Word: aids
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That is good charity, but bad development theory. Development is all about the long term - about building up the skills and infrastructure that sustain economic growth. Food aid was never meant to be more than a temporary stopgap before the implementation of slower, lasting solutions. In his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus argued that famines were simply a case of too many people with not enough food. Malthus noted that populations tended to grow faster than food supply - and predicted global catastrophe without drastic population reductions. In 1981, the economist and Nobel prizewinner Amartya...
Most of the world has followed such basic rules, to good effect. The world has grown richer and food aid has declined, from 20% of all official development assistance in the 1960s to less than 5% in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But we're still feeding Africa. East Africa accounts for 4% of the world's population but 20% of food aid, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; for all Africa, the figures...
...than all Africa. Palm oil was originally exported from West Africa to the industries of Europe; today Indonesia is a major producer and Nigeria a major importer. Often, donors are scrambling to make up ever bigger shortfalls in ever more desperate circumstances. The World Food Programme says emergency food aid rose from $258.1 million in 1989 to $2.8 billion in 2003. The OECD adds humanitarian disasters are becoming "more frequent, more severe and longer...
...options were immediately available. Most Evangelical do-gooding in the past century has been accomplished through Christian aid-and-development organizations like the behemoth World Vision. They work a lot like secular NGOs, maintaining a few dozen paid employees who manage long-term aid and community projects in poor areas for decades-long stretches. More recently, another model has emerged: each year, often during school breaks, about a million short-term volunteer missionaries in gangs of about 15 briefly saturate the Third World, enthusiastic if often ill-prepared, to build houses or dig wells and/or share the Gospel for about...
...nothing in his sales pitch - to thousands of pastors, dozens of heads of state, financiers at the Davos World Economic Forum and editorial boards - that suggests where its limits might be. He refers repeatedly to the "1 billion" Christians he thinks the plan can mobilize. His sell combines the aid wonk's jargon of "self-sufficiency, scalability and reproducibility," the dotcommer's dream of exponential growth and something older. Says one pastor participant: "This is like the fishes-and-loaves story. People think that that kind of miracle is happening...