I had a conversation with Carl, a business manager who was born in the U.K., but has been living and working in Africa for most of his life. At one time he managed a SCUBA diving operation on Lake Malawi and one of his close friends was a local farmer. He asked the guy why he didn’t water his crops.
“Every week a Toyota Land Cruiser from the UN drives by my farm. He gives me food if my crops are dying. He says if they are still dying at the end of the season, he will give me a pump to bring water 1 km from Lake Malawi. In the same circumstances, would you spend two hours a day carrying water?”
The experience of folks on the ground would seem to contradict Jeffrey Sachs’s plan to jump-start African economies by providing unlimited free food, shelter, medical care, and education. The human capacity for laziness exceeds any amount of money that might be shoveled in.
Carl said that he had read a study that determined that, prior to the recent rise of tourism, the average Zanzibar male worked 8 hours per week on subsistence farming or fishing. Carl noted that when he offers these folks a 40- or 50-hour/week job, they say “I’ve never done that. My father never did that. My grandfather never did that.” Carl conntinued: “I pay double the going wage. People work for me for four months and then one day they simply don’t show up.”
Why do people have to work harder than they used to? The number of fish and amount of land is the same, but the human population has exploded. With enough production of human babies, eventually people have to start working hard to feed them (or wait for a UN Land Cruiser to drive by).
Carl has seen virtually all foreign aid wasted and/or counterproductive in every African country where he has worked. In every case, just as noted by James Shikwati, the aid retards economic growth and activity. Carl’s conclusion: “Aid is Africa’s biggest problem, not AIDS”.
[A Red Cross worker in Dar es Salaam estimated that a maximum of 20 percent of aid through her organization actually reaches people in need. The rest is siphoned off by bureaucracy and officials. She mentioned this in a restaurant surrounded by $2 million homes in a country that has no apparent industry.]
It’s been a while since I read “The End of Poverty,” but unless I misread the book, Sachs was not advocating unlimited free anything. He was advocating what is necessary to get countries onto the first rung of development, that is to say, “startup capital.” Indeed, the startup capital perspective makes sense, as what we really want to do is help others to help themselves. I entirely agree that we don’t want to shovel free stuff to people ad infinitum, but aid itself is not the problem; stupid aid is.
Actually Sachs does advocate guaranteeing food, housing, health care, and education to everyone in a society, even if they use those guarantees to have 10 children per family. He dismisses, in a paragraph or two, the idea that such guarantees will lead to higher birth rates.
Phil,
Do we perhaps have to admit that there are certain segments of our human population that simply aren’t able to function as “the rest of us do” due to the fact that these segements have for generation upon generation been afforded a sort of “laziness-tolerance” factor from their aid-providers?
And if not, then how do we possibly go about changing these people’s feelings and beliefs?
End the aid? In all seriousness, you know that’ll happen when pigs fly.
Regards,
Mark