Sun, 31 Jul 2005

Economist Blames Aid for Africa Famine

More analysis of the famine situation developing in Africa. And this African economist really understands what's going on:

"When aid money keeps coming, all our policy-makers do is strategize on how to get more," said James Shikwati, a Kenya-based director of the Inter Region Economic Network, an African think tank.

"They forget about getting their own people working to solve these very basic problems. In Africa, we look to outsiders to solve our problems, making the victim not take responsibility to change."

He also points out that intra-African tariffs on food are roughly twice as high as those on food imported from Europe or America! Talk about not "eating local"!

Most of the problems in Africa were indeed "caused" by Western imperialism - but that doesn't mean we can fix them. In fact, if I were an African, I'd be real wary of any Western interference in my country, given the track record that first colonialism, and more recently "do-gooderism" has accumulated. Simply throwing money at the problem is not going to make it go away: the Africans need to address the root causes. We can advise them, we can help them, but ultimately we cannot solve anything for them.

AP - In Niger, a desert country twice the size of Texas, most of the 11 million people live on a dollar a day. Forty percent of children are underfed, and one out of four dies before turning 5. And that's when things are normal. Throw in a plague of locusts, and a familiar spectacle emerges: skeletal babies, distended bellies, people too famished to brush the flies from their faces.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

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