetheless, an estimated 10% to 15% of the population faces serious nutritional risk.”

The U.N. points out that almost half of Bangladesh’s rural residents are landless, and more than half of those landless people live in “extreme poverty.” According to the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a widely-recognized ranking of the relative well-being of nations, Bangladesh was the 145th-poorest nation in the world in 2002 (out of 173 countries considered). That’s pretty sad, and it’s up only 4 rankings since 1975, the period cited by Mr. Bush. This is one of the countries that he cites as a “success” story. What it is, is an example of growth without justice—the wrong kind of growth.

The point I have been making in the past three weeks is that the privatized and top-down formula for “growth” that is proposed by the Bush administration is always the “wrong kind of growth.” It is calculated to preserve existing power relationships, indeed to increase the power of global elites and U.S.-based multinationals. In this sense, U.S. aid is truly an obstacle to development of the world’s poor nations.

What to Do?

So, if aid is bad, do I recommend that we simply “cut them off,” leaving poor nations to fend for themselves? No, I do not. What I recommend is that we target our aid to those countries where there is already underway a restructuring of decision-making power. I want my country, in other words, to support the efforts of poor people to make revolutionary change. Given that the history of our country is one of actively subverting or attacking revolutionary movements around the world, this is a tall order. In fact, it sounds kind of absurd, and I know it.

That’s why, for activists and all of us who are concerned about hunger and poverty, our work is clear. We have to stop simply calling for more foreign aid. “More aid!” may sound good, but it has to be the right kind of aid, and it has to go to the right places. And those decisions about what kinds and what places are the right ones must be made by poor people themselves. The absence of their voices is the fundamental problem with Bush’s Millennium Challenge Accounts plan.

Until we succeed in making our country truly democratic and self-reliant—moving us away from empire and toward good global citizenship—we’ll continue to be incapable of playing a constructive role around the world, and we’ll continue to see more initiatives like the Millennium Challenge Accounts that take us a long way in the wrong direction.