[blackhawkC17]

Because it’s true. Aid makes governments less accountable to their people and more accountable to donors.

It has made many countries refuse to create robust healthcare/education/military (etc.) systems with local resources and instead depend on foreign resources that can be zapped away anytime and are often used to control local leaders to do the donor’s bidding.

Many locals in aid-dependent countries (including mine) say the same thing, yet it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid.

All the aid to Haiti, Afghanistan, and many other countries…their only achievement is now needing even more aid.

Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term..

[rob74]

If you're mentioning Haiti, it's only fair to add that they were saddled with a crippling debt to France (later to the US - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_independence_debt) from the very beginning of their existence, and many of their current problems can be traced back to that. It's important to see both sides, especially now that it's clear how corrosive this narrative is if you're looking at Musk's attitude toward USAID...

[blackhawkC17]

We’re likely in agreement. What Haiti needs is investment in domestic industries to be competitive in a capitalist world.

These investments can be provided by foreigners, but it’s ultimately the locals that need to rise up to the occasion and use it well. Unfortunately, Haiti is rooted in endemic corruption, stemming in part from aid dependency.

There’s no point of giving aid to Haiti while maintaining the status quo of the country being a little more than a raw material supplier to richer countries.

My exact complaint is that many countries give aid to feel good…and also for the recipient to do the donor’s bidding instead of what’s right for their countrymen.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune. If Haitian leaders remain more accountable to foreign donors than their local population, there’s no incentive to improve.

[goodpoint]

> it seems do-good Westerners want to force people to collect their aid

"do-good"? No, you are confusing legitimate aid with "the first one's free". The fake aid is often designed to create dependency and send large part of the money back to the donors.

[abeppu]

I think maybe there's an important different ethical and practical situation with genuinely foreign aid (rich countries sending resources to poor countries which have their own government, systems, regulations etc) vs a colonizing power that's effectively already in control of the area in which they helped form the crisis. The British were exporting food from Ireland and India in both of those crises. British land speculators bought Irish land and raised the rents and evicted farmers -- i.e. people already engaged in producing food were forced to stop.

So foreign aid may make governments less accountable to their people. But colonial governments don't start off being accountable to their people. The "aid" that the British ruling class said would create dependence can only be understood in the context of the intense extractive practices that were already in place.

> Yes, a famine is a special case where aid is necessary in the short term, but it’ll be a disaster and destroy local agriculture output if continued in the long term.

... but because Ireland was still exporting food to Britain, "aid" in the form of keeping Irish food to feed Irish people would clearly still have supported local agriculture. Not evicting farmers would have supported local agriculture. This is structurally different from shipping American grain to Afghanistan.

[blackhawkC17]

True, I was referring to the modern context of aid, not colonial times with extractive economies.

I don’t think it’s fair to apply the modern concept of aid to previous eras of colonialism, wars, and frequent famines. It was a different ballgame I feel I wouldn’t be qualified to comment on except I experienced it first-hand.