|By Rainer Zitelmann
Many people know Thilo Bode because he was managing director of Greenpeace for twelve years and later founder and director of foodwatch. He has now published his autobiography, “Resist!”. Bode began his career as a development worker and spent eleven years working in various countries – Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, Burkina Faso, and others. He says that in his early years he was naive and only later realized “that development aid cannot really contribute to overcoming poverty”.
In Somalia he was supposed to retrain nomads to become fishermen and was surprised that the minister in the then socialist country approved the contract immediately with his thumbprint and then, pointing to his suitcase, asked whether it contained the money for the project. “It did not. Nevertheless, it must be assumed that at least part of the project funds that were then regularly disbursed did not flow into the fishing fleet project, but into the pockets of the president and his clique. At the time, however, we talked ourselves into glossing over the issue of corruption.” Thirty years later, a UN report showed that only about half of the food aid reached the target groups, while the other half ended up with the warlords. A large portion of the money, Bode says, did not reach the needy population but seeped into the luxury villas and apartments that the nomenklatura bought with it in Paris or London.
What did he really achieve in Somalia? The country is now a failed state. “When I look back today, I can only conclude that after decades of foreign influence – including development aid – the country is worse off than it was 50 or 60 years ago shortly after its independence. The image of a heap of rubble forces itself upon you.”
Bode was also active in Tunisia for many years. Here, too, the ambitious projects, for example to promote tourism, did not help to improve the situation; in some cases it even became worse. “Development aid contributed to this extremely depressing state through its involvement, but also through looking the other way.”
Some Projects were later evaluated, but the data were based on reports written by the development workers themselves and were not publicly accessible. In an interview with the German daily newspaper Welt, Bode said: “Take Tunisia. I worked there as a development worker. All the aid of the last 30 or 40 years has not eliminated poverty. Instead, it has caused ecological damage, for example through the extraction of excessive amounts of groundwater for irrigation systems that are not maintained. Or for the cultivation of olive tree varieties that are unsuitable for the dry land and consume too much water. Added to this is the destruction of landscapes and cityscapes through mass tourism. Some have become rich, but we have contributed nothing to the development of the country.”
When asked why development aid funds were nevertheless still being given to such countries, Bode answered in the interview: “Because we are vulnerable to blackmail. Because our corrupt and authoritarian partners say: If you do not give us the money, then we will let even more refugee boats come to Europe. Added to this is the lack of transparency. Because the development workers evaluate themselves. I requested the audit reports of the last 40 years from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation. They were practically blacked out from the first to the last line.”
Numerous scientific studies, which I report on in my book “How Nations Escape Poverty” https://nations-escape-poverty.com/ , show that development aid is mostly ineffective and often even harmful. If the results of so many scientific studies are so clear, why does the conviction persist so stubbornly that development aid is the best way to free nations from poverty? I think it is the zero-sum belief. Many people believe that poor countries are only poor because rich countries have taken something away from them. The conclusion: rich countries must give up some of their wealth, and then poor countries will be better off. Bode puts it this way in his book: “We followed a simple cause-and-effect relationship: the developing countries are poor, and if we give them money for sensible projects and ensure through our support that these projects are properly implemented, then things will work out. In retrospect, this assumption is ridiculously simplistic.”
That this does not work has been clearly shown by the past decades. If the diagnosis of the problems of poor countries is wrong, then the therapy is also wrong. Both critics and supporters of development aid see it as a zero-sum game in which rich countries lose and poor countries benefit to the same extent. In principle, many critics and supporters agree on this: Supporters believe that the “sacrifices” must be accepted, out of compassion or as compensation for the West’s colonial sins. Critics believe that, given the problems in our own country, we cannot afford such generosity.
Supporters of development aid also try to convince people in rich countries with the argument that we ourselves would benefit, because this aid would “eliminate the causes of flight” and therefore more development aid would lead to less illegal migration.
Development aid would therefore not be a zero-sum game, but would lead to both sides winning. This is wrong for several reasons. First, poverty cannot be reduced through development aid, as the experience of past decades shows. But even if some people were slightly better off as a result, this would lead to more rather than less migration. The poorest of the poor do not come anyway, because they are not able to pay several thousand dollars to professional smugglers. Only those who are relatively better off can afford this.
Development aid is indeed not a zero-sum game, but a win-win situation, though in a very different way from what its advocates claim. On the one hand, powerful state development aid organizations and NGOs in rich countries benefit to a high degree, as do the many highly paid development workers employed in these structures. On the other hand, corrupt elites in the recipient countries benefit.
