It pains me to defend the international development industry.
Granted, we develop unrealistic expectations, then declare failure when the impossible remains impossible. There will always be diseases. There will always be poverty.
It’s more painful now that the USAID website is no longer in existence; I can’t get any information and, courtesy of Washingtonian chaos, I have to rely on memory plus a few rules of thumb.
Americans have had a split personality when it comes to helping others since the United States Agency for International Development came into being during the Kennedy years of the early 1960s. We oppose aid but express that opposition by being generous.
The average American has consistently thought that the federal government spends between 20 and 25 percent of its budget on aid.
It’s closer to 1 percent.
Aid, excuse me, “development assistance,” is not a single thing. It varies from interest-bearing loans to food assistance (USAID buys around $2 billion worth of food from American farmers annually), to clean energe and medicine. And USAID itself is not a single entity. It works through non-profits and intergovernmental organizations more than it does directly with foreign governments, which is to say, it is a bureaucratic behemoth with an army of contractors. Remember the International Organization for Migration and the cleanup from Typhoon Maysak in Chuuk?
And USAID is the world’s largest assistance donor.
While Americans don’t want lavish sums spent elsewhere, we also want to influence the world toward our own goals, especially national security.
The Trump administration’s attempts to shutter USAID without any input from Congress and to disregard already appropriated monies have forged a rough consensus on the future of foreign assistance.
Foreign aid reform is long overdue, but such reform needs to be legal and formed through the public policy apparatus. Never mind the fact that any candidate who bragged about foreign policy expertise outside of military service would be dead in the water in both a Republican and Democratic congressional primary.
Foreign aid – not all of which flows through USAID – has no shortage of critics. Aid fuels autocratic regimes, furthers corruption and
benefits the higher-ups in the receiving
countries, as they become better-off and travel frequently, while those most in need find themselves worse off after the influx of generosity.
Under the dome of the capitol rotunda of the Palau national capital building, I first heard the term “Dutch Disease,” a phenomenon first described in the Netherlands around the time USAID came into being. After discovering natural gas reserves, unemployment rose, Dutch manufacturing declined, and other economic performance indicators fell. It turns out that outside money inflates the local currency, making everything else—producing goods, exporting them, developing a skilled workforce—too expensive. Then, when the commodity prices drop or the flow of money gets tight, the country is suddenly in a worse position than before.
The guy explaining it was a member of the Consultant Class, an employee of the World Bank. Or was it the Asian Development Bank? He was there to discuss the offshore oil reserves, not whether foreign aid is the specific influx of foreign capital that causes Dutch Disease.
Rarely is it the case that an openly autocratic or violent regime gets a direct cash infusion. It happens sometimes, especially after a disaster, but fueling corruption and prioritizing the decently off over the truly poor tends to be more subtle.
I’m less concerned about Corruption with a capital C—the envelopes of money, the buying of votes, the disappearance of political opponents—and more concerned about corruption with a lowercase c. When people get too comfortable with each other and breed unfettered self-interest. When the same individuals and their families rotate between the same elected offices. When legislators become executives, then become ambassadors and repeat in reverse. When the people who are supposed to solve a problem are the ones who benefit from it.
Everyone in the Pacific has seen this firsthand. Why else would a courthouse sit empty because the judges are attending a far-off judicial development conference. Why is “off-island” a concept in island life?
But I already said it pains me to defend the international development industry.
Gabriel McCoard is an attorney who previously worked in Palau and Chuuk State. Send feedback to gabrieljmccoard@hotmail.com.
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