Food Aid
Here's a question for you ... Do you think we're actually helping people at the brink of famine by sending them emergency aid? If you really think about it, it starts to get downright confusing. We can't help trying to be heroes -- or at least, give ourselves that pat on the back for doing a good deed -- especially if it was just easy to pull off. But when it comes to real heroic efforts, do we just cave at the required effort? Again, the answer you might get when you really think about it, might surprise you.
In the short term, yes, we make a difference. There are starving mouths that needs feeding. Children, the elderly and the sick and poor. Without food they are the first to die off. In the long term, they need to live to sustain a society. Yes, saving lives is good in the short term too -- and that's why we do it. We need to keep doing it. But we also need to do the real heroic stuff. Sending food is easy. Making sure that in the long term, we don't need to keep sending food -- that's the challenge. We need to be able to provide help for countries on the brink to recover, and sustain an independence in provisioning the basics to their population. A country can be poor, but can also be self-sustaining. We don't tackle these challenges however.
Why?
Our attention span for one. We move from one disaster to another, pulling people back just in the nick of time, then move on. We're also not motivated economically to help anyone but ourselves in the short term. The only thing that causes us to swoop in when there is a disaster, is the few humanitarians amongst us that just won't shut up -- and perhaps a little guilt we feel from time to time. We don't think long term, because if we did, we'd realize that giving people help so they can sustain themselves in the long term is actually good for us economically. Put simply: if they could feed themselves, we could stop sending food for free to them; if they could feed themselves, they'd be more productive; if they were more productive, maybe they'd generate some meager income; and if they had money, we could sell them stuff they don't really want. The great circle of capitalist life! Hooray to globalization! It would be nice if we could also stop them from being distracted with the need to keep killing themselves so they wouldn't screw with the great capitalist plan.
Unfortunately, we appear to be too dumb to grasp that giving them the means to sustain themselves will eventually open their wallets to us. It would seem to me that that would be a great motivator to base tenet that really drives us: greed. It seems however that greed is also a double edge sword. Short term greed. Ever wonder about the amount of money tied up in delivering the food to those on the brink of famine? It takes a lot of money to get aid to where it is needed each year. So why would those with a vested interest in making money delivering short term fixes want to see sustaining happen?
Related reading:
In the short term, yes, we make a difference. There are starving mouths that needs feeding. Children, the elderly and the sick and poor. Without food they are the first to die off. In the long term, they need to live to sustain a society. Yes, saving lives is good in the short term too -- and that's why we do it. We need to keep doing it. But we also need to do the real heroic stuff. Sending food is easy. Making sure that in the long term, we don't need to keep sending food -- that's the challenge. We need to be able to provide help for countries on the brink to recover, and sustain an independence in provisioning the basics to their population. A country can be poor, but can also be self-sustaining. We don't tackle these challenges however.
Why?
Our attention span for one. We move from one disaster to another, pulling people back just in the nick of time, then move on. We're also not motivated economically to help anyone but ourselves in the short term. The only thing that causes us to swoop in when there is a disaster, is the few humanitarians amongst us that just won't shut up -- and perhaps a little guilt we feel from time to time. We don't think long term, because if we did, we'd realize that giving people help so they can sustain themselves in the long term is actually good for us economically. Put simply: if they could feed themselves, we could stop sending food for free to them; if they could feed themselves, they'd be more productive; if they were more productive, maybe they'd generate some meager income; and if they had money, we could sell them stuff they don't really want. The great circle of capitalist life! Hooray to globalization! It would be nice if we could also stop them from being distracted with the need to keep killing themselves so they wouldn't screw with the great capitalist plan.
Unfortunately, we appear to be too dumb to grasp that giving them the means to sustain themselves will eventually open their wallets to us. It would seem to me that that would be a great motivator to base tenet that really drives us: greed. It seems however that greed is also a double edge sword. Short term greed. Ever wonder about the amount of money tied up in delivering the food to those on the brink of famine? It takes a lot of money to get aid to where it is needed each year. So why would those with a vested interest in making money delivering short term fixes want to see sustaining happen?
Related reading:
- Malawi food experts question emergency aid system - from Reuters.
- Dependency and humanitarian relief: a critical analysis - from the Humanitarian Policy Group.
- UN World Food Programme reports of Food Aid.
- Hunger and the Globalized System of Trade and Food Production - from the Global Policy Forum.
- US Food Aid: Time to Get it Right [PDF].
Unfortunately, corrupt governments usually eat up the aid literally and figuratively.
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