AID HARMS THE HUNGRY

Unlike the aid that underwrites military or political goals (in aid-speak, ” security assistance”), which must often pass into the hands of the caudillo and the kleptocrat, humanitarian aid is meant to relieve the distress of vulnerable and innocent populations directly. And unlike “development assistance,” which sometimes pours into the maw of a claimant government for decades without producing demonstrably beneficial results, relief operations are understood to be finite in duration and to do something of unquestionable value: namely, save lives. Thus, at a time when American citizens are exhibiting growing impatience, even disgust, with our nation’s foreign aid program as a whole, popular support for humanitarian aid remains unflagging and enthusiastic. So enthusiastic, in fact, that private groups raise billions of dollars each year for it through voluntary contributions from ordinary Americans.

Yet according to an angry new expose, the American public’s view is all wrong. The thesis is in the book’s title: The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity. Its author is Michael Maren, who arrived in Africa in 1977 and has spent the last decade and a half writing about the continent for such outlets as Africa Report and the Nation. Once stationed at the Samalia mission of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Maren has seen humanitarian aid up close. He is appalled and infuriated by what he has witnessed.

“Like most people in the United States and Western Europe,” Maren writes, ” I’ve heard the pleas of aid organizations and boasts of their accomplishments in the Third World, but the Africa I know today is in much worse shape than it was when I first arrived.” Sad experience, he recounts, has “made me see that aid could be worse than incompetent and inadvertently destructive. It could be positively evil.” Part reportage, part memoir, The Road to Hell takes the reader on a meandering journey from Westport, Connecticut (headquarters of the large private charity Save the Children) and Geneva (site of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) to feeding programs in Samalia and refugee camps in post-genocide Rwanda. Its quest is to describe and document what Maren takes to be the thorough and irremediable corruption of a seemingly noble enterprise.

Maren paints a damning picture of Save the Children: As he documents in convincing detail, that tax-exempt charity perfected the business of raising contributions through ads showing the sad, desperate faces of the children it promised to sponsor, while in actuality only a trickle of the cash collected ever made it from Westport to the merchandised boys and girls. As Maren wryly comments, Save the Children “seems to be less of a development agency than a professional fund-raising operation, but with one big difference. No professional fund-raiser could get away with keeping 80 percent of the gross.”

Maren also uncovers the files on the U.N. High Commissioner’s long-standing relief operations in Samalia. These suggest that the august agency, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1981, was aware throughout the 1980s that the aid it oversaw was being stolen outright or, even worse, diverted to would-be warlords and their militias — groups thereby granted a financial interest in continuing the misery of the displaced populations. “Document after document said that the entire operation was a wasteful fraud,” writes Maren; every “confidential memo over a nine-year period concerned the politics of the relief operation, showing that everyone involved at every level knew it was a politically driven fiasco pushing Samalia to the edge of anarchy.”

Elsewhere, Maren makes a number of persuasive or interesting points about humanitarian relief in general. He reminds us that 90 percent of the food aid handed out in the Third World is not emergency aid. The overwhelming bulk of dispensed food comes from surplus-commodity disposal programs that service farm constituencies in affluent Western countries; just what the “food aid” gets used for after it’s shipped tends to be a secondary consideration. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that large quantities of food aid are simply stolen by the unhungry: Maren once estimated that only a third of the food aid under his jurisdiction back in his USAID days made it to the designated relief areas. And pilferage may not even be the worst outcome. Careless “food aid” programs can actually reduce a Third World society’s ability to feed itself. After all, it is impossible for local farmers to earn a living competing against free foreign grain.

Yet, when all is said and done, The Road To Hell is a flawed and deeply deluded book. So intense is Maren’s loathing for all the aid-related institutions to which he has been exposed that he is incapable of serving as a reliable guide to, or reasoned judge of, the problems he canvasses. His diagnosis of what ails humanitarian aid today, and his prescriptions for reforming it, turn out to be jarringly wrong-headed.

The realization that humanitarian relief is a cash-denominated operation appears to have ignited in Maren a smoldering rage, reminiscent of Anna Freud’s bursting into tears when she learned that her beloved Nanny was all the while being paid money to take care of her. He rails that “famine was a growth opportunity,” and elsewhere accuses non-governmental organizations in Somalia of “prowling about [the city of] Quorioley and drooling” over the potential of a project to attract money.

The problem with humanitarian aid is not that relief officials accept money for their toil. The proper questions, instead, concern the uses and impact of the money spent. Maren is apparently unaware that a number of temporary relief efforts in recent memory have succeeded spectacularly. Some of these, like a U.S.-India collaboration after back-to-back crop failures in the mid- 1960s, have saved millions upon millions of lives. But because it does not occur to Maren that humanitarian aid might sometimes work, he does not bother to ask why it fails when it does.

In Maren’s conspiratorial explication, it is axiomatic that humanitarian aid can do no good: It is simply an extension of a Western political-economic system that does no good for the peoples of the low-income regions. “The real beneficiaries of the AID program,” he writes at one point, “were, and are, the American equivalent of [deposed Somali dictator] Siyaad Barre’s inner circle . . . America’s merchants of grain.” Relief workers in Somalia “were, in every sense of the word, mercenaries,” and the collapse of civil order in Somalia — including “the violent events that occurred in 1993” — was merely “foreign aid carried to its logical extreme.” Although Maren writes dismissively of relief workers who “go bush” — that is, pick up local mores and habits — he himself has embraced the same hateful worldview as some of the fringe intellectuals who rub elbows with Western development officials in the Third World.

Maren’s recommendations for improving humanitarian aid are that the U.S. government should regulate private charities operating overseas, and that an independent agency should be established to “look after the interests of the targets of development and relief, a.k.a. the needy.” Unobjectionable as such pablum might appear to the concerned reader, in practice it offers the recipe for an unappetizing mess.

The real flaws of the humanitarian aid programs Maren describes do not derive from a shortage of government oversight; in large part, they can be traced to a surfeit of government influence. Most of the “private voluntary organizations” (PVOs) in The Road to Hell depend for their operating budgets upon taxpayer money, doled out to them by Western states and multilateral organizations. In seeking and accepting these funds, PVOs necessarily alter their objectives, skew their priorities, and adjust their administrative routines — very seldom for the better.

The moral hazard inherent in charitable ventures can never be completely circumvented. With a more scrupulous separation of public and private efforts, however, many of the perverse incentives in the humanitarian aid business could be mitigated or eliminated. It is a shame that Maren, who seems so deeply tortured by the failures of relief efforts, did not come to recognize as much.

Nicholas Eberstadt is a researcher with the American Enterprise Institute and the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. His books include Foreign Aid and American Purpose (AEI).