History by Magazine -- How free food aid from the West hurts the people of Africa
In 1993 I used my weekly column on magazines to tell Pittsburghers that even Butt-Head knew doing good could bring bad results in the underdeveloped world.
Is African food aid a killer?
Dec. 9, 1993
“I'll try 'The Dismal Science' category for one thousand, Alex."
"In this African country, the price of rice is now said to be the lowest in the world."
"What 'is Eeeegypt, man?"
"Sorry, Bart. That's not the question we're looking for. “
"Garth?"
"What is Nelson Mandela?"
"Sorry. That puts you at minus sixteen thousand."
"Butt-head?"
"What is Somalia?"
"That's correct for one thousand dollars."
"Cool, heh, heh."
"Butt-head, you must have read Tom Bethell's 'Exporting Famine' in this month's American Spectator."
"That's right, Alex.
“After James Hetfield of Metallica, Bethell's one of my favorite writers. He writes so clearly and cogently, especially on economics. His explication of how free food relief from the West actually causes or perpetuates food shortages and famine in the Third World was cool. It's a cruel irony that our free food …"
We must now resume our regular programming, but Butt-head is right about Bethell. His piece in American Spectator is, as Garth's friend Wayne would say, "excellent."
Bethell builds his piece around the shocking but largely unheard (in the United States) message of a seasoned and disillusioned relief worker in Africa named Michael Maren, who says bluntly: "Food aid is killing people."
This happens, as Bethell explains nicely, because relief organizations like CARE and World Vision are giving away non-emergency food all over Africa all the time, whether countries are suffering famines or not.
As Maren says, the aid groups have a vested interest in giving away as much free food away as they can; it's their mission.
But this infusion of free surplus food from the West (we grow way too much of it because of heavy government subsidies) competes with food grown locally by Somali farmers.
That gradually reduces demand for their home-grown grain, pushing local grain prices down and forcing many of them out of the farming business. Then when a drought drastically reduces local food production, famine results and in come the camera crews and shiploads of more free grain.
This recurring nightmare of unintended but predictable consequences is probably shocking to you, thanks to what Bethell says is the general neglect of American media.
But he says it's no news to folks in the relief aid industry. Interestingly, left-wing writers have been warning about how food dumping subverts local markets for years, says Bethell, who is as conservative as they come.
The leading conservatives critics of foreign aid have missed the argument, though a 1984 piece in the Wall Street Journal sounded a clear warning: "Free Food Bankrupts Foreign Farmers."
Bethell thinks this political twist is because the folks out in the field who have the facts like the disgruntled Maren are more likely to be leftists. But unlike Maren, Bethell says most of them shrink from accepting the moral that desk-bound conservatives already know by heart "that doing good with other people's money is likely to do harm."
A good companion to Bethell's piece in American Spectator is William McGurn 's "Missionary Capitalism."
It describes a small but thriving international program to bring capitalism to the Third World's poor from the bottom up, by lending — not giving — them small amounts of capital ($300 to $500) to start small enterprises.
In October, the National Rifle Association, proving yet again how easy it is to outrage America's gun-controllists, ran a fancy four-page insert ad aimed at women in 10 magazines.
The ads, which ran in five women's magazines (Good Housekeeping and Better Homes and Gardens refused to run them), were promoting the NRA's "Refuse to be a Victim" seminars in Washington, Miami and Texas. According to the trade magazine Folio, the ads worked as intended. The NRA's 800 number generated 6,000 calls within a week.
And 25 congresswomen complained, saying it preyed "on women's legitimate fears of violence."