[blackhawkC17]

Because it’s true. Aid makes governments less accountable to their people and more accountable to donors.

It has made many countries refuse to create robust healthcare/education/military (etc.) systems with local resources and instead depend on foreign resources that can be zapped away anytime and are often used to control local leaders to do the donor’s bidding.

Many locals in aid-dependent countries (including mine) say the same thing, yet it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid.

All the aid to Haiti, Afghanistan, and many other countries…their only achievement is now needing even more aid.

Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term..

[rob74]

If you're mentioning Haiti, it's only fair to add that they were saddled with a crippling debt to France (later to the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt) from the very beginning of their existence, and many of their current problems can be traced back to that. It's important to see both sides, especially now that it's clear how corrosive this narrative is if you're looking at Musk's attitude toward USAID...

[blackhawkC17]

We’re likely in agreement. What Haiti needs is investment in domestic industries to be competitive in a capitalist world.

These investments can be provided by foreigners, but it’s ultimately the locals that need to rise up to the occasion and use it well. Unfortunately, Haiti is rooted in endemic corruption, stemming in part from aid dependency.

There’s no point of giving aid to Haiti while maintaining the status quo of the country being a little more than a raw material supplier to richer countries.

My exact complaint is that many countries give aid to feel good…and also for the recipient to do the donor’s bidding instead of what’s right for their countrymen.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If Haitian leaders remain more accountable to foreign donors than their local population, there’s no incentive to improve.

[soco]

I cannot imagine a way out of this, the way you put it. Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death. Giving some aid today means feeding the masses and maintaining the corruption. The foreign donors cannot condition the aid, or they theoretically could but have zero leverage for actually following up, because see above - they could only stop it, which nobody wants. I'm aware that it's common to blame the foreign forces for any bad situation, but again, I see zero ways to change the status quo just by modulating the foreign aid. Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?

[nickd2001]

This is one of the aims behind Fair Trade. Its giving a fair price to local producers for products, which means you can help people without running into issues of perverse incentives, dependency, lack of self-determination. That's the theory at least... For items not easily produced in the west e:g tea, coffee, chocolate, bananas, we try wherever possible to buy Fair Trade.

[blackhawkC17]

> Not giving any aid today means condemning masses to death.

It’s not the responsibility of foreigners to feed other countries’ populations. Those countries have governments made up of adults (often voted in by the masses) who can take decisions for themselves…it’s their fault if their citizens are left to starve, not foreigners.

> Or you mean the Haitian leaders are paid exactly to keep the population half-starving?

It’s not intentional, but that’s what inadvertently happens. There’s little incentive to find unique domestic solutions to long-running issues when foreign saviors are willing to cover for the Haitian government repeatedly.

At some point, we should admit that it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals.

The above reasoning is what caused the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on wars and so-called nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq, all to no avail.

It helped neither the locals nor the U.S., where these wars have contributed to political turbulence with dire consequences.

[nickd2001]

"it’s arrogant for foreigners thinking they’re responsible for another country’s problems and should be the ones solving them, not the locals." - I agree with that but, to me that isn't an argument against providing targeted, life-saving aid to those in a terrible situation, whilst try to be mindful that the locals should be listened to and often in charge of it, and that aid can have negative effects if done badly. To give an example, I'm sure no-one in a disaster zone worries about arrogance when they see a doctor arrive from Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). But hopefully MSF once they've dealt with the initial problem, are trying to help locals train up in medical techniques that they themselves want and work in the local environment. From what I've seen, I believe they do just that.. probably not always perfectly.

[goodpoint]

> it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid

"do-good"? No, you are confusing legitimate aid with "the first one's free". The fake aid is often designed to create dependency and send large part of the money back to the donors.

[abeppu]

I think maybe there's an important different ethical and practical situation with genuinely foreign aid (rich countries sending resources to poor countries which have their own government, systems, regulations etc) vs a colonizing power that's effectively already in control of the area in which they helped form the crisis. The British were exporting food from Ireland and India in both of those crises. British land speculators bought Irish land and raised the rents and evicted farmers -- i.e. people already engaged in producing food were forced to stop.

So foreign aid may make governments less accountable to their people. But colonial governments don't start off being accountable to their people. The "aid" that the British ruling class said would create dependence can only be understood in the context of the intense extractive practices that were already in place.

> Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term.

... but because Ireland was still exporting food to Britain, "aid" in the form of keeping Irish food to feed Irish people would clearly still have supported local agriculture. Not evicting farmers would have supported local agriculture. This is structurally different from shipping American grain to Afghanistan.

[blackhawkC17]

True, I was referring to the modern context of aid, not colonial times with extractive economies.

I don’t think it’s fair to apply the modern concept of aid to previous eras of colonialism, wars, and frequent famines. It was a different ballgame I feel I wouldn’t be qualified to comment on except I experienced it first-hand.