Prospect
January 20, 2005
Opinions: Truth aid
by Sebastian Mallaby
In the first days of January, George W Bush summoned his father (the
ex-president), his brother (the future president?), and even Bill
Clinton (the ex-president and maybe the future ex of a president),
directing them all to assist revving up America’s response to Asia’s
tsunami. Seldom has so much star power been so superfluous. Even
before the stars were activated, a spontaneous emotional earthquake
had occurred somewhere deep within the western psyche, and a tsunami
of money had begun rolling towards the Indian ocean. By 3rd January,
one week after the disaster, private US donations amounted to over
£87m; Britons had given £100m; Germans had come through with £107m.
On 6th January, the New York Daily News, a gossipy tabloid not known
for its interest in global poverty, plastered the number $ 103,474
across its front page-the amount the paper’s own appeal had raised in
a 24-hour period.
Why this incredible response? There has been much talk of Christmas
spirit, and of westerners’ ability to identify with a tragedy that
killed western beachgoers. But there was something deeper at work
here, and something quite ironic too. For the generosity reflected
the unspoken feeling that this crisis stood apart from other crises
in poor countries. The tsunami was unlike Aids, which seems to spread
relentlessly because developing country leaders won’t challenge
sexual taboo and social prejudice. The tsunami was unlike the
murderous wars in Sudan or Congo, for which the blame can be laid
even more clearly at the feet of local leaders. The tsunami was not
even like the general problem of global poverty, which most people
reasonably believe is tied up with corruption and bad policies,
making it at least partly impervious to western assistance. Instead,
the tsunami was a simple act of nature. It bubbled up from the sea,
and laid waste to half a dozen countries; it had nothing to do with
human greed or cowardice or corruption. And so westerners responded
generously, confident that an uncomplicated, unpolitical disaster
could be swiftly remedied with charity.
This was a return to a simple vision of disasters, one that has been
mostly absent since the first postcolonial relief effort in Biafra in
the late 1960s. Bob Geldof conjured the same vision in Ethiopia
briefly in the 1980s: the simple images of starving children swept
away the complicating political context, and the money flooded in.
But for the most part, the political view has dominated. Ethiopia’s
famine is now understood as a consequence of the Mengistu
dictatorship’s crazy agrarian collectivism, and disaster relief is
understood to have prolonged its grip on the country. Floods in
Bangladesh are viewed not only as natural disasters but as the
consequence of reckless logging; Caribbean hurricanes are understood
to cause more damage than they should because governments refuse to
prepare for them. Of course, these understandings kill the charitable
impulse. You would not give to a beggar if you think he has chosen to
be homeless, still less if you suspect your money will subsidise his
choice.
If the public view of disasters has grown weary and worldly, disaster
relief professionals have travelled even farther down this road.
Interviewing the veterans at American relief agencies in the
aftermath of the tsunami, I heard anguish as well as delight at the
outpouring of generosity: had people taken leave of their (political)
senses? And how would they react to the discovery that translating
their gifts into humanitarian progress is very hard? However touching
this moment of innocent giving, successful emergency efforts are
almost as much about fending off untutored charitable impulses as
about raising charitable money; relief workers have learned to
install incinerators at warehouses to dispose of unhelpful donations.
Julia Taft, a veteran of USAid and of the UN development programme,
told me how after the Armenian earthquake of 1988, the Armenian
diaspora in America was asked not to send anything initially. Relief
professionals feared that mountains of stale food and unwanted cuddly
toys would clog the distribution system. The instruction worked:
Armenians in the US waited, listened, and then gave just what was
wanted.
Moreover, there has probably never been a time when the public’s
open-walleted innocence could have been more awkward than now. For
the disaster-relief profession has evolved more or less in parallel
with its first cousin, the development business-many leading players,
from Oxfam to the World Bank to governmental aid agencies, are
involved in both disasters and development-and each of these
professions has grown wiser and humbler. They have come to an
understanding of what they cannot do as well as what they can. This
is why the prospect of millions of bright-eyed first-time
givers-supporters who donate dramatically in the expectation of
dramatic field successes-produces mixed emotions.
The path to humility for the development business began in the 1950s,
when development thinkers believed that capital would trigger
economic take-off in the ex-colonies. When capital transfers failed
to unlock progress, development agencies experimented with other
types of transfer. From the 1960s, they began to provide not just
physical capital (dams, roads, water systems) but human capital
(health, education). When that did not work as well as hoped, the
development people went after the next apparent bottleneck: they
spent the 1980s and early 1990s attaching ever more policy conditions
to their loans. But by the late 1990s, a new consensus was emerging.
Developing countries’ policies were indeed crucial, but aid
conditionality was too weak an instrument to affect them; Pakistan
signed 22 loan agreements between 1970 and 1997 promising to cut its
budget deficit, and failed to do any cutting throughout the period.
So the new development consensus acknowledged development aid’s
limited influence. Poor countries themselves were now said to be “in
the driving seat.” Development agencies focused on identifying the
best performers and concentrating money on them so as to accelerate
their progress.
The disaster relief business has followed a similar trajectory. In
the early days, charities responded with supplies, almost any
supplies: food, blankets, tents, medicines. Then, in the 1970s, they
began to reflect on the consequences: aid in kind could destroy local
merchants who supplied the same commodities, and who would be needed
to keep life going long after the aid agencies pulled out. Pretty
soon, this insight about the dangers of displacing local systems was
applied more broadly. Feeding camps, regarded by most agencies as a
logistical necessity, came to be seen as dangerous: they lured people
off their land and away from what little food there might be left to
harvest; they crowded people into unsanitary settlements where they
easily fell prey to cholera; they delayed a return to normal
subsistence agriculture when the rains returned. In Ethiopia in the
1980s, the US branch of Save the Children broke new ground when it
refused to work through feeding camps, investing in donkey trains to
bring food to remote villages.
Like the development business, however, the disaster business has
come to defer ever more devoutly to the role of locals. This is
partly because the long slog of post-disaster reconstruction depends
on local management. Last year a World Bank study of Hurricane Mitch
reconstruction in Honduras emphasised this point. Since the Honduran
economy is beset by overdependence on coffee, chaotic urban planning,
large debts and mistrusted rulers, it has been almost impossible for
donor-assisted reconstruction efforts to pay off. But the deference
to locals also holds for the immediate aftermath of a disaster. When
the hurricane or earthquake hits, it is local organisations that will
be there, and locals who will mount the first effort. It will be days
before foreigners jet in, and even then they will rely on local staff
to learn the ropes.
And so, to borrow the development jargon, locals are in the driving
seat. When I asked an old hand at Care, a leading American relief
charity, what struck her about the reports from the tsunami region,
she told me she had heard journalists complaining about the absence
of foreign relief staff-an absence she regarded as a hopeful sign,
given the unintended consequences of heavy-handed foreign charity.
When I called Michael Wiest, the chief operating officer at Catholic
Relief Services, he launched into a speech about his relationships
with foreign partners. In India, Catholic Relief has long-standing
relationships with local charities, and it quickly underwrote their
procurement of relief supplies. In Aceh, by contrast, a lack of local
counterparts was forcing it to fly in foreigners as a second-best
option. Even in Aceh, Wiest was pleased to have discovered a local
Jesuit with a relief operation that could benefit from extra cash.
The last thing any relief agency wants to do these days is to arrive,
as Wiest puts it, “like a triumphant invading army.” And yet a
triumphant army-or, more precisely, navy-has been one of the dominant
television images of the tsunami coverage: US naval helicopters have
been buzzing the remote portions of northern Sumatra, air-dropping
supplies to desperate villagers. It seems likely that this image of
brave western charity has fuelled the extraordinary giving: it has
made the fruits of generosity appear certain and tangible, brushing
away the normal doubts about aid’s effectiveness. But the helicopter
image is misleading. When relief agencies figure out a way to spend
the tsunami millions, they will do so through Indonesians and Indians
and Sri Lankans, and the results will depend on the competence of
these partners.
Bit by bit, the true nature of the relief effort will become
apparent. The tsunami region is not some sort of film set for heroic
western masters of disaster. Rather, it is what it always was before
the crisis: a collection of prickly, independent nations muddling
their way towards prosperity. India has a tendency to put its
national pride before its people’s welfare, which is why it refused
western assistance that could have saved lives on the remote Andaman
islands; Sri Lanka and Indonesia each face insurgencies, which were
brutal before the tsunami and will doubtless be brutal again now.
Western money will flow into these bubbling, imperfect societies and
some of it will be wasted, lost or stolen, and it will not usually be
possible to know exactly how or why. When this is generally realised,
the outpouring of western generosity will face its true test. Is it
premised on the illusion that the relief business is easy? Or can we
permit ourselves to hope that it is more durable than that?