My AID Problem

Strypey ponders the Aid NGO ideology.

I recently stumbled across a NGO AID foundation called Heifer International. Watching their cute flash ad about giving livestock to impoverished families I couldn't help but wonder about the difference in attitude between the NGOs and activist factions within the amorphous anti-corporate movement that rose to prominence in the late 90s and now forms a current within the anti-war movement.

To a primitivist Heifer is asking us to facilitate the repeat of one of the key historical stages that lead to the system of exploitation we live under today - the domestication of animals. To an animal rights activist, this
ad is ethically equivalent to asking people to give a slave to struggling business.

To a socialist encouraging the impoverished to enter into the market economy by selling surplus animal products represents an expansion by stealth of the capitalist system, a less obviously destructive method than its usual historical habit of expanding by conquest.

To an indigenous rights activist encouraging the impoverished to use the money recevied for selling those surpluses for education and health case is also problematic. 'Education' in the NGO model usually means teaching children how to wear uniforms, sit at desks and read and write english and 'Health Care' means buying drugs and other products from pharmaceutical corporations. None of which respects the oral, life-skills based education systems and natural medicine based health care that are keystone parts of the indigenous world.

To an ecologist more pragmatic questions spring to mind, how is the animal to be fed if the prospective owners are starving? How is the clearing of land for these livestock
and the gases and other wastes they produce going to affect global climate change if this program were to be implemented in all poor areas?

It's easy to accuse any of these groups of being chauvinistic, placing more importance on political correctness according to their own ideology than on feeding the starving. It's equally easy to accuse first-world activists of romanticising the traditional lives of those classified as living in poverty.

Problem is it's just as easy to fall into a trap of cultural imperialism, of looking at a populations traditional lifestyle as being inherently poor simply because it lacks the material luxuries and complex legal mechanisms of our own alienated society, even though its culture, social cohesion and the happiness of its people with their lot may be a vast improvement on the society of the spectacle.

Aid is a complicated phenomenon. Clearly those of us living in 'rich countries' have an obligation to offer a hand-up to our neighbours in the 'global south'. But perhaps what they need more is for us to force our government and business leaders to take our collective knee off their backs and point our collective guns away from their heads?

Related

http://www.heifer.org/