Food Aid

I mentioned a couple of days ago a New York Times article about how food aid sometimes makes problems worse in the Third World. One of my readers tells me:

If you are interested in the topic I suggest P.T. Bauer's Reality and Rhetoric. It was published in 1984 so is probably a bit dated, but it is the classic in the field of development. He lays it on the line. Development aid harms far more than it helps, for good reasons any libertarian would understand. Aid empowers the already powerful.

I saw this myself during my 2 years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. I was in a small mountain village, too remote to have electricity. Every single individual in that town of farmers received food 'aid'. Canned chickens came from Denmark, cooking oil, flour and corn the US. Foreigners also built the local school and the regional radio station. I read Bauer's book shortly after coming home, and it all came into sharp focus, all the things I had seen but not fully understood.

These people were not starving, and the great majority of the population was farmers. But my guess is that there was hardly a person in the country that did not receive some kind of aid. Of course, I was part of that.