Bucking the Trend; or, Malawi: Wowee!

Well, you would think that this would be the ideal way for foreign aid to work.

Then again, a lot of these nations are third world because their soil is arrid, not capable of supporting a large agricultural industry.

What would be really awesome to see is industry consultants, civil planners/engineers and financial analysts come into a region (i.e. Africa), figure out what sorts of available resources already exist and develope plans with local governments to build industries based on that. So, if your small third world country doesn't have soil for farming, you could erect some other type of industry, while your neighbors might have an ideal landscape for food production, encouraging trade between the two newly developing nations.

Subsidies on goods which can be used for PRODUCTION go a lot farther than just large sums of PRODUCT. It's kind of like an artificial dependency that seeks only to sustain itself.

I think it's a brilliant idea, and I'd like to see more creative thought go into how to realistically help underdeveloped nations reach a state of self sufficiency. In fact, it's almost a direct analogy to one of the oldest bits of wisdom I can think of "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, you feed him for the rest of his life."

Jam it back in, in the dark.

What seems to be unique is that they for once identified a deficiency and came up with a simple solutions. Shipping metric tonnage of food to a country which already has an existing agricultural industry doesn't make any sense at all, if anything foreign aid should be administered with some sort of gameplan. Instead of just lobbing money and goods at a situation, it causes a weird sort of dependency upon us and other nations that could be solved with a little bit of data analysis and critical thinking.

There's nowhere I can't reach.