Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

CARE cares

A note by Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker. It's good to see evidence of thoughtful development policy. Too bad that, as in this instance, it's so often a decision to resist or reject the bad development policy of the US government. Better by far, though, than attending to one's own bottom line and ignoring pernicious effects on others.

Here's Hertzberg:

This story, from last Thursday’s front page of the planet’s only indispensable newspaper, details an admirable act of courage and leadership by a venerable nonprofit.

The gist: CARE—one of the world’s great relief organizations, founded in 1945 to help victims of the Second World War, the outfit that gave the language the “care package”—is refusing $45 million in federal handouts because “American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.” The way the system works, the Times’s Celia Dugger writes,

the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

To put it, er, less charitably, the program subsidizes the already amply subsidized American megafarming and shipping industries in the guise of (and, no doubt, with the more or less sincere aim of) helping the starving millions. CARE and the other relief organizations give moral cover (and pocket the cover charge). A conspicuous result is that indigenous farmers are driven to ruin when the local market is flooded with cheap substitutes for local produce. It’s a high-tech, lobbyist-driven variation on the old theme of giving a man a fish instead of a fishing pole. CARE has concluded that despite its cut, the game is at best a wash as far as its humanitarian goals are concerned.

Even for one of the biggest relief organizations on earth, $45 million—that’s $45 million a year—puts quite a hole in the budget, one that will have to be filled contributor by contributor on the phone, plate by plate at benefit dinners. This wouldn’t be a bad moment to kick in a few bucks.

“What’s happened to humanitarian organizations over the years is that a lot of us have become contractors on behalf of the government,” said George Odo of CARE. “That’s sad but true. It compromised our ability to speak up when things went wrong.”

This story, from last Thursday’s front page of the planet’s only indispensable newspaper, details an admirable act of courage and leadership by a venerable nonprofit.

The gist: CARE—one of the world’s great relief organizations, founded in 1945 to help victims of the Second World War, the outfit that gave the language the “care package”—is refusing $45 million in federal handouts because “American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but also may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.” The way the system works, the Times’s Celia Dugger writes,

the United States government buys the goods from American agribusinesses, ships them overseas, mostly on American-flagged carriers, and then donates them to the aid groups as an indirect form of financing. The groups sell the products on the market in poor countries and use the money to finance their antipoverty programs. It amounts to about $180 million a year.

To put it, er, less charitably, the program subsidizes the already amply subsidized American megafarming and shipping industries in the guise of (and, no doubt, with the more or less sincere aim of) helping the starving millions. CARE and the other relief organizations give moral cover (and pocket the cover charge). A conspicuous result is that indigenous farmers are driven to ruin when the local market is flooded with cheap substitutes for local produce. It’s a high-tech, lobbyist-driven variation on the old theme of giving a man a fish instead of a fishing pole. CARE has concluded that despite its cut, the game is at best a wash as far as its humanitarian goals are concerned.

Even for one of the biggest relief organizations on earth, $45 million—that’s $45 million a year—puts quite a hole in the budget, one that will have to be filled contributor by contributor on the phone, plate by plate at benefit dinners. This wouldn’t be a bad moment to kick in a few bucks.

Retire that metaphor!

On reflection, I think it's time to retire the metaphor of canary in the mine, at least in our assessment of environmental well-being. I nominated honey bees for that role a couple of days ago, and their disappearance is dramatic and ominous. But any review of the range of precipitous species decline and destruction offers so many other candidates for that grim distinction that I imagine a mine more full of innocent birds and beasts than miners. Consider only the birds. I don't know how canaries are faring, but Audubon Society research published in 2004 says 70 percent of grassland bird species, 36 percent of shrub-land birds and 25 percent of forest birds are declining.