David Sogge argues that food aid changed Africa's diets and created a dependency on an expensive, foreign commodity: bread. "Wheat is grown in only a few corners of Africa and at greater cost than it is grown in Western Europe or North America. So those countries are sometimes paying substantial parts of their foreign exchange earnings to buy wheat from Canada, the US, from Europe to make the bread in the bakeries to feed people who have these new eating habits.
A Trickle Too Little
Whether America intentionally used food aid to turn Africans into consumers of wheat, and especially American wheat, is debatable. But David Sogge suggests that the political and economic interests of donor or lender countries usually influence who gets foreign aid and how. Relieving poverty has only relatively recently becomes a fundamental criterion for assessing aid's success.
"Until about three or four years ago," explains Sogge, "aid did not particularly take poverty into account. Poverty would be something that would be resolved once the benefits of broad development would trickle down to poorer people."
Delivery Problems
This trickle down theory, which says if you improve things at the top they will eventually improve things at the bottom, has not worked. In his book, David Sogge cites numerous studies that show how aid programmes have had a negative impact on economic growth and have usually created greater income inequalities. But can we place most of the blame on the givers of aid? Problems do occur once the money and materials arrive in the country of destination.
"Corruption and malpractice is an old one and it cuts across many systems of public assistance. Clearly this has occurred with foreign aid. One of the aid industry's most successful rip off artists, the President of the now People's Democratic republic of the Congo Mr. Mobutu, took his money out of his foreign bank accounts that were regularly monitored by the Washington DC foreign aid institutions. Similar cases have occurred in Indonesia where the World Bank apparently knew of the disappearance of something like 20% of all rural bank loans to Indonesia during the Suharto administration.
More Say
Despite this gloomy picture, there are a few reasons to be optimistic about the future. Protests like those in Argentina earlier this year are having an impact. And democratising aid - giving citizens, especially those from countries receiving aid, the opportunity to say and even decide how aid should be used - is a concept that gives David Sogge hope.
"In Northern Mozambique a group of Mozambican and Danish development workers have devised a program based on a local development fund. And that's in a part of Africa that has no history of public participation in determining how public money will be used."
Letting policy makers and citizens decide together how best they can improve their lives is the simple yet much neglected message David Sogge offers us. Even the skeptics of aid say it should continue despite its flaws, few people are willing to suggest that it should stop. Whether at its best or at its worst, foreign aid is here to stay.
