International Aid, Produces Dependency and Continuous Poverty, By James Reed

Alex Berenson has given a sensible refutation of the international aid ideology. At present the US Left are manic about the closing down of USAID, which has been a money tap for the Democrats and Leftist organisations. But the public expression has been that the poor Third World will perish without billions being tossed their way. Berenson makes the point that aid develops dependency because it is usually, but not always, in the form of giving men fish, rather than teaching them how to fish, to use the old metaphor. Even in the case of food relief, this remains a problem:

"Even the most basic and seemingly necessary aid, famine relief, regularly worsens the hunger it is meant to solve, because armed groups in the famine regions will hijack aid convoys or charge aid groups for the right to the deliver aid. Hunger itself becomes a resource when Western groups are willing to pour in money to solve it.

This concern is not theoretical.

In a 2010 New Yorker article about the 1968-1970 famine in Biafra, a secessionist province of Nigeria — a famine that essentially began the modern Western aid industry — Philip Gourevich explained that

Had it not been for the West's charity, the Nigerian civil war surely would have ended much sooner. Against the lives that the airlifted aid saved must be weighed all those lives—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands—that were lost to the extra year and a half of destruction. But the newborn humanitarian international hardly stopped to reflect on this fact.

And even when famine isn't the issue, and genocidal or psychopathic leaders who are willing to starve their own populations aren't in charge, aid is fundamentally undemocratic."

The potential for corruption is ever present. Simply consider the billions of dollars of military aid to the Ukraine, which has disappeared, probably into the pockets of the corrupt leaders, with arms being sold on the black market.

China was once in the foreign aid, dependency nexus, but wisely broke free:

"As hard as it is to believe now, the People's Republic was once one of the world's poorest countries and received substantial aid. By the mid-1990s it received about $3.5 billion in official foreign aid annually (though compared to other poor countries, that figure was still relatively small compared to its population of over 1 billion).

But following the spring 1989 student uprising that culminated in the massacres in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government decided to pursue a strategy of hyper-aggressive export-led economic development. It stopped worrying about aid, which quickly dried up. Instead, it chased foreign investment and its own growth - with incredible success.

In a little more than a generation, China went from African levels of poverty to the world's second-largest economy, with a per-capita income of almost $15,000 annually, comparable to countries such as Mexico or Turkey. Meanwhile, African nations that stayed focused on aid lagged behind. As an aid expert who had worked in China wrote in 2022, "Aid is only effective when the right policy framework is in place based on a national readiness to learn, adapt and change."

In short, foreign aid will aid countries who do not need it, and those who might, are damaged by it in the long term. The only way for true development is by the nation exerting the will to survive itself.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-best-reason-to-hate-international