Atlantic Monthly Press,
Foreign aid has reached immense proportions. If one excludes the billions spent yearly by private voluntary organizations such as the Hunger Project, Oxfam, and World Vision, and looks just at money raised by taxation and distributed by government agencies, the figure hovers around $60 billion a year. The budgets of most multinational corporations, including Standard Oil, IBM, Phillips, Nestlé, and Volkswagen, pale in comparison. And yet this figure, Graham Hancock, a former aid worker for the British Overseas Development Administration, points out, doesn’t even include the billions more in government-to-government loans, unless they are “soft” or concessional loans. The question Hancock asks, and answers, in this explosive book is just whom is this “aid” aiding.
The chief, if not the sole beneficiaries of foreign aid, Hancock shows, are the local elites in the recipient countries, special interest groups in the developed counties, and the aid bureaucracy itself. The chief losers? The First World taxpayers and the poverty-stricken in the Third World.
The aid “industry” is quite lucrative for those who administer its programs. Incomes for employees of international agencies are determined by the “Noblemaire Principle,” named after Georges Noblemaire, an employee of the League of Nations in the 1920s. According to this principle, salaries for employees of international organizations should be high enough “to attract as employees citizens of the country with the best-paid national civil service.” United Nations pay rates, Hancock notes, must therefore exceed “those of the federal civil service of the richest country on earth—the United States.”
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