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Topic: OF Financial and FOOD Aid

Of Food aid.

The politic of begging for foreign financial aid to feed the body, and leave affairs of the mind and the heart to religious missionaries in places like Haiti is outdated.

ELLE1

My Friend Elle you are absolutely right, I waited, I waited and I waited. Now let's talk about it since you have given me the opportunity and the impetus.

Many concerned Americans believe that were élite-controlled structures generate hunger, we should intervene to"improve the lot of the poor" They focus on improving and increasing official U.S foreign assistance.

They call for"new directions-style aid", focus on the small farmer, basic needs, support for land reform, appropriate technology, and popular participation. But they presume at least two things: first, that official development assistance is the principal way the U.S govrnment intervenes in the struggle for food securtity in countries around the world; and second, that U.S.-funded aid agencies actually are doing or even could do, what they say they are doing, helping the poor and hungry.

Focusing on official development assistance and its relationship to the hungry threatens to divert attention of concerned Americans from the many other and often more telling ways their government affects the poor majority in other countries. For U.S government development aid is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. There are at least 15 other overt channnels(not to mention covert ones like the C.I.A.) through which the U.S government supports the governments and economic elites of its choosing. Here I will mention only a few that I will present in details through other segments:

1-U.S milatary sales assistance programs to Third World.

2-The Treasury Department's EXPORT-IMPORT Bank and the Commodity Credit Corporation

3-The International Monetary Fund IMF)

Before I develop the subject by presenting the agencies let me use this particular example which should be of great interest for all concerned posters since it happened in Haiti.

The Institute for Food and Development policy has received in 1978 several communications, independent of each other, from American missionaries in rural Haiti who decry food-for-work programs using U.S. food aid. One wrote:

"In the village where we are living, for example, one family controls all the community and government offices including judge,mayor, community council, president, etc.

Besides owning vast tracts of land," the family speculates in coffee and controls all the illegal tree cutting in the area. When CARE entered the village with a Food for Work soil conservation project(using U.S food aid), it came as no surprise that "The family," was the local administrator of the project and chose who would work in the project. "The family" was the local administrator of the project and chose who would work in the project." The family" through the auspices of the community council president, is also responsible for seeing to the actual food distribution. To th CARE people this project is a good grassroots effort, but in reality it is not helping those peasants in the area who really need it. CARE for example, believes that the workers are mostly landless peasants. The Institute has surveyed nearly all of the workers on the project and have yet to find any landless peasants. The workers must work 3 days a week on the project,1 day on the road for the community council and 1 day in the garden of one of the community leaders(i.e,"the family") Thus the projects take the farmers away from their own plots for 5 days of the week in La Perle des Antilles.

Finally, we can assume thar even if the Government of the Unitd States wanted to shift its entire aid program to put itself on the side of the hungry throughout the world, could it do so?

According to what I have gathered in my research and based on reserach and experiments of the Institute for Food and Development policy I can only conclude that no governmental development assistance program can address the social an economic causes of hunger because in doing so it would threaten the very elites with whom overall U.S policy must maintain relations.

Clearly U.S. aid policy will not go against the elites abroad who serve U.S. military and corporate interests; it must side with the elites who are resisting challenges to an economic system similar to that of the United States.

My source:

The Institute for Food and Development Policy U.S.A.

I will continue with more segments on Food and Financial Aid.

Mèsi anpil pou opotinité-a konpatriot Elle ak konpatriot Denyro.