Third World

By John Greenwald

Their wide, staring eyes and matchstick arms are the all too familiar icons of hunger and despair. The Third World's starving millions are truly the wretched of the earth, and in recent years the affluent West has lavished billions of dollars in efforts to feed them. Yet famine relief is a very small part of the roughly $1 trillion in aid that rich nations have given poor ones since World War II in the largest voluntary transfer of wealth in human history. Throughout the world today, thousands of public and private organizations are spending some $35 billion a year to promote development and erase poverty. Groups offering assistance range from behemoths like the World Bank, which annually lends some $16 billion to developing countries, to Irish Rock Singer Bob Geldof's Band Aid, which so far has managed to raise nearly $80 million.

Foreign aid has become a vast and powerful industry, but it is also an increasingly troubled one. Around the globe it is frequently marked by failure, frustration and danger. Two weeks ago, ten members of a medical team from the Paris-based Doctors Without Borders were abducted by armed men from a Somalian refugee camp. In Africa, civil warfare blocks relief shipments to areas where hundreds of thousands are starving. In Bangladesh, 15 years of foreign assistance has made little measurable improvement in people's lives. Everywhere stories are told and retold of corrupt government officials who rip off assistance before it reaches the needy and of wasteful projects and high living by aid workers amid dismal poverty.

For all that, foreign aid still has its eloquent defenders. Studies show it has not only boosted the standard of living in many countries but sharply raised literacy and life expectancy. South Korea, devastated by its three-year war with North Korea in the early 1950s, used grants and loans to become a healthy industrial power. Taiwan also built a strong economy with help from its friends. The United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, has promoted health and nutrition programs and immunized millions of children against measles, diphtheria, typhoid and other diseases. "Overall, the record is very good," says John Sewell, president of the Overseas Development Council, a Washington- based research organization. "Aid has worked. When one looks at the Third World, the rate of progress has been remarkable."

Not even the staunchest advocates of aid, though, deny its many problems. One of the most glaring has been the intractable misery of Africa despite more than 20 years of intensive foreign assistance. A recent study by the 24-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found "virtually no progress in per-capita income over the past two decades" in countries south of the Sahara Desert. Worse yet, said the report, sub-Saharan Africa now produces less food per person than it did in 1960, despite the tens of billions of aid dollars spent on rural development. Among reasons for this dismal record: ceaseless political strife, wrongheaded economic policies and a harsh and erratic climate.

Recent famines have spotlighted Africa's woes and the difficulty of providing help. When pictures of starving Ethiopian and Sudanese children appeared around the world, there was an outpouring of aid. Rock Musician Geldof was among the first to become involved in raising money, followed by USA for Africa, an American outfit that produced We Are the World, the smash- hit record of 1985.

But raising money often proved the easy part. In Ethiopia, the Marxist government of Mengistu Haile Mariam, which is battling guerrillas in the country's northern provinces, promptly turned aid into a political tool. Government troops seized a food-laden ship to keep supplies from reaching the rebel-held north, where the famine was most severe. In Sudan, guerrillas battling Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi's regime shot down a passenger plane last August, killing 60 people, and threatened to shoot any relief aircraft that tried to land in the south, where some 2 million Sudanese needed food.

Those and similar actions started a fierce debate among relief agencies about their dealings with local governments. In Paris, Doctors Without Borders attacked Mengistu's policy of forced resettlement of villagers living in the rebellious north. "Resettlement, not famine, is the biggest killer," said Claude Malhuret, the group's former president. For their efforts, the 26 doctors and nurses working for the organization in Ethiopia were kicked out of the country.

For all their good intentions, aid donors often find themselves at odds with the very people they seek to help. One common complaint is that some relief workers live in a style that contrasts vividly -- and insultingly -- with the poverty around them. In Mozambique, where about 40 Western agencies have offices, high-ranking aid workers can rent colonial villas staffed by servants and still save large chunks of salaries that may exceed $80,000 a year. That is a sum past reckoning in a country in which the average annual income is about $300. Such imported luxuries as Cuban cigars, French perfumes and Scotch whisky are available in hard-currency stores that Mozambicans seldom enter. "I often wonder who is helping whom," says an Italian engineer who has spent 17 years in the impoverished African nation.

When relief workers flooded into Sudan last summer to address the widespread famine there, Sudan Times Editor Bona Malwal wrote a full-page protest article. He attacked foreigners who "would like to stay in their air- conditioned homes in Khartoum, where they can be close to urban amenities, luxuries and, in some cases, their racially segregated clubs."

Not all those who provide assistance, of course, lead comfortable lives. Volunteers working for such private charitable organizations as Catholic Relief Services, Band Aid or Oxfam often live in spartan quarters and work exhaustingly long hours. In Khartoum, Alastair Scott-Villiers, 26, supervises the distribution of $22 million in Band Aid relief from a dingy hotel room that lacks a toilet or bath. His annual salary is about $14,000. Outside the capital, Liz Hughes, 25, shares a hut in the crumbling village of Mayo with two other Irish nurses. The threesome, who each receive $60 a month from Goal, an Irish relief group, has been helping to clean up the disease-ridden village's water supply and typically sees some 100 patients a day.

Outside big cities, many aid workers face constant danger. Guerrillas ambushed a 50-truck relief convoy late last year in southern Sudan, killing ten drivers. In a previous attack, rebels handcuffed truck drivers to their steering wheels and executed them by tossing hand grenades into the cabs. In Mozambique, where resistance fighters are at war with the Marxist government, few foreigners dare venture far from the capital of Maputo or other relatively secure areas. Some who do so never return. When relief workers reached the Indian Ocean port of Vilanculos last year, they found that a five-member East German aid team had been murdered by rebels a few miles from the town.

Even without the threat posed by guerrillas, not all Third World aid reaches its destination. Some is skimmed off by corrupt middlemen, some may wind up in the pockets of a country's officials, and still more may spoil or be stolen. "I wouldn't claim that 100% gets exactly where it should," concedes Jean-Pierre Hocke, United Nations high commissioner for refugees. Hocke estimates that up to 10% of relief contributions for refugees never gets to them. Says Millicent Fenwick, the American envoy to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome: "You have to understand that we are dealing with human beings, not saints."

Some of the assistance that does get through may be misguided or misused. Abandoned tractors and farm implements can be found rusting across Africa, while fields lie untended. When asked why the equipment went unused, one Ethiopian villager replied, "The foreigners came in, and when they left, we didn't know how to keep it going."

American foreign-aid efforts have shifted dramatically during the past decade. Washington, once a key source of development assistance, now stresses military rather than humanitarian help. The largest U.S.-aid recipients last year were Israel ($3 billion) and Egypt ($2 billion), and more than half of that assistance was in the form of weapons and other defense hardware. Not a single African country south of the Sahara was among the top-ten American-aid recipients. "We're basically out of the development business," says Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. "In the long run, that is unwise."

Winning votes for any type of foreign assistance is one of the toughest jobs in Washington. With domestic social programs tightly curtailed by Gramm-Rudman spending limits, few Congressmen can politically afford to support more overseas aid. Thus while the U.S. remains the world's largest single source of foreign giving, its contribution is the smallest among major industrial nations when measured as a fraction of gross national product.

Foreign-aid supporters argue that the West has little choice but to continue sharing its largesse with less fortunate nations. Without assistance, "this would be a less caring and compassionate world," says Representative Stephen Solarz of New York, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "These agencies embody the consciences of the countries that they come from." Yet at a time when government budgets everywhere are strained, political leaders demand more than ever that foreign aid be wisely given and effectively used.

With reporting by David S. Jackson/Khartoum and Neil MacNeil/Washington, with other bureaus