It’s not a change that’s worth thousands of innocent people dying an tens of thousands suffering needlessly.
I agree, but to say so in response to that article is to ignore the author’s main point — that there’s more to western aid than helping to alleviate the suffering and prevent the deaths of people in “underdeveloped” countries.
The author does not say that that western aid should end as abruptly as Tramp is ending USAID efforts, salutary and otherwise. He does say that the demise of this agency’s efforts could be a chance to rethink and rework how such aid functions when it’s extended by an ultimately self-interested empire.
It’s that extractive side that most USains fail to realize, because we so rarely hear a perspective like that of the author, Patrick Gathara, who points out that many non-USians will not miss the overall impact of USAID (and probably would not miss those of other US “international outreach” efforts like the Peace Corps and the Fullbright Program as well).
I wish articles like this one would appear in the NY Times or WaPo, as a corrective to USian naivete about the US as an extractive empire, with forms of aid that work to prop up the empire more than to provide the kinds of aid they do.
I’m reminded of how charity is often used by corporations and wealthy — as a tax write off, or a form of window washing or conscience salving, and more to Gathara’s point, as a way of avoiding more helpful efforts to fix an extractive system that results in ridiculously disproportionate wealth gaps: “the entire enterprise of aid has been a tool for geopolitical control, a means of preserving, rather than eliminating, global inequality and the resource extraction that feeds it.”
Indeed,
The aid industry, in effect, inherited colonialism’s “civilising mission”. Its do-gooder image papers over the extractive nature of the international system and attempts to ameliorate its worst excesses without actually challenging the system. If anything, the two are in a symbiotic relationship. The aid industry legitimises extractive global trade and governance systems, which in turn produce the outcomes that legitimise the existence of the aid agencies.
As a result, today, despite the proliferation of aid and development agencies, the racialised global order has barely budged, and deep inequality continues to characterise the relations between nations. A 1997 study by the US Congressional Budget Office found that foreign aid played, at best, a marginal role in promoting economic development and improving human welfare and could even “hinder development depending on the environment in which that aid is used and the conditions under which it is given”.
