The human aid handcuff

Why your food donation is keeping people hungry in the long run

When I think of international aid or charity organizations, I consider their work among the purest forms of good. With many donors and volunteers going unrecognized and having no personal connections to the people they’re helping, their efforts are a complete manifestation of their human empathy. They are an untainted force of sincerity and generosity against the corruption and greed of our world.

Or so I used to think.

I want to introduce an alternate possibility: that world aid organizations are, in reality, causing the countries and citizens they’re helping to become dependent on the resources they provide. This pipeline of aid is hindering their development and causing increased socioeconomic volatility and destitution in the long run. Whether done intentionally or unintentionally depends on the organization, and while this idea may not apply to every situation (such as humanitarian relief for drought and disasters), it has historically been true for most.

The Food for Peace program, run by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 1954 to today, is a prime example. The program entailed exporting food from U.S. domestic surplus to developing countries, which were given loans to pay for the commodities. These countries were essentially given really cheap food from America to help sustain their people, and in return, the U.S. was able to continue subsidizing its farmers. Although the premise seems generous and the program was marketed as humanitarian, the effects were disastrous.

The program completely undermined local food production, forcing farmers in Mexico, Liberia and other areas of Sub-Saharan Africa to try to match prices that were too cheap for them to compete with. Countries such as these — which were once in the process of agricultural development and economic growth via exporting crops — became net importers of food and grew dependent on the U.S., no longer able to support themselves in the long run.

In fact, the U.S. Food for Peace program can help explain much of the context of underdevelopment and mass emigration from Mexico today. Mexico was essentially forced to both take in U.S. surplus and find something new to contribute to the market. Since local farmers couldn’t sell their crops anymore, all they could offer was cheap labor. In his book “Animal, Vegetable, Junk,” Mark Bittman described that “two million farmers were put out of work, unemployment rose, emigration soared, and income stagnated.” U.S. “aid” led to the destruction of an entire nation's livelihood and undermined development that would’ve supported generations to come.

This is not a special case, either — aid has proved destructive in countries like Guatemala, Pakistan, India, Jamaica and more. The only country left standing to benefit has been the U.S. itself — by compelling a plethora of other nations to grow dependent on its aid, the U.S. has taken control of their governments by causing them to become reliant on American aid, and has ensured its geopolitical stability in the world.

But the undermining of development in financially scarce countries isn’t just restricted to this one U.S. food aid program — it goes far beyond that. Development occurs when a society is forced to find a way to fulfill the growing needs of its people, and in doing so, it will start to cultivate the foundations required for its future prosperity. If international organizations provide a constant pipeline of human aid, sending in teachers, food, clothing, doctors, etc. — then society will not respond to its own needs from within. It will not develop the social infrastructure necessary to allow it to handle crises, the educational institutions necessary to produce its own intelligentsia, the manufacturing facilities to sell its own products nor the innovative food and water systems to sustain its people. Instead of communities coming together in their own local organizations and governments to provide for their people, these organizations come in from the outside — and the opportunity to build a more cohesive, unified society is lost.

The impact of this loss of unity shouldn’t be underestimated. There is less commitment and loyalty to improving the condition of a community if members rely on outsiders to improve it for them. Local people often don’t have a voice in the aid organizations helping them, which can lead to a defeatist mentality; people may start to believe that they are unable to help themselves and that they must rely on the aid of outsiders, which is simply not the case.

If aid organizations truly want to support developing countries, they need to drastically alter their approach. Through offering more technical advice, funding social infrastructure and projects, incentivizing domestic production and working subordinately to local communities and organizations, they can actually contribute to the betterment of these societies in the long run. It may even be best to heavily reduce or eliminate their role altogether — although this would have to be done cautiously, so as to avoid a total shock to dependent nations. In the end, one thing is clear: It is time for developing countries to be unleashed from the human aid handcuff.

Written by: Saniya Syed — sansyed@ucdavis.edu

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