When businesses make people starve

Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in Africa Favoring Americans

The bag of green peas, stamped “USAID From the American People,” took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.

For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.

They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world’s most generous food relief program wasn’t fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia’s drought-ridden South Omo region this year.

“I am so grieved that I lost those children,” said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. “They died of the food shortage.”

The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.

A great essay from Bloomberg.com and a must-read for all those that think putting social needs into the hands of business directly translates into efficiency. Aid taking six months to reach Ethiopia because of the intervention of big business, whose primary motivations are profit rather than people. Interestingly, the true criminals in this case are not the Government, who under a proposal by Bush tried to move towards at least 25% of the food aid being locally-produced, but the big business lobbyists who moved to stop this. While the story characterises this aid as benefiting all Americans, the truth is that that it does not, the additional revenue gained from sending US-produced food only goes towards those who are siphoning off profit from the top of these companies. Like Lehman's apparent remorse for shareholders melting away in the shadow of the half a billion dollars of profits he took from the company, ADM, Cagill and Bunge do little to spread the wealth to those everyday Americans now living in Grapes of Wrath tent cities across the United States, having lost their jobs in the quest to cut down on costs by moving production off-shore and their homes through foreclosures.

International aid policies have often been devastating for developing nations, such as the IMF's knowledge of the impending 1965 Indonesian massacre (see Pilger 2001), the flooding of Uganda with American rice which undercuts those living on subsistence living, or the outrageously stupid IMF conditions for Bolivian aid in 2000 - aid in exchange for the privatisation of water in Cochabamba - which led to widespread riots (banning people below the poverty line from collecting rainwater has to be one of the most cruel policies ever).

The article goes on to detail the level of lobbying these companies do and how the donations of aid is seen as a cash cow for US industry hoping to capitalise on the poor. While some will say that these Africans are lucky to see the aid that they do, the story has a fable for us in little old New Zealand about the dangers of letting business intervene in the administration of the state. We should be seriously questioning the assumption that privatisation is the equivalent of good governance that many people have lapped up. Both state control and business control have their foibles, although certainly both approaches can learn off each other. Before we let Key privatise our prison system, our health care system and our screens, we should look at changing the guidelines that position profit as the central goal and ensure that business has learnt enough from models of state governance to be able to look after people before their pockets. Blind faith in either system is just as ideologically biased.