The Importance of Making Impoverished Countries Self-Sufficient
The Gleaners, by Jean-François Millet.
On the 26th of June 2024, during one of the side events, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) conducted a discussion titled: Underfunding and the cost of inaction: How to address one of the main challenges to humanitarian response. As the title implies, panelists met to discuss the importance of giving aid to vulnerable populations worldwide, and how to spend the money effectively. Many of the speakers emphasized that there was a decrease in funding, and how this will impact food security. Some said that the whole humanitarian system had to be reconstructed, while others promoted the idea of trying to get more money from private donors.
However, there was one speech that stood out to me as having a lot of substance and being constructive. The representative from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations gave the most grounded and realistic plans that I heard in the entire meeting. While I am not very familiar with the organization’s history and policies, the representative believed that getting impoverished nations to become self-sufficient was the way to set up humanitarian aid programs. She promoted Emergency Agriculture, which is the process of giving aid in the form of seeds to farmers to plant crops. The representative said that while the whole program is increasingly “underfunded and overlooked”, it is cost-effective and efficient. According to the representative FAO has only received “13% of its requested 2 billion dollars” and, “in the last year with less than 1 billion dollars 56 million people were able to produce their own food.” With only 6% of requested funds for Burkina Faso and 4% of requested funds for Mali raised, it is highly likely that millions will not be able to grow their own crops.
The idea that a nation’s humanitarian aid should come in the form of seeds sounds like a reasonable and effective solution to me. It gives the farmers the ability to remain self-sufficient and therefore autonomous. It also allows them to grow their nation’s agricultural industry, thus helping to develop the state economy. It is a ground-up approach, and addresses the needs of citizens in rural areas, which are usually the worst off economically.
The alternative, which is to constantly give food handouts, may sound like a solution, but it keeps the nation in a perpetual state of reliance. Its economy continues to be in a state of decay and its people rely on external food aid in order to survive. When a country is in a state of reliance, it is at the mercy of its donors, and is vulnerable to external pressure and influence. External pressure may not always be bad, but it is often used to coerce a government to change to benefit a wealthier nation. The United States and its western allies, the leading forces behind liberalism, often try to pressure nations into rejecting traditional views. For example, the west has been trying to persuade nations in Africa and eastern Asia to legalize abortion.
It is my belief that aid should not be a permanent solution, but a tool to help a nation get out of its quandary and onto a better path. As the saying goes,
“if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day, but if you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime.”