During the first classes of the minor we talked a lot about international aid and why countries provide it. In these classes it became very clear that a lot of international aid is not particularly necessary or wanted in a country. We talked about it in a way I never thought about it before. Of course I knew that aid can end up at the wrong people or can go to corrupt organizations/ governments. But aid can go wrong through a lot of other ways to like making countries way too dependent on it.
So why do countries provide foreign aid? The goal of aid is improve the standard of living for everyone. Necessary here for are things like food, housing, education, medical resources and employment. And achieving this by working together to provide support and resources that are necessary, to create a more equal world.
Therefore I was very disappointed to hear so many examples where it has gone wrong. In a lot of cases there had been not enough research about if the aid they were willing to provide was really necessary, and if it would even help them. For example the world bank loaned more than $10 million to Tanzania for cashew nut processing. The result of this was that in 1982 they had 11 factories that could do the processing, three times more what was necessary each year. This eventually resulted that some of the factories where only running at less than 20%, which helped making it cheaper to send the cashew nuts to India for processing.
And there are a lot of more of these examples where there had been not enough research if it would actually help or not. But there are cases where it is clear that aid is not working but nobody is doing anything about it because it would not benefit them.
During a lecture, a great example was given about how the United States gave rice to Ethiopia to help them have enough food. However, this ended up causing some serious problems. The rice given to them was a lot cheaper than the local rice in Ethiopia, so local farmers couldn't compete and lost their jobs. This didn't help Ethiopia at all. The disturbing fact is that for the United States, it is simply cheaper to buy rice from their own farmers than to stop giving it to Ethiopia. If the US doesn't buy this rice, some farmers in the US will go out of business, which will eventually be bad for the US.
So simply put, we all need to become more aware of the (possible) negative effects of International Aid. With better research and helping where it's needed, we can assist these countries to become less dependent and have a good standard way of living. And this is, of course, something that every person in the world deserves.
I agree with what you write here in your blog. It is shocking to hear what America's development assistance has brought about in Ethiopia. This is exactly what we should learn from, to provide more tailored development assistance in the future. And represents the interests of those who need it. A very interesting topic from which we can learn a lot.
Tjerk
I agree with what you say in this blog. I was also shocked when we heared that the U.S gives rice to developing countries what breaks down the local markt and without this the farmers of the U.S are in trouble. The most crazy thing is that our teacher said that everyone knows about this, but nobody does anything to change it. It is so weird that this bad system keeps existing, even when everyone (including big NGOs) knows that it is doing more harm than good. So saidly it seems that sometimes aid is not at all to help another country but it is for own benefit.