Foreign Aid Has Flaws. So What? - by NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Sorry - Times Select (NYT)

Foreign Aid Has Flaws. So What?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: June 13, 2006

"Don't tell anyone, but a dirty little secret within the foreign aid world is that aid often doesn't work very well.

Now that truth has been aired (and sometimes exaggerated) in a provocative new book by William Easterly, "The White Man's Burden." Mr. Easterly, a former World Bank official who is now an economics professor at New York University, has tossed a hand grenade at the world's bleeding hearts — and, worst of all, he makes some valid points.

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But the rest of us should read it, because there is a growing constituency for fighting global poverty, and we need to figure out how to make that money more effective.

I disagree with many of Professor Easterly's arguments, but he's right about one central reality: helping people can be much harder than it looks. When people are chronically hungry, for example, shipping in food can actually make things worse, because the imported food lowers prices and thus discourages farmers from planting in the next season. (That's why the United Nations, when spending aid money, tries to buy food in the region rather than import it.)

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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/13/opinion/13Kristof.html