One of the most frequent criticisms of foreign aid is how it fuels rampant corruption in the countries that receive it. Money that the UK government markets to the gullible electorate as being destined to help the destitute in the third world actually
The economic environment that created aid bureaucracies has therefore built unproductive organisations that define their output as money disbursed rather than service delivered, produce many low-return observable outputs like glossy reports and “frameworks”
The significant debt burdens of less developed countries have often been incurred as a result of the foreign aid packages pushed by wealthier countries and Western institutions and pursued by corrupt and greedy politicians and businessmen in recipient countries.
“Yeah. To think of USAID, the Agency of International Development, as a charitable organization is, yeah, that’s certainly totally erroneous.
As aid flows in, citizens of the recipient countries effectively become dis-enfranchised as increasingly all their governments need to do to stay in power is to court and cater to foreign donors.
The dependence on foreign aid means that it becomes the opiate of the Third World. In a similar way to how the development of the welfare state in the UK and other developed countries has completely undermined and destroyed society by removing the need
I came across this interesting anecdote on Quora from the poster’s time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali:
An example of this phenomenon is the US ‘Food for Peace’ program that was created in 1954 to help the Eisenhower administration get rid of embarrassingly large farm surpluses.
Although food aid programs may sometimes alleviate hunger in the short run, the overall effect of them appears to be the disruption of local agricultural markets, making it harder for poor countries to develop their own resources and feed themselves in the long run.
Foreign aid creates poverty through economic institutions that systematically block the incentives and opportunities of poor people to make things better for themselves, their neighbours and their country.
The Poverty Cure website highlights well the failure of foreign aid to stimulate trade and wealth creation.
More than half of the international assistance spending related to Afghanistan,Iraq,and Pakistan is for military or security uses.For example,some of the international assistance funds sent to Pakistan have been used totrain their Frontier Corp in counterinsurgency
john-perkins-confessions-of-an-economic-hitman-the-united-states-spends-over-87-billion-conducting-a-war-in-iraq-while-the-united-nations-estimates-that-for-less-than-half-that-amount
Foreign aid represents money, or wealth, that has been seized by force from taxpayers whether through taxation or increased government borrowing (with the taxpayer base used as collateral) to finance the aid.
As a result many aid programs are ill-conceived and economically unsound,
Thus it is unsurprising that in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has dotted the countryside with “white elephants”
On closer inspection, the very idea that the purpose of aid is to alleviate poverty seems incorrect. Instead, it is actually an important function of Western imperialism. In the majority of cases,
In light of the points covered in this post, foreign aid can be seen as a first line of defence against national self-determination and development and against other reforms which might undermine the ability of the West, its banks and their multinational corporations,
Cutting off the flow of aid would altogether be far more beneficial, says Dambisa Moyo.