5 Feet of Fury

How Foreign Aid Destroyed Africa

Guy who made The Great Global Warming Swindle is also an expert on this troubling subject:

These are aid-wars. They should be called aid-wars. There are many on the left – most people on the left I’m sure, who genuinely want to help Africans (and indeed poor people generally). The difficulty is, their desire to help people comes second to their emotional commitment to socialism. The left and the greens are utterly wedded to their anti-capitalist ideology. They refuse to listen to arguments, no matter how cogent or well supported, that contradict their political prejudices. You can tell a green that their opposition to the use of DDT has resulted in the needless deaths of literally millions of people from malaria. What’s their reaction? The greens still support the ban on DDT.

In the end, their subjective self-righteousness counts for nothing. It doesn’t matter what they think they’re doing. It matters what they’re actually doing. So, yes, I think we need to confront people on the left with the consequences of their policies. They are killing people. They have blood on their hands.

(…) And what has all this aid done to fight African poverty? The UN declared in 1999 that 70 countries – all aid recipients – were poorer than they had been in 1980. The countries that had received the most aid – like Liberia, Zaire and Somalia – had descended in barbarism and anarchy.

(…) The big shame is that we don’t let African farmers sell their food to the US and the EU. Subsidies, tariffs and so on. People who are against free trade in food should be really ashamed of themselves.