Dear Friends:
A few weeks ago I wrote asking for bibliographical help on the question of
the relationship between "humanitarian" aid to poor peoples around the
world the changes in the world economy that tended to impoverish people.
I received many responses for which I am very grateful. I thought it
might be useful to share with you some of what I learned.
I focused mostly on only the latest material--I felt I had to be
defend myself against the response that my sources were "old hat," that
things had changed. Of recent stuff, here is what I found.
The Case against the Global Economy, edited by Jerry Mander and Edward
Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Books, 1996) contains a brief piece by
Karen Lehman and Al Krebs, "Control of the World's Food Supply," that
summarizes how food conglomerates have come to control much of the world's
food, particularly grain, supply, eliminating small farmers everywhere.
But there is nothing here about food aid.
NGOs, States and Donors, edited by David Hulme and Michael Edwards
contains an interesting essay by Jehan Perera, "In Unequal Dialogue with
Donors: the Experience of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement [Sri Lanka]."
In this case the inequalites of power and resources added to the
command-style of the donor organizations (including UNICEF and OXFAM). In
summarizing (s)he writes, "What started off as a partnership based on
dialogue had, by the mid-1990s, become a subcontractorship based on
commands and sanctions." So the relationship was terminated.
Far and away the most useful book for my interests was Michael Maren's The
Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International
Charity (New York: The Free press, 1997). Maren started as a Peace Corps
volunteer in Kenya in the late 1970s, then worked for Catholic Relief
Services there; he then went to work in Somalia for USAID. Later he
became a reporter (writing for the Village Voice, Penthouse, Forbes Media
Critic, and The New Republic) covering Somalia, the case that this book
focuses on. The book is very powerful. The UN and CARE act very
destructively. The aid business is exposed as a *business* where the
suffering of children is helpful to getting contributions that enable the
aid organizations to sustain themselves and grow.
The most consistent political theme is to undermine the idea of neutral
humanitarian aid. "Food was power, and so long as the food came in, the
battle to control it would continue." (p. 14) He shows how there are
political conflicts wherever food is sent, so all aid is bound to be
political; it will be used by one group or another to advance its
political program and interests. The aid that came to Somalia after 1977
contributed to the famine of 1992 as it aided the building of the various
factions and their armed forces: since no one had to produce food (food
aid ensured that there was to be nothing to be gained by food production),
the aid became an instrument by which faction leaders maintained the
allegiance of their armed followers and, by selling food and buying
weapons, kept them well armed. Related to this, Maren shows how the civil
conflicts into which food aid often comes then provide occasion for the
imperialists, often under UN umbrella, to bring in their own
"peacekeeping" forces. So "peacekeeping" becomes another name for the
imperialists' bombing and killing of peoples in Africa and elsewhere.
(Maren does not put it in these words--he is a firm believer in
free-market capitalism, but on a local or national level.)
One of the most powerful parts of the book is his detailing (pp. 167-70)
how the dumping of free or cheap grain destroyed local agriculture and
turned the agricultural economy toward the production of export crops,
particularly bananas. He writes, "The West's surplus grains were
subsidizing the production of bananas and other crops that did not compete
with western agricultural interests." He also describes some of the
history of the U.S.'s use of agricultural surpluses to further the foreign
policy aims of the U.S. gov't (as in Lappe and Collins' Food First). So
we have a powerful and up-to-date indictment of how food aid is used to
turn a population that had been self-sufficient in food into wage slaves
for the international food economy. This directly supports some of the
points of Chossudovsky's The Globalisation of Poverty.
But what about the aid organizations with the best reputations, UNICEF and
OXFAM? There is nothing here that is damaging to UNICEF. About OXFAM he
has the following paragraph:"At night the expats would gather and drink
whiskey and smoke cigarattes. The conversation was monotonously the same.
Talk was about the refugees, the stolen food, the corrupt camp commanders,
and the idiotic projects. Oxfam was teaching refugees to grow onions and
cabbages and peppers in the refugee camp. The two Oxfam agriculturists
discussed their dilemma nightly: The idea behind their project was to make
the refugees more self-sufficient. But if the refugees were going to
return to their nomadic way of life, these skills wouldn't be very useful.
And if they were going to settle down and become farmers, they's need to
know a lot more about agriculture than how to grow just a few cash crops.
And there was very little incentive for them to learn. They could eat
fine on their rations and sell the surplus for whatever pocket change they
needed. The Oxfam team drank their whisky every night and wondered aloud
why they were doing what they were doing every day." (p. 98)
Maren's discussion here is interesting, but raises a number of questions:
were the foods mentioned here being raised for local markets or for export
to Europe? how did Oxfam workers arrive at decisions as to what to teach
people to grow? what relationship, if any, is there between Oxfam and the
U.S. or British governments and the food conglomerates? These are the
issues that would allow us to decide how much planning goes into a
situation where food production for local use is being undermined all over
the world by the dumping of surplus grains while production for export to
North America and Europe is being encouraged.
If any of you have comments or any further bibliographical help, let me
know. I am aware of how little I know about these things.
Paul Gomberg
HPPS
Chicago State University