And if you want to be part of the effort for the G8 from this side of the pond, join up with the ONE Campaign at www.bread.org/one and write a letter to PResident Bush at http://www.one.org/AddMyVoice.aspx

Thanks, Aaron and Aaron, for creating covenantblogs.

Another perspective on foreign aid is from the late Murray Rothbard from a decade ago on the Somalia hunger crisis, found here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard80.html.

The lesson: governments can not and will not solve the very problems governments themselves create. Excerpt:

What about the refugees in the nine camps? Why were they there, and were they really starving? Maren discovered the truth: in the first place, the refugees were there because they were nomads fleeing the Ogaden, where they had been caught between the Ethiopian army and WSLF. Second, the number of refugees was deliberately highly inflated by the Somali government, in order to sucker Americans into sending aid. Barre was claiming two million refugees when there were far less (he had originally claimed half a million). Thus, Maren found that one camp, Amalow, which was supposed to have 18,503 refugees, and had food allotted for that many, really had only about 3,500. As a result, far too much food was being shipped into Somalia and into the camps by the bamboozled Americans.

Not only that: just as occurred eleven years later, the American excess of food was inspired by duplicitous journalists, "who took pictures of the sick and the hungry, and the relief agencies arrived on the scene with food. And the food was being stolen."

Moreover, Maren reveals, despite the massive theft, "no one was starving to death in the refugee camps." Oh, there was plenty of death all right, but the death was caused by disease: malaria, measles, dysentery, diphtheria, pneumonia, river blindness. But food, though not the problem, kept pouring in and being stolen.

There was more method to this madness than simply providing free American food for Barre's army and for the Ogaden guerrillas. As Maren perceptively points out, the Somalian government, like the Kenyan government, hates nomads. Even though the nomadic Somali refugees weren't starving, they were attracted to settling in the refugee camps by the promise of free food. After all, it's easier to sit in a camp and receive food for free than to have to hunt and work for it. As Maren puts it:

"Somalis are nomads who spend most of their time looking for food. If you put a pile of food in the desert they will come and get it...The famine camps were set up and they came."
And so the American food unwittingly played into the hands of Barre and later Somali rulers: helping to build a modern socialist state by settling nomads. Maren puts the point trenchantly:

"African leaders like to settle nomads. Nomads make it hard to build a modern state, and even harder to build a socialist state. Nomads can't be taxed, they can't be drafted, and they can't be controlled. They also can't be used to attract foreign aid, unless you can get them to stay in one place.

"In addition, many African leaders, trying hard to be modern, view nomads as an embarrassment and a nuisance. Anything 'primitive' is an embarrassment and a nuisance. From Bamko to Nairobi I've listened to Africa's elite discuss nomads as if they were vermin."

Maren then concludes about the American relief program of the early 1980s:

"So not only was the refugee relief program feeding Barre's army, it was settling his population of nomads...And all this was happening with the assistance of energetic young foreigners who were helping to build the infrastructure of those new, refugee-populated towns, setting up clinics, drilling wells, trying to teach the former nomads how to settle down and grow food."
What had happened to the cattle of the nomad refugees? Some was lost to drought; the rest was left behind with family members. Traditionally, nomads who had lost their cattle to drought got assistance from relatives and other clan members; but now, in 1981, they had another option: free food in the refugee camps.

But, as Maren points out, the Ogaden desert is sparsely settled: one family would have eight to ten square miles of desert for grazing their camels and goats. But the refugee camps played hob with, you should excuse the expression, the nomad's eco-system. Now each family was packed into a few square yards. There is no need to learn about sanitation when you've always got ten square miles of desert to roam around in. But sanitation became a big problem in the refugee camps: hence, rampant disease and death.