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HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 10:28 am

Recently, I've had some discussions about foreign aid in Africa. Part of European austerity measures is to limit foreign aid to developing countries, especially in Africa. When it was discussed here, some political parties were in favour, choosing to spend the money on education and health care in our own country. Other parties, and this is where it gets interesting, said a lot of people might die because we didn't help them.

My view on the matter might be regarded as being slightly offensive, but it's an interesting concept. Why care? If they can't sustain themselves, provide in their own development and political stability, we are just helping them to perpetuate and upscale their misery. If we help a starving region, it's not starvation as a concept that ceases to exist. It's just the decline in population in those regions that's avoided. In fact, population in areas like the Horn of Africa might grow if we continue to provide them with foreign health care and nutritional aid, meaning the next famine will simply affect more people and take more food and health care to assuage.

Thomas Robert Malthus is hailed in some history textbooks as someone who properly explained what happened in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, when cheap wheat imports from the Baltic caused the population to grow beyond its previous natural limits. His theory could apply to Africa today - the land currently provides enough to sustain a set amount of people. Beyond that, they rely on foreign medical care and food. I think it’s a sign that there’s something structurally wrong in Africa, not ethically wrong in Europe, if a lot of people would die because one tiny European country ceased to provide food and health care to several African countries.

Feel free to share your opinion in this - I'm interested in your perspectives.



minervx
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16 May 2012, 10:46 am

Oh, yes I agree.

Starvation is incurable. If you give food aid to starving people in the world (and they don't have the means to consistently obtain food themselves), they will be healthy enough to reproduce more children, insofar as they get aid. And then there will be more mouths to feed.



Jacoby
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16 May 2012, 11:09 am

I disagree with the idea the premise Africa is sustaining more people than it's resources are capable of, it's more of an issue of most countries in Africa not being developed enough to take advantage of them.

I don't know how much the Netherlands gives to other countries in foreign aid but I'm guessing it isn't anywhere near the amount the US doles out every year. Apart from not being authorized in the constitution, I believe a lot of the aid we give to foreign countries ends up in hands of rich people in these countries. A good portion of our foreign aid is military aid as well, which is completely unacceptable. I think it is immoral to be sending our money overseas when we have such budget troubles here at home.



HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 11:35 am

Africa, in theory, could carry more people than it currently does. However, in order to do that, hundreds of millions of people would have to be relocated, resources would have to be more equally distributed amongst tribes and, ideally, there would be no different ethnic groups, as a lot of them are constantly waging war against one another, wars that certainly aren't avoided by increasing their population through feeding them while they're not producing food and allowing them to migrate across Africa. After all, a lot of past famines in Africa were the result of starving groups migrating across the continent millions at a time, making temporary aid less effective even in the short term.

And indeed, although saying it would be considered racist here, African governments aren't capable of taking care of their own natural resources. Previously, there were the Europeans taking over, exporting resources and importing finished products while keeping the population under control. When these countries became independent, they were given a lot of money and material aid, but the new rulers were utterly incapable of making the right decisions, and were ousted or murdered continuously, with the occasional civil war or genocide as a side show. Now we have Asian countries moving in and taking resources in exchange for products and monetary aid.



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16 May 2012, 12:16 pm

This issue comes up in the UK. We apparently give a lot of aid to India, who have their own space program and a growing economy. The politicians say it is all part of diplomacy. A lot of foriegn aid workers claim the money does not go to the people who need it either.

I think we should cut back on foreign aid until our economy is growing again.



ruveyn
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16 May 2012, 12:51 pm

Robdemanc wrote:
This issue comes up in the UK. We apparently give a lot of aid to India, who have their own space program and a growing economy. The politicians say it is all part of diplomacy. A lot of foriegn aid workers claim the money does not go to the people who need it either.

I think we should cut back on foreign aid until our economy is growing again.


Why have foreign "aid". What is the matter with investment? That makes economic sense.

ruveyn



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16 May 2012, 3:05 pm

I used to be very pro-forein aid. Then I debated this issue with my husband a while back (I was suspecting him to be the OP under a screen name I don't know, but probably not). Then I realized that in the long run, it costs more lives to violence and perpetuating poverty if we keep giving food to the hungry rather t han investing in their education, etc. I am not anti-aid per se, but pepetual food programs are indeed not very helpful.



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16 May 2012, 3:25 pm

HisDivineMajesty wrote:
Recently, I've had some discussions about foreign aid in Africa. Part of European austerity measures is to limit foreign aid to developing countries, especially in Africa. When it was discussed here, some political parties were in favour, choosing to spend the money on education and health care in our own country. Other parties, and this is where it gets interesting, said a lot of people might die because we didn't help them.

My view on the matter might be regarded as being slightly offensive, but it's an interesting concept. Why care? If they can't sustain themselves, provide in their own development and political stability, we are just helping them to perpetuate and upscale their misery. If we help a starving region, it's not starvation as a concept that ceases to exist. It's just the decline in population in those regions that's avoided. In fact, population in areas like the Horn of Africa might grow if we continue to provide them with foreign health care and nutritional aid, meaning the next famine will simply affect more people and take more food and health care to assuage.

Thomas Robert Malthus is hailed in some history textbooks as someone who properly explained what happened in the Netherlands in the sixteenth century, when cheap wheat imports from the Baltic caused the population to grow beyond its previous natural limits. His theory could apply to Africa today - the land currently provides enough to sustain a set amount of people. Beyond that, they rely on foreign medical care and food. I think it’s a sign that there’s something structurally wrong in Africa, not ethically wrong in Europe, if a lot of people would die because one tiny European country ceased to provide food and health care to several African countries.

Feel free to share your opinion in this - I'm interested in your perspectives.


I think foreign aid is stupid, but at the same time I reject Malthus.

Yes, rapid population growth can be 'bad', but not if capital production (which is increased by savings) is adequate enough.

But I have to admit that third world countries don't usually have a lot of capital production, as they tend to be labour-intensive (so-called 'cheap labour').



HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 4:14 pm

The problem with Africa is that it doesn't have the means to sustain such a population at this time. If the rest of the world withdrew medical help and food aid, and stopped subsidies to African governments, tens of millions would probably die in the first years and there would be very few countries able to stay afloat without civil wars or coups. After Gaddafi's regime fell, the new Libyan regime stopped his programme of aid for West Africa, and sent a lot of people - some of them armed - back to Mali and surrounding countries. A few months on they've had a coup there, and some of Africa's oldest architecture is being vandalised by militias. If that is what happens even with western foreign aid remaining in place in that region, imagine what would happen if they'd abandon all clinics run by western organisations and stopped subsidies to keep governments in power.

And that could be explained by 'colonial scars', as a lot of people would have us believe, but it might actually be caused simply by internal incompetent governments and a population growing to a point where it would stop growing normally, but continues to grow as long as there are foreign means to sustain it. Even outside of Africa, foreign aid and internal incompetence have caused a lot of trouble. In 1975, Suriname became independent after it had been a Dutch colony. Because of 'colonial guilt', the Dutch government gave Suriname a lot of foreign aid. It took them five years before a third of the country had fled and they'd had a coup followed by some prominent politically-motivated murders.

The best option, I think, is still to just withdraw from foreign aid altogether. Governments in Africa have always counted on a lot of money pouring in from guilt-tripped Europeans, and have always known that they could get away with almost any way of spending it. Some landlocked African countries even have a navy to fight battles on rivers and lakes, because aid organisations will feed, shelter and take care of their population's urgent medical needs for them. Realistically, this can't continue forever, and it's a dangerous, ever-expanding scheme that will eventually implode. It might simply be better to just let the starving starve and the sick die in regions where food production and facilities aren't adequate, as feeding them would only upscale the problem and procrastinate the inevitable breakdown.

ChangelingGirl wrote:
I debated this issue with my husband a while back (I was suspecting him to be the OP under a screen name I don't know, but probably not)


Don't worry - I'm not your husband. I'm not anyone's husband. My avatar is a photo of me, and the chance I look even vaguely like your husband is close to zero. :P



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16 May 2012, 5:09 pm

I bet most foreign aid goes towards other country's military spending.


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HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 5:18 pm

snapcap wrote:
I bet most foreign aid goes towards other country's military spending.


Bilateral aid, of course, is paid to governments. These governments are usually in a lot of debt because of their incompetence, so a lot of it goes to paying off debts. The rest is, indeed, spent on security. Sometimes it backfires, and the military stages a coup. Meanwhile, the population is still growing due to there being enough food and medical care because of the other type of foreign aid, which is provided by organisations called 'development partners' and consists mainly of clinics, distribution of food and water and education. This, again, makes me wonder why we don't cut foreign aid. It would force those governments to be more realistic.



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16 May 2012, 5:20 pm

I can't help but feel that you are looking at this entire thing from only the European perspective.

A well informed person would be reading and researching each side of the story (both the African perspective and the European in equal amounts), then going after data and statistics, keeping in mind their biases and then making an informed decision.


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HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 5:54 pm

I've yet to find the African perspective anywhere, which is why I've started this thread. However, I've read excerpts from foreign aid manifestos and organisations, and it's usually the same old story, only with a doubling amount of people they want to help every few years. I still fail to see why these people insist on breeding rapidly and continuing to live in regions deemed too arid for most crops. In a very pessimistic lifespan of 40 years, there have been eighteen major famines in Africa, mainly caused by natural disasters and poor governance. In the case of drought, they know it happens every few years, yet they don't build reserves, don't build irrigation systems and call for aid every time because they really don't have enough food to feed their expanding population for three months in a drought. Poor governance is straightforward in those cases.

As for souces, I found this rather disturbing article as a citation on Wikipedia. If even some of this is true, half of Africa should die unless a miracle solution is found in order to structurally fix it.
http://news.mongabay.com/2006/1214-unu.html

As it says, they're fixing the symptoms, not the illness itself, which is mainly that large parts of Africa are just awful in terms of soil and can't produce a lot of food under current conditions, yet we're sending emergency aid every few years so the population doesn't naturally decline to a structurally viable level.



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16 May 2012, 6:01 pm

It doesnt work that way.

Most foriegn aid is not emergency aid for famines. It steady ecomic aid.

Cutting off foriegn aid might cost some lives -enough to make it tragic. But not so many lives that it stops population growth.
Foriegn aid doesnt have the effect of staving off Thomas Malthus.

And the amount of foriegn aid rich countries give africa has little to do with the quantity of suffering going on in africa. It correlates with how much the rich countries are in fear of enemies and other geopolitcal power playing.

Foriegn aid dropped to a trickle when the cold war ended and we didnt have to compete with the Soviet Union for friends and allies. And it went up again after 9-11 when we needed to win friends and influence people in the third world to wage the global war on terrorism.

Poor countries have higher population growth rates than rich countries.

But african countries have high growth rates even by third world standards.

Foriegn aid doesnt cause Nigeria to have a four percent per year population growth. And withholding aid is not going to do much to reduce that rate.

There other local demigraphic factors that have to be dealt with.



HisDivineMajesty
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16 May 2012, 6:12 pm

I'm sure there are other factors that affect population growth. However, aid either buys food or treats other symptoms so there's more room in their household budgets for food. The theory Malthus devised is one I find relevant because the continent, apparently, does not produce enough food to feed even three quarters of its population, a figure apparently expected to be down to 25% by 2025. If we cancel food aid and economic aid, they'll have to rely on their own production and comparative advantages to either produce or buy enough food or simply have their population starve to a point where the situation is durable.



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16 May 2012, 7:12 pm

Most of the foreign aid ends up in the hands of corrupt politicians. People like Hosni Mubarack (who became a multi-billionaire) and Mobutu Sese Seko (who was one of the world's richest men). You're basically robbing poor people in your own country to give the money to a handful of extremely rich dictators. You really shouldn't bother.

If the people are starving now, they aren't going to starve any more by giving less money to their dictators.