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Fish and Bread For Everyone? Aiding the poor.
Foxy_Roxy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hi, this is my first thread so bear with me.
In my Geography class today (a problem within itself), the lecture was about overpopulation and the poverty stricken of the world. My teacher suggested that there is no forseeable way for these people to help themselves, and we, a country thousands of miles away, have a responsibility to do it, by giving them food, money, ect. He also stated that it wasn't their fault for having so many children and increasing the population so much, they do it so they will have someone to depend on, no matter if that person starves. (Ok, so I'm a little apprihensive.) the idea being that more laborers= more food and money. Although this has been shown not to work, time and time again.
My thought was, if they can't figure out a way to help themselves, is there really a point? And should it really be our responsibility to feed the poor of other countries? Is it our business?
DISCUSS.
In my Geography class today (a problem within itself), the lecture was about overpopulation and the poverty stricken of the world. My teacher suggested that there is no forseeable way for these people to help themselves, and we, a country thousands of miles away, have a responsibility to do it, by giving them food, money, ect. He also stated that it wasn't their fault for having so many children and increasing the population so much, they do it so they will have someone to depend on, no matter if that person starves. (Ok, so I'm a little apprihensive.) the idea being that more laborers= more food and money. Although this has been shown not to work, time and time again.
My thought was, if they can't figure out a way to help themselves, is there really a point? And should it really be our responsibility to feed the poor of other countries? Is it our business?
DISCUSS.
Foxy_Roxy on
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Pumping money indiscriminately into a system, however, will solve nothing. This isn't post-war-Europe. Manpower is key.
I view this more as an investment more than anything. If we can stabilize the region, the economic benefits from having such a place will be returned to the rest of the world pretty handily, especially when African countries are able to develop without outside aid.
Furthermore, the West needs to stop with the farm subsidies. It is criminal how much excess grain is produced by us (specifically the US and certain European nations) compared to the energy investment and cost of labor compared to what Africa can and should be better at doing.
I'm amazed at how the farmer's lobby has managed to make the average voter not care about this, or not even realize it's not happening. It really fucks with America, too. I'm willing to bet the droughts in the Southeast that have been going on since early spring wouldn't have been anywhere near as severe if there wasn't so much unnecessary agriculture going on.
XBL: QuazarX
But hell, with the money it'd save the country's themselves you'd probably be able to re-invest it in easing the changeover to something more efficient anyway.
Doing so would be nearly impossible in the US, which sucks. Farm states hold an incredibly disproportionate amount of power in the Senate, and the agriculture lobby is one of the best-run in the nation. Also, people are afraid of being labeled as a "city-slicker". It's much more attractive to have a "down to earth" image, like Bush gets with Crawford Ranch and all his other Texas shit, or Clinton got with being from Arkansas, or Carter with peanut farming, or Reagan with being jelly beans.
It's just politicians paying themselves.
edit: beaten, but this does deserve double-lime
Though I agree, we shouldn't just throw things at the developing world. We should figure out, most of all, how to help people help themselves.
Also, a big reason the birthrate is so high is due to diseases that kill off many children, forcing parents to have more in order to make sure that one survives to take care of them in their old age.
I think it would be enough if the loopholes that allow big corporate farms to receive subsidies were closed. In my experience small family farms barely get along as it is.
There's a reason they barely get along. It's not economically viable or sensible to have a tiny farm. It's the same reason we don't have individual cobblers or blacksmiths or carpenters (unless you think we should subsidize cobblers and blacksmiths, too). The market changes, circumstances change.
Now, as to how to bring about meaningful social changes that would allow a more efficient government, I haven't the foggiest.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
That means that one should keep anything one earns or one has that allows one to live, and give everything else away.
By that rationale he believes that one isn't merely going above and beyond the call of duty, it is the duty.
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
I think the world is a small place these days and that finding an example of this would be pretty difficult.
By beginning this with "Singer would say", I thought this was an homage to Vince Vaughn's adherence to Arthur Schopenhauer... heh.
This is a tenuous subject because of the breadth of the word 'responsibility'- do you mean, is it a moral imperative for a decent person? Is helping the less fortunate a requisite of status quo morality? Or are you asking whether legislation should effectively require citizens to help?
There are people who will say yes/no to all levels of your question, but I think it'd be more productive to specify what you mean by responsibility.
Your teacher is wrong, and shit at geography. Stating that other people can't do what we do is bigotry. Humans are all pretty much the same and have the same capacity to both excel and balls it up completely. If you or I were plunked in the jungle with a knife and a pair of shoes, we'd be just as fucked as anyone else.
I'd say we have a responsibility to fix what we broke, but that's as far as it goes. Sounds like he's preaching, honestly, and while the sentiment is nice, just giving people everything tends to turn them into useless people if you give too much and for too long. case in point: food aid often undercuts local produce markets, making it no longer possible to survive off growing your own gear and selling it. Response: go on welfare, increase demand for that aid.
Well, its not their fault that most aid organisations are forbidden to supply contraception and its not the fault that their governments don't promote gender equality, so okay...
people are people everywhere. they don't want to have kid after kid, uncaring if they die, but in regions with high infant mortality and minimal female control over contraception and sexual behaviour, its hard to avoid. well, law of diminishing returns applies, but lots of those kids don't make it to five years.
Its worked for most of human history, it just causes problems when the death rate drops due to medical and hygiene improvements, and there's a lag before people adjust breeding rates in response. Wiki 'demographic transition', its a key concept.
They can't? News to me. Foreign people aren't freakin' monkeys. The mechanics of poverty reduction are well known, and the human situation has improved in leaps and bounds across the planet in the last century. Areas that lag behind are usually screwed over by one of a few factors: environmental disaster, bad leadership, foreign destabilisation. Usually a combination of factors are at work, but its not impossible to circumvent these things.
Here is a good story, you should read it.
In many cases, we made them poor. In all cases, a small amount of carefully applied aid can be the boost a group needs to get back on its own two feet. What you're proposing is the equivalent of asking whether we should kill people who break their legs and can't learn to hop about without crutches. Your question is oversimplistic.
Yes.
done. basically, there's ways and ways to alleviate poverty, and the easy ways aren't the best.
I'd disagree. If you see someone drowning in a lake, and you have a lifesaver in hand, then it's your responsibility to throw it to them. Doesn't matter who pushed them.
So, direct food aid isn't very hot. That doesn't mean that aid generally is bad. As you've said, there are well-known poverty reduction strategies that do work. And it's our responsibility to undertake them--not because of the history of colonialism, or any of that business, but because there are people in need and we have the means to help.
At least in Northern European countries, national security is often used as a justification for farm subsidies: sure, we may not actually do anything with the excess food production now, but we need to maintain the infrastructure in case an international crisis renders us unable to import food. Is this the reasoning they use in the U.S. as well?
That's why I made an effort to distinguish the lifeline from banning people from entering the lake without a flotation device strapped to them and never funding a swim class. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but you really can't lump the two together and call it all 'aid', which is the primary misunderstanding this thread is based around.
's what I'm saying. Aid delivery has to be carried out in a particular way in order to achieve the goal of fostering self-sufficiency. If your goal is to destabilise barely-developed economies and create a half-starved crowd of dependants, current methods are far more effective.
For instance, just exactly how much "research" is required to cure cancer? How much money is made by research and drug companies now and how much would they make if there was a cure?
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
Aside from being a completely inadequate comment, are you saying they make a lot now with the ongoing research or that they would make a lot if there was a cure?
I woudl posit that the potential for revenue is much greater if one can prolong research over a longer period of time than if there was a pill that insta-cured it.
It's an interesting question for someone like me, with no real education in the matter, to ask.
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
Wow... so completely misrepresentative of what I was saying...
Fair enough.
-Robert E. Howard
Tower of the Elephant
After seeing the brutal side of people you're donating to, do you still want to empathize?
It depends. Drug companies don't like studies where a cheap/non-patentable method is effective against a disease, and will go to great lengths to undermine such research, both by trying to affect funding of such research, and by funding their own research designed to provide results to the contrary. They can't really do much about research in mice and in vitro studies, but they seem to have a lot of influence in the approval and funding of clinical trials. In cancer research, a lot of research focuses on angiogenesis (how cancer cells attract blood vessels to grow into tumor tissue) and drugs that prevent it. For example, a simple compound that removes free copper ions from blood has been shown to prevent angiogenesis in certain slow-growing cancers. High dose aspirin has been suggested to work in some, as has some plant chemical, the name of which escapes me. But the lack of commercial incentive seems to keep most of such research from ever getting past the preliminary results stage.
Yuppers.
Of course, eliminating farm subsidies is a no-brainer - and they go hand-in-hand with the push for food aid. Governments dump money on their farmers to over-produce food, and then drop off the surplus in the third world in USAID sacks and pat themselves on the back.
Sure, we must still be prepared to respond in times of immediate food shortages, and we have a responsibility to do so, but aid should be more geared towards farm inputs - fertilizers, equipment, &c. - and markets for their produce.
While in Malawi I toured a teaching farm that had been set up to demonstrate various best-practices in irrigation and agriculture - all without any specialised equipment. It was a pretty impressive place that used terraced fields, canals, man-made aquifers, crop-rotation, &c. to grow bananas, maize, strawberries, beans and lots of other stuff. It made for a sustainable farm that anyone could replicate - at least in part - provided they knew the techniques.
@ The Cat - thanks a lot for the link.
It's the whole "Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime" dilemma. On one hand, yes, industrialized nations (and not just the U.S.) do produce an excess amount of foodstuffs which could be sent to destitute nations and peoples to combat poverty. Certainly, we should encourage aid to poorer nations, especially after times of crisis or natural disasters.
On the other hand, it has to be done to establish self-sufficiency and with restrictions as to who is getting the aid, otherwise we're creating a worse problem than we're solving. Continuously sending aid to impoverished nations without conditions or restrictions has always led to corruption of it's government officials, apathy among its people and eventual anarchism. Just sending over a few cases of Ho-Ho's and Sunny D to feel good about yourself isn't being humane and saving the world: it's being short-sighted and (honestly) vain.
After seeing the abject despair that is these peoples lives, I can understand the brutality that it elicits. I empathize with those in want and the actions of a helpless soul, not those possessed of simple and vile hatred.
I think it's pretty clear that the money you give to oxfam will do far, far more good than that same money would have done if you had spent it on yourself. However, people are selfish as psychological fact, and are willing to disregard others when deciding how to draw up their budgets.
You will do far, far more good as a corporate lawyer who gives twenty percent than as a kid who goes to ecuador on break to build a couple houses.
You can't just give money. Someone actually has to go over there in person and do it. Maybe it shouldn't just be volunteer work. Maybe if you paid people to go work there you would get better and more workers. But as it is, you can't just pump money indiscriminately into the system. And even volunteer projects need funding for supplies and transportation.
Yes, exactly. This is what I'm thinking.
US farming subsidies are not maintained for reasons like those of Europe, but also have a history borne out of deprivation and near starvation. The first US farming subsidies (of which I am aware) came about during the Great Depression. The Roosevelt government subsidized farmers to not produce certain crops so as to raise the price of said crops. It was pretty unpopular, and eventually done away with.
Now the main government subsidies which have the government buy up the surplus grain to give away to foreign countries came about in the late '40s I think. This is basically the form of US agricultural subsidies today. Of course, this occured because of the disruption of the world food supply post WWII. The US government had been buying the excess grain all throughout and after the war, but just made it official in the late 40s.
Of course, it could be argued that the US farming subsidies, at least, have outrun their usefulness. Be that as it may the restriction or removal of US farm subsidies is not going to do a great deal to alleviate the problems of the 3rd world. Most of the problems of the 3rd World can be traced to one of two sources: foreign or local corruption. Either the locals are getting screwed by some foreign government or corporation, or the locals are getting screwed by some totalitarian warlord. Those problems will not resolve themselves no matter how much free aid we give the local poor. Unless of course we started giving the local poor weapons and training....
Just kidding.