Foreign aid is an investment in our future

Mostly foreign aid by Governments etc are a complete con trick! It has never really been about poverty. Genuine unexpected famine crises are usually mostly funded by individuals with additional, if necessary, input by governments.

However, Crisis Management (or Disaster Capitalism) is big business in the West nowadays...and all of it is classed as "foreign aid" in which the foreign country aids the profits of the "aid-giving" country's businesses, which in turn add to the "aid-giving" country's coffers...and just might, with a high wind following, produce some medium/long term benefit to the starving poor.  It is an investment in our future, for sure......but absolutely not in the future of the countries receiving the aid. 

"Foreign aid" by Governments covers a multitude of what are, imo, quite frankly in many cases, sins...from loans from the IMF/ World Bank, with  restrictive monetarist conditions required to be imposed by the receiving Governments, not only on the projects funded but on government economic policies in general as an imperative for the loan (think Chile, think ......to US Food Aid..which is as much a business model as any other. Apart from the fact that food aid in kind is the least economic or useful way of providing medium/long term aid to famine stricken/impoverished countries, it most certainly does increase the profits of the, for example, three US based multi-national corporate agri-businesses, who sold the US Food aid programme, two thirds of the food it distributed in 2011. 

Now I wonder, being extremely cynical, how much foreign aid reflects American and other Western  geo-political priorities as much (if not any  more) as humanitarian need.  From what I have read...the US requires the vast majority of food aid to be sourced and shipped by US companies.(so they get profits) ..while other countries, like Canada and the EU (though I don't know if the UK adheres to the EU way of providing aid, though I ha'e ma doubts they do) have “untied” their food aid budgets, buying food aid closer to where it is needed or sending cash instead so that the benefits all fall on the third world countries who need the benefits and not on the greedy buggers in the West scrabbling for profit who don't.  The US Food Aid set up has been criticised as 'corporate welfare' for grain giants (and the carrier companies transporting their product)..and I can't disagree.

Let's be upfront and honest here...."foreign aid" is not just predicated on the poor and starving, (despite what the "my country right or wrong" and  "money is god" aficionados would like us to believe) Their perception might  be acceptable if the aid in kind  didn't have, additionally, to be transported on ships for umpty ump miles so the recipient country could eat American leftovers and sell their own internal production cheap to the West to get foreign currency to repay the loans they have received from the IMF/World Bank...and those in the donor country, into the bargain,  makes silly money profits from both provision and transportation.  But hey....foreign aid is as much a tool of Western governments against their "lessers" as sabre-rattling, invading, withdrawing embassies and droning from afar to kill perceived terrorists are.

How much money have the US, UK and other Western  taxpayers pumped into "foreign aid" to maintain and further support  Israeli obduracy, their military prowess and their trashing (maybe even genocide) of the Palestinians.....and how many countries have received "aid",so they could spend it, as a part of the deal, on armaments produced by businesses in the country giving the aid?

The way Governments, in the UK at least, have become since Reagan/Thatcher is what makes me a fervent nationalist in favour of Scottish Independence (though I have been inclined that way for the last fifty years) ..because, imo...Scottish MPs are mostly more interested in their personal individual status as a small pointless/useless fish in a lucrative big pond with no power than the possibility of being a small fish in a less lucrative small pond with possibly real power......the income received subsumes the good of the country..I see it in the UK and in the USa....which is why I always...and I make no bones about it, talk about the UK as being America-lite....and I hate it.