The Road to Hell

When The Road to Hell (by Michael Maren) came out I spotted it on the library shelf and grabbed it. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," and what intentions could be better than helping to keep people from starving to death? Around the world, but most especially in Africa, Non-Governmental Organizations and UN programs work to provide famine relief.

The problem is that the hungry people are often spread out over a large area. It is hard and expensive to bring the food to them. So: bring the people to the food!

The results are hideous. The same concentration of people that makes food distribution efficient means that sanitation becomes a major problem. The farmers are uprooted from their farms, and even if they could grow a crop (and they can usually grow something, even if it isn't enough to live off during a famine), they can't. So the amount of food available drops even farther. The farmers that remain on their land can't afford to grow more than subsistence crops, because they can't compete with the free food offered at the concentration camps--so they only grow what they need. If farmers have been encouraged to buy fertilizers or pesticides, they will already be in debt, and so will go out of business completely because of the competition from free food.

In the camps there is nothing to do, unless you can get a job with the NGO. So children grow up (sometimes for a few years) with no traditional children's chores and no examples of parents working, and lose part of the work ethic.

In countries with civil wars, the situation is even worse. The concentration of people and supplies makes them targets, unless the NGO workers pay bribes and hire (generally from among the bandits) guards for themselves and the goods. So the aid workers wind up funding the very civil wars they are trying to ameliorate the effects of.

The aid workers ... OK, let me be a bit more accurate. Some of the aid groups, especially religous ones, try to be more sensitive and spend money as much as possible to the benefit of the locals. But in the more secular ones (the UN groups dramatically so) even the field workers tend to treat themselves in the manner to which they became accustomed in Europe or America, and the generator runs air conditioning for the office in the camp while the refugees swelter in plastic tents without even fans. SUV's for the staff rank in priority right up there with trucks for the food, and don't forget the per diem!

All of this might be dismissed as unfortunate side effects, but Maren uncovered UN documents showing that some refugee relief groups didn't care that their work was worse than useless. Their only significant interests were in maintaining their staffs and the funding levels.

Peter Biddlecomb wrote of visiting one aid/training center which was trying to teach the local farmers how to use modern equipment. Their star tractor driver, Peter discovered, was blind in one eye and so afraid to turn left that he would drive miles out of his way doing right turns to get where he needed to go. He was the star driver because of the number of miles he logged.

An aid group wants to be able to measure how well it is giving aid and number of tons of food imported (not necessarily distributed--see "bribes for bandits" above) or miles driven or number of children in a camp are easy things to measure. The number of people who didn't starve is harder to count, as is the number of farmers who didn't go out of business. The things that actually help aren't always easy to measure.

For example, one proposal for nomadic tribes is a "cattle bank," in which a fellow who is flush with cows or goats in good times can make a "deposit" in exchange for a promise of return in kind or the equivalent in money on demand. When drought strikes cattle can die, and the nomad has nothing to sell for food; but if he has made "deposits" he still has a cushion to support his family.

But how do you measure how well such a thing works to explain it to the donors in the US? By the number of nomads who don't lose everything in the drought 11 years from now? Easier to round up people into camps after the fact, and take juicy photos of starving children to make the donors feel guilty.

Recent years unveiled the sex for food scandals of UN-run camps in Sierra Leone; and the utterly politicized "refugee camps" of Palestine are utter abombinations. NGO's can do good work, even noble work--but the structural problems mean most of the effort is wasted or even damaging. You're safer giving to a religious group, but even there you should consider whether what they do makes sense. Will the people be more self-sufficient after the aid comes through or less?