Message-ID: <330382C2.5809@erols.com> Date: Thu, 13 Feb 1997 13:08:18 -0800 From: John Daly <mailto:dalyj@erols.com> Subject: Re: Nancy West's question To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU
Nancy West wrote: >
> I'd like to hear from all of you who are out there in the middle of
> what's going on--just what does that aid consist of and exactly who is
> getting it? I know that new knowledge is naive and that what is taught in
> the class room is not always the same as in the real world. This is my
> second time around in school. So, please enlighten me.
> ****
I don't know if I am in the middle of things, but here is my primer on development aid. I think what is going on is terribly complex.
Certainly the United States provides a smaller portion of its GDP for development assistance than any other developed nation. However, there appears to be a decrease in enthusiasm for development assistance in other developed countries. This trend is in spite of some great successes in development assistance. It may not be a specific reflection of the overall success or failure of development assistance at all. I would suggest that with the emphasis on private sector and the opening of international financial markets to developing countries, more of the action is going to be in the private sector and less in concessional aid. And the end of the cold war and the consequent fall of the predominant paradigm for foreign assistance, have created some political uncertainty about the purposes and instruments for foreign aid.
As to specifics: The increase in food production in Asia (that resulted from large investments in irrigation, accompanied by development of high yielding varieties of grain, and the increase of chemical inputs to agriculture) changed the debate on hunger from one in which people argued for triage (letting the "basket cases" suffer hunger alone while focusing aid on "those who could be saved"), to one in which people focus on how to ameliorate the problems of hunger in Africa. Aid was helpful in the increase in food production in Asia, but now there seems to be concern about the ability to continue to increase Asian food production to meet the future needs of a growing and increasingly affluent population. Clearly it has not yet been possible to achieve comparable increases of food production in Africa. Why not? Well, Africa depends on rain fed agriculture, and it has not been possible to make comparable investments in irrigation to those in Asia, nor has the technology been developed to improve crop productivity for rain fed crops comparable to that for irrigated crops. Policies have not provided farmers with incentives to improve productivity. Inputs have been less than in Asia. Whatever the reasons, in Africa per capita food production decreased over long periods in spite of foreign aid. (Would it have decreased even more without aid?) Generally people who have enough money to buy food don't go hungry even in Africa, and the problem of hunger today is in my view primarily a problem of poverty. But if you want to reduce poverty in Africa, you have to realize that most Africans depend on agriculture for their livelyhoods, and thus one must seek to improve agricultural productivity. It also cuts food costs to the consumer to grow it near that consumer.
In health, the great success story has been the erradication of smallpox which I think would not have happened without a large infusion of foreign aid, but the world effort to erradicate malaria in the 1950s and 60s failed. Why did it fail? Lack of political will? Donor fatigue? Lack of capacity to sustain complex organizational efforts for decades? Lack of scientific and technological understanding of the complexity of the problem? Evolution of drug resistant plasmodia and insecticide resistant mosquitos? Probably all of the above, and more. (The erradication effort failed in the sense that erradication was not achieved, and similar progress might perhaps have been made with fewer resources if the attempt had always been control. In any case, tens of millions of lives were saved.) While clearly life expectancy in the developing world has improved, equally clearly far too many people bear an unacceptable burden of disease. Foreign aid can claim some of the credit for improving health and some blame for not doing better. Similarly, while the ability of people to contol their own fertility in the world has improved greatly in the last half century, there are a whole lot of people out there who are going to have more kids than they want because of lack of access to contraceptives. And while Dave Pimentel's analysis of the carrying capacity of the earth may eventually prove innacurate, we are already converting a large part of photosynthesis on the earth to human purposes now, and the carrying capacity of the earth seems likely to be limited in the next century or two. Aid can be credited with successes and charged with not having succeeded better in population programs.
I find the discussion of environmental problems has suffered from lack of specifics. Different environmental problems are caused by different things. If one looks at global warming, it seems clear that the more fossil fuel you use, the more greenhouse gases you produce; the developed countries and especially the U.S. produce more than their share. If you look at tropical deforestation, certainly the tropical forests are mostly in poor countries and poverty and greed in those countries share in the blame. On the other hand, the demand for wood and for export agricultural products (which encourages clearing of land for farming) are predominantly from developed countries. I have been impressed in looking at the former Communist countries at the degree to which they allowed pollution to occur in places that threaten human health (e.g. Chernoble), and such problems are also endemic to developing countries. It is hard to argue against either the proposition that developed countries should do more to protect the environment, or the proposition that developing countries should do more. On the other hand, how do you get people to do so? By admitting your ignorance? Perhaps. But I don't condemn the folk who have done extapolations of current conditions to point out the problems we face if we don't change our ways. Foreign assistance has only taken environmental problems seriously in the last couple of decades. (I recall that a National Research Council proposal to study tropical deforestation in about 1970 was turned down because "deforestation wasn't a development problem"!) I think donor progress is being made in the sense of "above all do no harm", and to some degree in developing programs that help reduce or reverse environmental damage.
On another front, people in developing countries are moving to the cities in unprecidented numbers, and developing countries are giving birth to megacities which are unlike anything which existed in history. So developing countries are trying to create jobs for millions of urban workers, and there isn't much money per worker. As the developing countries succeed in creating industrial jobs, their exports enter US and European markets. Sure, the growing urban populations are also markets for developed country exports and create OECD jobs, but the folk who lose US factory jobs are not necessarily the ones who get jobs in software companies. And the managers and investors in the US factories are not necessarily compensated for their losses according to the gains of US high tech firms. I don't think foreign aid has really come to grips with the problems of urban growth in developing countries, nor adequately with the problems of creating jobs in micro, small and medium enterprises. I suspect part of the problem is lack of political will, but I suspect underlying the lack of will is lack of public understanding of urban problems and unemployment and the humanitarian benefits that foreign aid can deliver in these areas.
Its pretty easy to take potshots at democracies which have aid policies which are sometimes misguided and sometimes self serving, but the way to improve those aid policies is public advocacy and political action, and it is a long road. Surveys have suggested that a lot of people are willing to support foreign aid for eliminating hunger, child survival and other humanitarian purposes. In the policy process in a democracy, there are obviously also people focusing on foreign aid from the point of improving balance of payments, promoting security, protecting jobs, making money, etc. Blaming folk in corporations for promoting their own interests seems to me pretty futile (and developing countries are not without people advocating policies that meet their narrow interests at the expense of others). But, in every other developed country than the US the political process has resulted in a greater portion of the country's production going for aid. Perhaps those of us in the US who believe the 0.7 percent of GDP is not a bad target bear the fault in not working harder to make our views prevail.
------------------------------------ John A. Daly Consultant 14205 Bauer Dr. Rockville, MD 20853 mailto:dalyj@erols.com ------------------------------------