Is foreign aid the solution to global poverty?

Yes

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by Peter Eleazar

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A famous story was told of a wash up of thousands of starfish. A young boy was throwing as many as he could back into the sea. A man told him he was wasting his time, "how will that help, there are thousands of them?" But the boy just picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, saying: "helped that one".

Rejection of foreign aid is a gesture of helpless indifference that does little to help the sufferings in our present world, but the little that is done is like turning loaves and fishes into food for millions. Monroe was out of touch and unhelpful in saying, "you stay in your hemisphere and I'll stay in mine".

Had Monroe been around in the days of FD Roosevelt, he may well have been more worried about domestic issues. FDR intervened in the great depression to provide an economic uplift to millions of unemployed people. The cost in terms of US public debt is an ongoing legacy of the US economy. However, the US government recognized that without direct financial assistance, America was doomed to long term economic stagnation and other secondary crises. The intervention saved that generation, but the current generation was the long term beneficiary of the resultant prosperity.

The same post-depression generation then stood by with wrenched hands and folded arms pondering the darkness enveloping Europe, less than twenty years later. Already into an historic 3rd term of office, FDR pleaded with Americans to assist in the war effort, knowing that Nazism put the planet at risk. Lend-lease resolved congressional reservations and provided much needed capital support for the war effort, but he remained frustrated in his efforts to bring America to war, until Pearl harbor - the day that Churchill declared as the turning point in the war.

The reasons I bring these points up is because Americans are and have been beneficiaries of aid (even if it came from their own government) and secondly their reluctance to extend aid to a struggling world has historically reflected ignorance about how global affairs affect their own status quo.

My own country faces an immigration problem just as the US does. That immigration problem stems from economic problems across our respective borders and the promise of financial freedom in the land of plenty. Although our government has been rightly criticized for inadequately condemning the mismanagement of its neighbors, it rightly discerned that aggravation of the economic viability of those neighbors would put our economy at risk. The result is that, notwithstanding our non-intervention, the problem has escalated and their problem is now our problem, just as global economic woes impact rich nations through refugees, environmental problems, wars and the conversion of struggling nations into global dependents.

It is a reality that no nation can exist in isolation of the rest of the world. The global economy is an open one that requires the good faith of its diverse members to broaden participation through trade, trade practices, price equity and financial aid. The rich nations engage these debates for the very fact that they cannot avoid the consequences of global economic realities. When global societies stumble, their problems become everyone's problems.

It is of note that right now the US government is showing a fair degree of naivet for global dynamics, by reneging on the Kyoto protocols and resisting European initiatives for global debt relief. As the world faces new global crises, is the US once again on the fence, observing the issues from some smug distance until a crisis changes their collective consciousness and brings global issues home? As Al Gore observes, that crisis may be nearer than the Second World War was to an indifferent and ill-prepared Britain in those dark days not so long ago.

I concede that the nature of the prevailing debate is also about finding non-financial ways to help distressed nations.

Certainly, I am the first to deplore some of the excesses of African governments and I find it appalling that corrupt governments continue to mismanage their economies whilst lining their own pockets. Unfortunately, the US itself once struggled with the ethics of exploiting people for economic gain and fought a bitter war to resolve that crisis, because some recognized the consequences of human exploitation, whilst others saw its economic benefits. The turning points in such miserable human tragedy came when a crisis wrenched decision makers out of their indifference into an honest and integrous confrontation of reality, a reality that now touches the lives of billions of innocent victims of the very oppression that once divided America so violently.

I am no advocate of throwing good money after bad, but when we use that as a pretext to not help so we can spend more money on making billion dollar sports heroes and trillion dollar armies for a largely non-existent threat, then I have to conclude that the pretexts are nothing more than a cop out and an expedient way out of a global reality.

There are many indirect ways to stimulate marginal economies, but they all cost money. So if there is to be help it is going to cost. However, there are sustainable and not so sustainable solutions, but the sustainable solutions offer reciprocal benefits to investor nations. When the US government stimulates its own economy, does it not benefit through a broader tax base, stability, political gain and enhanced buying power? Well the same is true when intervention in the global economy broadens global markets for US products and reduces the dependent status of marginal economies.

This is our problem. The world is not limited to the green verge of central park. There is a bigger picture beyond our limited horizons and unless we collectively work to make the planet a viable home for its entire people, we will face a collective crisis.

A man asked what hell is. He was shown a room full of people sitting around a pot of fine smelling stew. But their spoons were so long that they could not feed themselves and so they remained in hell, hungry and unsatisfied. In another room a similar situation revealed a fat, healthy and happy group of people who had learnt to use their long spoons to feed each other, a picture of heaven. If, as Belinda Carlisle implies, Heaven is a place on earth (and I doubt it will ever be so), then the path to such Utopian thresholds is through the simple act of helping each other to survive in a harsh world. Those who preach condemnation of lesser worlds will always be eclipsed by the Samaritan who does extraordinary good.

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