Overseas Aid

As you've started a new thread on the subject ninny I'll repeat my reply to you on the Bus Pass thread:

As had been said many times before on GN, overseas aid is not really a handout, more an oiling of the wheels of trade.

The UK expects a return, in the end.

Extracts from a Christian Aid report "The Economics of Failure: The real cost of free trade for poor countries" (June 2005):

"Trade liberalisation has cost sub-Saharan Africa US$ 272 billion over the past twenty years. Had they not been forced to liberalise as the price of aid, loans and debt relief sub-Saharam Africa would have had enough extra income to wipe out their debts and have sufficient left over to pay for every child to be vaccinated and go to school."

"Two decades of liberalisation has cost Sub-Saharan Africa roughly what it has received in aid. Effectively, this aid did no more than compensate African countries for the losses they sustained by meeting the conditions that were attached to the aid they received."

I say charity should begin in the camps of the Syrian refugees.

I don't care if we get anything back or not.

The problem here is with how the aid is distributed, and how monitoring of this is conducted. All governments are corrupt, including our own, hence, as Riverwalk says "the oiling of the wheels of trade." No government handout, here or overseas, is without motive, and those motives do not comprise any humanitarian compassion.

I cannot see, in principle, the problem with overseas aid to less economically developed countries. Regardless of their politics, is it not our responsibility to help those so much worse off than we can possibly imagine?

Much better to work with NGOs who will endeavour to get aid to where it is needed. I think of the big ones - UNICEF etc. as well as all the other agencies.

Politics and compassion do not sit well together, if at all. People and compassion do. Mostly.