Some people just can't grasp this.
Even if the food was making it to the natives. They haven't learned you can't feed 12 kids on a 1 kid budget. Until they understand this we are only enlarging the problem.
R
Part of the '12 kids on a 1 kid budget....' is cultural... and caused by Western do-gooderism. Culturally, up until the post-WW2 period, the indigenous people in many of these 'aid' countries needed to have a lot of kids to ensure one or two would survive into adulthood. Epidemics, simple infections (common in tropical areas) raged out of control, famines, warfare, accidents, animal attacks... average life-expectancy was dismal. You wanted a couple of kids to survive in order to take care of you in your old age (no pensions, either... if you didn't have kids to feed you when you got old... you died...) you needed to up the odds by having lots of kids. So large numbers of births were the norm. Didn't hurt that missionaries were also pushing big families... more souls for the church. But large numbers of infant and childhood deaths were the norm, too.
Now along comes UNICEF (remember the little orange boxes we carried on halloween as kids?) and penicillin and modern nutrition and malaria spraying and food aid, and every other way of helping raise life-expectancy and allowing more kids to survive to adulthood... and you are going to have a population bomb. Now you have extra people who need food, firewood, meat, space... and something to do. And they have extra people.... and they have extra people. And all those people strip the natural resources, food, land, animals like locusts. They don't care about the magnificance of the White Rhino. It's a pile of meat. Period. So they eat everything in site, strip every bit of burnable wood down to cook their meager food... and destroy the very land that used to sustain them. All brought on because it was really saddening to watch starving kids in Technicolor for the '60's generation and a couple of generations of well-meaning Western do-gooders had to mess with the natural balance of things... in order to feel good.
I'm not saying it was a better life with high infant mortality... or that people shouldn't benefit from innovation and medicine and communications and all the other great stuff the 20th Century wrought. But there are unintended consequences of everything.... and being a do-gooder, while good at one level, can be utterly destructive at another level. Aid without thought as to the consequences has destroyed Africa and Mexico and dozens of other nations or cultures within nations.
BTW, the term I used above "population bomb" was the title of a book and theory by two professors named Ehrlich at Stanford in the '60s. It was one of the books that helped kick off the environmental movement, but also very controversial for its implicit advocacy of population control. It's a fascinating book. And disturbing. The radical environmental movement, which advocates vast human extermination to save the planet (among their other crazy ideas) garnered a lot of their ideas from these theories.
The main lesson is that second- third- and fourth-order unintended consequences are hard to predict and often very, very bad. It's not hard to argue that today's issues with unrest in massively-over-populated Muslim regions where there are no jobs, no opportunities, no options (and lots of envy over Western wealth) is a direct result of the ticking population bomb. When you can't see any 'out' of your current misery, martyrdom looks good and you'll grasp on to any idea that may give you escape from the hell that is a third-world existence.
No easy answers...
Cheers,
Sirhr
