Lords of Poverty
Hogan, John P.
BOOKS In Ouagadougou, the road more traveled LORDS OF POVERTY The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business Graham Hancock The Atlantic Monthly Press, $17.95, 234...
...AID and UN agencies are severely criticized for their botched response to the Somalia drought of 1987, which Hancock reports was replete with delays and miscalculations and marked by failure to listen to local people...
...BOOKS In Ouagadougou, the road more traveled LORDS OF POVERTY The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business Graham Hancock The Atlantic Monthly Press, $17.95, 234 pp...
...The road took a long time to build but it is still there.to build but it is still there...
...and Britain to fight malnutrition and starvation in third-world countries...
...He dwells on life-styles, salaries, consultant fees, housing, and cars, all of which serve to cut development workers off from the very people they are supposed to be serving...
...As for the road in Burkina Faso, the local committee decided what villages should be linked...
...The series does not deny the failures in development efforts or the ongoing crisis in the third world but offers hope by showing examples of sustainable development activities in a number of countries including India, Ghana, Bolivia, and Indonesia...
...Like a peeping Tom, he catches some juicy glimpses but never sees the whole picture...
...While the catalogue of failures offers grist for the auditor's mill, the text will not hold up as a handbook for the antiforeign assistance lobby...
...But the petit pere did play a crucial role...
...Small is not beautiful...
...Hancock waxes eloquent and deadly on the latter but says nothing about the former...
...Aid is not bad...
...In a description of the "limo-lock" at a World Bank function, we are told, "Thus, like Siamese twins joined together at the hip, aid bureaucrats and their limousines are never far apart...
...on overhead...
...rather it is inherently bad, bad to the bone and utterly beyond reform...
...Third-world people have evolved indigenous popular education and community development programs, usually with religious or ethnic roots...
...The second thrust paints vivid portraits of some costly development fiascos...
...Agency for International Development staffers who had just returned from chaperoning a Washington biggie on a project visit...
...It needs to be determined to what extent the failures that Hancock describes are the result of the bureaucratic culture of the aid institutions he criticizes, or the result of an imposed modus operandi...
...This would make possible local-level project planning and smaller project activities...
...For example, I know agency officials who don't run around in limos, and I could list examples of successful projects...
...But that's where the problem lies not in the very concept of development assistance...
...Hancock claims that in 1985 The Hunger Project raised $6,981,005 of which only $210,775 went to relief in poor countries...
...The problems are colossal...
...One is Aid for Just Development by Hellinger, Hellinger, and O'Regan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1988), which calls for the large multilateral and bilateral agencies to support mediating structures for development activities indigenous, local, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that can reach out to local communities...
...At this level, however, much of what Hancock says needs to be heard...
...The next few years should provide new insights as the World Bank, the UN, and U.S...
...He views development from the outside...
...Examples of project failures from around the world fill page after page...
...He develops it through a two-pronged case-study approach...
...Two come to mind...
...Aid should be stopped immediately...
...AID look more to nongovernmental organizations to design and implement programs...
...His thesis is that development assistance is a sixty-billion-dollar-a-year sacred cow, which crushes local initiative and poisons the environment...
...Third...
...My real problem concerns the conclusion he draws from his case-study approach...
...A second corrective is the upcoming PBS series, "Local Heroes, Global Challenge," produced by the Harvard Institute for International Development...
...frostbite medicine and electric blankets sent to Africa...
...They had set out early that morning toward the Niger border to see a several-million-dollar stretch of highway just completed under an AID contract...
...they include graphic accounts of the killing effect of "structural adjustment" loans on the poor...
...But the real and costly culprits are the large multilateral and bilateral agencies...
...AID, and Britain's Overseas Development Administration...
...I have some problems with Hancock's factual assertions, but they are relatively minor...
...A full response to such a negative tour de force is not possible here, but a few rejoinders are necessary...
...While generally positive about private, nongovernmental organizations, Hancock hits hard at World Vision and The Hunger Project...
...This is the more helpful side of the analysis...
...When the big money arrives, community participation and self-determination get cut out...
...Hancock dedicates his book to senior staff members at the World Bank who, he says, "illegally acquired and read" an original synopsis of the work and attempted to block his research...
...His conclusion is that the lords of poverty should exit...
...The author's problem is that he does exactly what he accuses the aid bureaucrats of doing...
...Much like the large agencies he attacks, Hancock himself fails to distinguish between aid and development...
...The larger the better and "if a project is funded by foreigners it will typically also be designed by foreigners and implemented by foreigners...
...The staffers, however, were furious and embarrassed: heavy rains had demolished the highway and the culvert walls had burst, causing the whole roadbed to wash away...
...Both development as process and development as project need to be understood...
...Discerning the direction of the process is the key to contributing to a country's development...
...T]hey convinced me," he writes, that "the aid business has much to hide...
...The last chapter neatly sums up the view that the sacred cow is really a sacrilegious vulture...
...Hancock is right, the big donor agencies do not listen to the poor...
...There are correctives available to balance Hancock's bitter message...
...fathers and sons laid the roadbed...
...The latter organization raises funds in the U.S...
...He agrees with the Mexican community activist he quotes: "If you live in Mexico City today you are either rich or numb if you fail to notice that development stinks...
...The image of the petit pere and the young Burkinabe leading the AID convoy along their road came back to me many times as I read Lords of Poverty...
...These approaches provide the basis for true liberation and development...
...Ten years ago I was working in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta...
...Both first-world donor governments and third-world recipient governments could work through such structures...
...Until recently, large multilateral and bilateral agencies worked almost exclusively with national government institutions, which are often corrupt, incompetent, and entrenched colonial vestiges...
...The first describes examples of self-serving bureaucrats at the World Bank, United Nations, U.S...
...Mothers and daughters collected the rocks...
...One evening in Ouagadougou, I ran into a group of U.S...
...the massive $434 million World Bank resettlement scheme, "Polonoreste," in Brazil, where $250 million was spent to build a highway that has become a quick corridor facilitating slash-and-burn farming techniques and a turnpike for "rapid commercial penetration of the region...
...However, it is usually this process that is truncated and compromised when a local group arrives at the project stage...
...Second...
...This road, built rock by rock by local people with local materials, John P. Hogan had weathered the heavy rains...
...a large hydroelectric dam project in Ghana designed to send electric power hundreds of miles but which caused thousands of cases of river-blindness in the local population...
...The staffers were even more devastated when they were led to the only alternative route available, a small but sturdy secondary road still under construction by a group of high school boys and an Italian missionary priest...
...As a result, the environment has been devastated and local Indian tribes "virtually wiped out...
...Will the large donors have the sense to allow indigenous private voluntary and church groups the freedom to relate directly with and support local community groups...
...He trained a young man to facilitate the months of meetings and he got a small grant for the cement...
...The shiny jeeps got stuck in the mud...
...First...
...Most important, if the affluent Western countries would depoliticize aid, untie it from a myriad of political, economic, social, and administrative prejudices, there would be fewer failed projects...
...Solutions should certainly be home-grown, but for some time to come outside help will be needed to be effective...
...Rashmi Mayur, an Indian development worker, faults Hancock because his admonition to stop aid offers no alternative "to alleviate the wretchedness of the earth" and he "makes no effort to distinguish between what works and what doesn't" (Development Forum, January-February 1990...
...The rest was spent in the U.S...
...local people's participation in project design, implementation, and management is too time-consuming and cumbersome...
...According to Hancock, the big development agencies believe they can't afford to "ask the poor...
...The book provides grim examples for both development personnel and taxpayers: grain shipped to Somalia during the 1986 famine which had been rejected by San Francisco zookeepers...
...Thus the fiascos...
...A young engineer from the area drew up the plans...
...Outside aid can help, hinder, or otherwise influence the development process, but cannot totally define it...
...Drain the dirty bath water, but don't throw out the baby...
...Hancock, for all his anger, is oblivious to third-world needs...
...The authors also urge a network of collaboration between northern NGOs and southern NGOs...
...because it is sometimes misused, corrupt, or crass...
...Hancock caps off his caustic critique with sections on the "drug of food aid" and accounts of how foreign assistance has lined the pockets of corrupt leaders: the Marcoses, the Duvaliers, Bokassa, and Mobutu...
Vol. 117 • June 1990 • No. 12
