The global community spends billions annually on bilateral development-aid initiatives, under the increasingly popular mandate to mitigate poverty and suffering in the developing world. In the past fifty years, Western countries have transferred over $2.3 trillion to the continent of Africa alone, frankly to no substantive avail. Essentially, the field of international aid hosts battles in which Northern ethics meets Southern political and economic realities. On the one hand, comparatively wealthy countries cite a moral imperative to give as the fundamental motivation behind our donations: to the vast majority of the populous, giving is seen as objectively good and not giving as lacking empathy and social conscience.
On the other hand, from a purely economic standpoint, the outlook is bleak, save for comparatively few isolated success stories: Aid is simply not effective at fulfilling its aforementioned mandate for change. Studies show that since the 1970s, as aid allotments have increased, economic growth in the developing world has actually decreased with an accompanying higher incidence of poverty, proving that aid has little long-term socioeconomic impact at the grassroots level. In every sense, the contemporary moral debate surrounding aid focuses on the real reasoning behind “giving” in its present form, in the face of such low levels of economic efficacy. The contemporary distribution debate surrounds targeting, budgeting, and fragmentation issues, after taking into account the motivations and policies of bureaucratic donor governments.
A close look at patterns of aid allocations proves that the United States, for example, does not give for humanitarian reasons, as it often assures others. To the contrary, the United States tends to allocate funds largely in order to buy policy concessions at home, while aid policy is losing civilian support as a result of the economic crisis. In recipient countries, aid allotments foster corruption, dependency on aid, and less governmental relevance for populations, as foreign regimes accept aid donations in order to satisfy powerful interests, thereby ensuring continued reign.
While this might seem like a distant issue, both sides of the aid debate are “closer to home” than we currently imagine: for one, the issue has implications for the government budget, in which we as citizens have a say (regardless of how small). In a Gallup poll conducted in February, for instance, 59 percent of U.S. citizens voiced that they would support significant cuts to foreign aid. A CNN poll a few months later found that 81 percent of citizens had grown to support such cuts. Meanwhile, despite the UN’s call in 2005 for the most developed countries to donate 0.7 percent of GNI toward development aid, the United States constantly spends about 0.2 percent, which arguably could not provide a significant enough contribution to poverty-mitigation efforts. This begs the question, how is it that aid is such a grossly misunderstood issue in our society and how can we fix the system to better fit the desires of our populous and the needs of foreign recipients?
Secondly, as far as implications go, it is a heated foreign-policy issue that should induce us to exercise our rights as U.S. citizens to demand that our government be consistent in rhetoric and action: we do what we say we are going to do and for the reasons that we vocalize. As it is widely understood that the United States has difficulty balancing its moral and strategic objectives, it is my belief that through shedding light on this issue in particular—because it is a hot-button issue but not the hottest, so to speak—that we will be able to deal with consistency issues in foreign policy.
So to sum up, this issue is messy and complex; it is emotional and complicated. Over the course of this summer semester, I would like to follow U.S. aid initiatives from a national perspective. On the U.S. end, Republicans in the House of Representatives two weeks ago introduced a document that would cut foreign aid funding and other State Department operations by 18 percent, equivalent to $55-60 billion, while raising the Defense budget by 3 percent. While studying the different parties’ approaches to aid budgeting from moral and strategic standpoints, I wish to discover how each political body proposes to fix that which is currently broken!
I have indeed thought about writing a letter to the editor or to an elected official many times and then recoiled/“wimped out,” one could say, on actually doing so. Historically, the act of formulating a list of things to say to a public figure has been quite simple for me, but the act of hitting the “send” key or the mailing of the envelope have been the difficulty. The “why” question is a bit less comfortable when one actually stops to think about it: in my case, I think I have felt as though my opinions would be discarded as drops in the bucket in comparison to the amount of advocacy that would be necessary to create real differences in political campaigns. I sincerely believe, however, that recent technological advances have made it so that larger campaigns are possible (and I am completely willing to participate), so “participating” in the public sphere has become less of an individual or isolated event and more collective in nature (with less stigma attached). That said, I am currently quite similar to the majority of my peers in being reluctant to participate in forms of public writing, but hopefully I will learn how to participate in new forms of cyber-dialogue that will provide new outlets for my political ideas.
Based on my own observations of my peers and my experiences with peers in and from different countries, I feel that people our age in the United States know less, comparatively speaking, than other young adults do, about current events and the political process in general. We opt for constant entertainment and concentrate on more emotionally “comfortable” topics and activities in which our peers participate (for our highly developed-country resources allow this!). I believe that this choice makes us less likely to engage in causes about which we are passionate, for many of us (although certainly not all) have fewer politically oriented causes about which we are passionate.
However, I have observed that while there are groups of highly politically active young adults in many countries—especially in Latin America and Europe—there are indifferent groups in those countries as well. I think that it has much to do with individual and familial realities inside of cultural and class structures: for example, if one lives comfortably and has a choice to escape the realities of those who are suffering, it is much easier for that person to not to pay attention to such painful realities. Many active young adults in our society seem to be so because they have dealt intimately with issues of sickness or suffering. One would hope that in changing this reality, as I mentioned in the above paragraph, more technological outlets for political discourse will prompt higher levels of political participation on the parts of young adults worldwide.
