The Failure of Aid...asinine philantropy

"Back in the early 1970s, in an effort to break the cycles of starvation in the Turkana region, Kenyan officials had delegated the Norwegian development agency Norad the task of retraining local herders to fish. The lake swarmed with tilapia and Nile perch. The idea was to wean the people off their boom-and-bust livestock economy, swap animal for fish protein, and make the nomads productive, sedentary citizens. The Scandinavians built a modern freezer plant near the lake. They taught people how to cast nets. And they distributed 20 large, modern fiberglass skiffs. The project was a colossal failure. As it turned out, freezing the catches cost more than the fish were worth. And, astoundingly, the foreigners hadn't bothered to ask whether the milk- and meat-addicted nomads even liked fish. (They didn't.) A decade after donors had sunk millions into the scheme, the Turkana pastoralists were as poor and hungry as ever. Many gave up and returned to the bush. A few of the more enterprising families found a novel use for their upturned fishing vessels as crude shelters. 

Lake Turkana's beached fishing fleet became an icon of asinine philanthropy in Africa."

-Paul Salopek, The Last Famine


We need to analyze what went wrong with this program, what were the structural deficits that created failure, not just for the project, but for the intended beneficiaries, as well as the Kenyan State, whose social contract with these nomadic tribes was thus eroded. A few superficial critiques of the program....

Program Design: participatory in nature? I think not...
Delegation of Program Responsibility: Is the Norweigan government better able to design and implement a program for nomads in Kenya than Kenyans in Nairobi are? Increased geographic distancing=increased chances for failure.
Focus on "Nomadic Productivity:" How can we learn/understanding that certain lifestyles are simply not conducive, in their traditional form, to integration into the wider, globalized economy? How can we understand/learn that pushing this integration will lead to greater failure, domination by power, and, if "successful," only succeeds in bringing people onto the lowest rungs of development while stripping their cultural identity and community bonds?
Modern Freezer Plant: A great symbol/metaphor for the imposition of inappropriate technology upon unwilling recipients; the vestiges of these projects dominate the landscape of so many LDC's....

and so much more....

"The Last Famine"

One of the great journalists of our time, Paul Salopek, recently published an article on the famine in the Horn of Africa this year (Foreign Policy Magazine, March 2012).
Salopek, with his characteristic, ethnographic approach, details the impact of the famine, of the environmental change, on nomadic, pastoralist communities in the north of Kenya, in the region of the mythic Lake Turkana, "...A gargantuan wilderness of hot wind and thorn stubble..."

Salopek's investigation turns him, seemingly unwittingly, as he is also a humanist,  into a critic of humanitarian aid; his words encapsulate the conundrum of long-term humanitarian assistance:

"The savannas were crisscrossed by invisible migration routes, seasonal pasturage rights, proprietary water holes. In a place as destitute as the Turkana Basin, food aid hadn't just swollen human populations, but undermined those antique rules. It had also encouraged the nomads, ruinously, to maintain more animals than the fragile pastures could sustain; living on donations, they saw little need to eat or sell off their herds in times of drought. And so, the rangelands eventually wore away, becoming sterile as concrete."

The fine line of humanitarian assistance, of ecological devastation, of the increasingly heavy human burden on remote, ragged, thin lands, in addition to its thickening presence elsewhere; the human as the occupier of this earth, its burden.
Stopping food aid to these communities would cause mass death, which is not a viable solution, even for the most hardened critics of foreign assistance.

Is it possible to go back? Has the West, has our benevolence, brought about systematic destruction of survival mechanisms, and, if so, what is to be done?