Deceitful development aid

The majority of the world’s people live in poverty, in countries where poverty is very widespread. The world’s nations may be divided into four broad categories:

• Industrialised countries whose wealth is derived from the export of a variety of different kinds of civilian and military products and services, most of these labour-intensive and requiring a high level of worker education.
• Wealthy countries with very small populations, substantial mineral resources such as oil, and very hierarchical social and political systems.
• Very populous countries whose wealth is derived from the export of substantial quantities of minerals such as oil, with few industrial jobs, widespread poverty, and serious political instability.
• Very poor, politically unstable countries with very limited export earnings and almost total dependance on foreign “development” aid and remittances from family members working overseas.

Foreign aid from industrialised countries to poor people in what are often euphemistically designated “developing countries” comes partly from government agencies and international agencies, financed by taxpayers in wealthy countries, and partly from registered charitable agencies financed by the general public via fund-raising activities. Aid is concentrated in “development projects” run by salaried experts from the donor countries in collaboration with workers hired in the recipient countries.

Development aid is characterised by deceits that are scarcely ever mentioned by mainstream media nor mainstream commentators:

• The causes of poverty are never fully revealed to the general public, though partial explanations may be published. Even supposedly reputable charities are thereby guilty of leaving the general public with a totally false perception of the economics of world poverty and an unjustified acceptance of the status quo. With few exceptions, mainstream and scholarly sources allow the public to sustain the (false) conviction that some nations and races are inherently inferior, and to falsely internalise the cause of poverty to corrupt and incompetent national leadership.
• Private aid charities abuse the natural willingness of individuals to give money away to help poor individuals by falsely extrapolating from the misfortunes of the poor in their own countries to the structural disadvantages of people living in very poor countries.
• No national government ever takes any action whose motive is not the preservation or furtherance of its own nation. This may also involve providing genuine assistance to specific other nations, especially in times of war, but such assistance is rarely what it seems as it is always driven by national self-interest. Even aid projects that withstand critical analysis can be shown to benefit the donor country more than they benefit the target population groups in the receipient country. A fictionalised yet almost totally ignored example of this is described in Norwegian writer Åsne Seierstad’s controversial “The Bookseller of Kabul”, whose main character works hard to put together a bid for a big, potentially lucrative government contract financed from development aid to produce textbooks for Afghani schoolchildren. The last page of the book recounts how he loses the contract, which is awarded instead to the Oxford University Press, a multi-national publishing corporation based in the UK, which is one of the major military and donor nations engaged in Afghanistan.
• Unlike the fictional example just described, many real-world development projects that are subjected to independent analysis not only fail to benefit the target group in the recipient project, but they also fuel corruption and benefit criminal organisations while depriving bona fide local businesses of custom.
• Some development projects are intended to create “import substitution”, namely deliberately to deprive export businesses in third countries of markets to which they previously had access in the target country.
• Even well-managed development projects that succesfully fulfill their objectives by providing the recipient country with contraceptives, schools, roads, power stations or other beneficial facilities that the target group would otherwise have had to do without, and with which the local people express their satisfaction, do nothing to reduce the structural poverty of the recipient country as a whole.
• In donor nations there is a widespread body of thought, encouraged by some political parties and some sectors of the press, that instead of inflicting development aid on poor countries, “we ought to leave them alone”. Anyone who has actually visited a recipient country and bothers to read the nameplates identifying the manufacturers of the machinery, such as cellphone masts, pumping stations, ferries, railway locomotives, aeroplanes etc., installed in these countries will become aware that “leaving them alone” would also entail withdrawing the army of salesmen responsible for the large scale export of advanced manufactured products from wealthy countries to poor countries, some of it paid for at market prices without development aid but from the proceeds of the export of minerals. The businessmen engaged in this trade are very successful at stifling any mainstream public discussion of what “leaving them alone” would really entail.

Nobody who lives in an industrialised country is left in any doubt of the great importance of exports to the wealth and wellbeing of the nation. Both politicians and businessmen are outspoken in reminding us of this. It follows from this that the widespread belief that we live in a hermetically sealed country that is immune to social, political and economic events in the rest of the world is utterly ridiculous – yet it is publicly perpuated every day in countless different contexts, and can readily be observed at all levels of intelligence. If things are going wrong, then it is the fault of our own government, our own banks, or our own education system. If things are going right, then we can all pat each other on the bank.

The endorsement by politicians and professional experts of the myth that every country is a closed system is solid evidence for the existence of an undeclared freemasonry amongs the members of the ruling class that crosses national borders.

Cattle from Oknha-Tey Island being hustled into the
River Mekong near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

No one can fail to notice the impact made by American or Japanese multi-national corporations on life in the country where we live, yet the business community is very effective at suppressing any discussion of the equally obvious needs of businesses in foreign countries (especially the poorer ones) to export their wares and services to our own country. It is a taboo topic in politics and the media, among scholars, and among aid agencies. The words “Cambodian multi-national corporation” would certainly raise nervous eyebrows if mentioned at any sober get-together of highly educated professional people. Why should the obvious needs of poor countries to develop advanced export industries be taboo, unless the business community has something to hide?

It is difficult to defend this otherwise obvious conclusion as long as we are allowed to believe that people of other races and other nationalities are so fundamentally inferior to us that they are not capable of developing the advanced products and services that wealthy countries are willing to import. But would we allow them access to our markets if they did succeed in developing their industry? There is very strong evidence that our business community would ensure that they would be excluded.

During the Cold War, industry in the Soviet Union succeeded in developing nuclear and conventional weapon systems whose reputation was sufficient to keep us in constant fear of nuclear hostilities. Although one Russian reactor at one Ukrainian nuclear power station famously went out of control in 1986, numerous others have been successfully generating electricity for many decades. The Russians succeeded in developing the Kalashnikov, the most successful machine gun ever, used and copied all over the world (except by NATO troups). A missile from a weapon system developed in the USSR recently succeeded in shooting down a Malaysian civilian airliner flying at cruising height over the Ukraine. The Soviets also developed mass produced family cars that made significant penetration into western markets. They developed a variety of civilian aircraft so successful that many westerners chose to trust themselves to these machines on routes between the Far East and Europe.

So when the USSR decided to abandon Communism in 1989, and instead became “capitalist”, as we were all told, there was no obvious reason why its civilian and military products should not enjoy increasing success in, and penetration of, western markets. Amazingly, no one in the west ever publicly speculates as to why the opposite has happened. This, too, is a taboo topic. No one can believe that the former Communists have forgotten their hard-won industrial skills, so there is only one possible explanation – namely, that western business interests and politicians have made sure that the world’s most lucrative markets are closed to civil and military exports from the countries of the former Soviet Union. But they have not told the voters.

The members states of the USSR were not the only non-western countries with a military aircraft industry. During the Falklands War, news reports in countries friendly to the UK sometimes mentioned the Pucara fighter-bomber developed and built by Argentinian industry. Despite being modern and by no means unsuccessful in service, it has enjoyed no great success in export markets. Industry in another South American country, Brazil, has successfully developed a variety of large and small military and commercial aircraft, with some very modest penetration of high-end export markets – but the popular perception of Brazil in the northern hemisphere is still of a coffee producing “developing” country with a reckless attitude to the importance of its tropical rain forests.

Prior to the British conquest of India, the sub-continent had a large ship-building industry, which the colonising power allowed to decline so as to enlarge the market for Britain’s own shipyards. Indian ship-building has never recovered its former scale. Even today, Indians rarely criticise the huge extent of the railways built by the British, with rolling stock and other equipment manufactured in the UK. Yet using the sub-continent as a captive market put an effective permanent stop to the indigenous development of a railway manufacturing industry.

The Friendship Bridge over the Mekong River
in Phnom Penh, Cambodia,
built with Japanese development aid

Taiwan and South Korea are two south-east Asian “tigers” that in just a few decades have developed from impoverished underdeveloped countries into wealthy industrialised nations with a wide variety of high-tech exports. Contrast.them with Cambodia and Vietnam, two very different states whose similarities are that each was once a French colony and where poverty is still widespread. Note, however, that Cambodia receives much more foreign aid than Vietnam, which exports both minerals and manufactured products. Contrary to what mainstream economists and geography teachers try to deceive us into believing, the enormous success of Taiwan and South Korea is the result of a conscious decision to allow export businesses in these specific countries unrestricted and privileged access to the domestic markets in the USA and its western allies. This cruel strategy was adopted explicitly to demonstrate to the leaders of Communist countries the rewards available to those states who resisted Communism – though this message was designed for the ruling elites, and deliberately misinterpreted for the general public.

Long Bien Bridge across the Red River in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Badly damaged by repeated American bombing, it was
repaired by Vietnamese engineers, without foreign aid.

There is no mystery about world poverty, but the deceit can be summarised as follows:

• Structural poverty in struggling countries is caused by the policies deliberately adopted by the ruling elites in wealthy countries, mainly by denying businesses in poor countries access to the most lucrative markets. The historical term for this practice is mercantilism.
• This poverty could be greatly alleviated by the replacement by wealthy countries of mercantilism by specific elements of the Christian canon of ethics, namely the “Good Samaritan” principle, and the 10th Commandment, which condemns covetousness (i.e., greed).
• Wealthy nations are dependant on the existence of poor nations in order to maintain prices and profits. The general public is unaware of this simple but awful fact, because it has been taboo ever since Jesus observed that “the poor you will always have with you”.
• The general public believes, incorrectly, that scholarly and non-sensational popular sources of information about geography are doing their best to be honest. Consequently the public has no idea that their leaders are constantly confronted with an ethical choice between mercantilism and Christianity, and that they always settle for the former.
• The 9th Commandment condemns “false witness” (especially against one’s “neighbour”). Allowing the general public (including the people in poor countries themselves) to believe the myth that national poverty is self-inflicted violates this Commandment by denigrating those “neighbours”.
• Allowing the public to believe the “false witness” perpetrated by the development agencies that their aid is the main or only solution to poverty in “developing” countries also infringes this Commandment.