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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (115519)	9/23/2003 12:56:58 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You have a very negative, and I think unwarranted, opinion of religious people. Note four medical missionaries were shot in Yemen, a country where non-Muslim proselytism is illegal. Yet they were there providing medical aid, doing no proselytism except by example. cbc.ca In any event, I would think private (either religious or non-religious) aid would be more likely to reach the needy than govt to govt aid.

To: epicure who wrote (115519)	9/23/2003 2:41:08 AM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Respond to of 281500

Whereas direct aide from a foreign government is purely altruistic. Yea, right.

To: epicure who wrote (115519)	9/23/2003 4:39:51 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

<rant> Virtually all aid, whether private or public, has strings attached, and is generally more concerned with the donor's agendas than with the needs of the recipients. This is true of public and private aid from the US, and from other donors as well. Money channeled through many cause-oriented NGOs is as tied as money from the missionaries - it just goes to promote a different external agenda. The real scandal is not how little the developed nations spend in aid, but how much they spend to protect their non-competitive agricultural sectors from competition from producers in the developing world. The US, Europe, and Japan - equally guilty - spend far more to prevent poor countries from selling the only products they can efficiently produce than they do in aid. In many cases developed nations have lent huge sums of money to promote export-oriented agriculture and develop the infrastructure needed for exports in 3rd world countries, then manipulated markets to make sure those exports can't happen profitably. Trade is much better than aid, and dismantling the protection given to 1st world agribusiness will do more for the developing world than doubling or tripling the amount spent on aid, whether private or public. Frankly, the way aid is administered these days - and that goes for private aid as well as public aid - is so messed up that I don't think doubling or tripling it would accomplish a great deal. </rant>