Foreign Aid Introduction

1 May 2006

My main reason for starting this blog was to collect some thoughts and facts about foreign aid, though I will probably put some unrelated posts in the blog as well.

Basically, I have been generally dissatisfied for many years with the effects on the world of US foreign policy and foreign aid, and suspicious about our government's motivations in that arena. At the end of 2005, I read a very thought-provoking book about US foreign aid policy, called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, by John Perkins, which had some startling stories in it that confirmed my suspicions about what was really going on. Soon after reading that book, I went on a six-week trip to Nicaragua, where I saw some of the effects of US foreign aid, as well as foreign aid from other countries to Nicaragua. This was not my first trip abroad or to the less-well-off parts of Latin America, so nothing I saw was really new to me. However, this time I came back from my travels filled with the desire to do something: to make a change in the way the US, World Bank, and related agencies send foreign aid to Latin America (and probably to the rest of the developing world as well, though I know less about that).

But what can one person do? I have no intention (or chance) of becoming a high-ranking official in the cabinet, so I probably cannot have much direct effect on US foreign aid decisions. However, I have the sense (or at least hope) that if people in the US knew what was really going on in the arena of foreign aid, they would want to change our policies, and if enough people wanted to change our policies, eventually the politicians would have to listen to them and do something. So, my thought was that if I were going to try to educate people about what was going on, the first step would be to have some coherent information to give them, and that is what I plan to gather in this blog. It's a small first step, and maybe it will not change anything, but it is, at least, something that is worth trying. We'll see how it goes.

Tags