The Correct Way to Fight Famine in Africa

Fire of Liberty
On July 26, 2005 I saw an edition of ABC's Nightline which focused on the famine that is ravaging the countryside of Niger. Now I'm all glad that ABC brought such suffering to our screens but they opted to buy film which was recorded by a reporter from the BBC. In a usual BBC fashion, the reporter placed a considerable amount of blame on the US and countries of the West because they hadn't plopped enough money down via aid to stop the starvation. Even worse, the folks at the BBC showed countless film footage of children with flies around their faces, with horrible sores all over their bodies and countless walking skeletons walking around to hammer in the point of what the West's seemingly lack of compassion was doing to this sub-Saharan nation. To add insult to injury, Ted Koppel brought on the UN's Development Program director Mark Malloch Brown to pile on more complaints about how the G8 nations are still providing only a small portion of the money that the world needed to spend to fight famine in Africa.

What I really found disappointing is that Koppel and his producers failed to bring on someone to argue that aid money is fine but if they really wanted to get to the root of the problem then they should focus more on reforming these nation's economies, cleaning up government corruption, opening their markets to free trade as well as a greater dependence on private or Christian charities that teach individuals skills and techniques to tackle their problems. On only has to look throughout the history at the amount of economic aid that the West - namely the US - has spent towards fighting starvation to realize that spending even more isn't going to solve the problem. Even with a countless amount of economists and learned individuals arguing the dangers of the West continuing its open spigot policy on aid money towards Africa without any reform, you still have various news agencies like the Washington Post just lambasting the West for being too stingy or how capitalism and development created more harm than good. Luckily, people like Tech Central Station's Melana Zyla Vickers are here to refute the crazy claims that the MSM types seem to bring up out of the blue. Probably one of the best arguments that I've seen is in this piece by Vickers. Judge for yourself her excellent takedown of this common MSM fallacy:

In Niger specifically, the controls of a command economy are still very visible. The second-poorest country in the world derives almost half its income from international aid, and another substantial chunk from uranium exporting companies controlled by Niger's former colonial overlord, France. This is hardly a solid base for a free market. Price controls and government intervention in the grain market stopped only in the last decade, meaning a free market has not yet developed in full. The obstacles to new business development and foreign business participation are manifold. Much of the agricultural sector is still government-run. Worst of all, tiny Niger, in which only 15% of the land is arable and non-desert, depends on its neighbors for cereal imports every year. But this year, those command-controlled neighbors, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Mali, are restricting exports to Niger, despite the fact that they've signed trade treaties against such hoarding. In other words, Niger's children are starving because of a failure to trade freely, and not a failure of the free market.

Niger's situation is nothing new. Command-controlled, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have regularly bred famine because they can't respond quickly to resulting conditions or to bad harvests, and because their comfortable ruling elites ignore the starvation their policies cause, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, who wrote Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Other academics have argued the point even more forcefully, alleging that socialist regimes' starvation of millions of people constitutes deliberate neglect, if not deliberate killing.

One day I hope these media types will stop laying the world's ills at the feet of the free market and the Westbut until then we have to depend on Vickers and other sensible people to cut through the muck. Maybe if the UN and the Live 8 crowd would stop shouting at the West to "spend more money," then the problems in Africa could be solved but then that would be asking for miracles that the UN never seems to be able to produce in its 60 year existance.