Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia Since Live Aid

By Peter Gill

(Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $27.95)

In the fall of 1994, James P. Grant, the executive director of UNICEF, sent a message in the name of his agency to the upcoming Cairo conference on population and development, in which he declared that the world had within its grasp the means to solve “the problems of poverty, population, and environmental degradation that feed off of one another in a downward spiral [bringing] instability and strife in its wake.” Grant was a great man, a giant of the development world. He was among the first senior figures within the U.N. system, not to mention national governments in either the poor world or the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), to take on board the fundamental insight that development is inextricably bound up with the emancipation, education, and empowerment of women.

Throughout his long career, Grant was as unyieldingly optimistic about human possibility as he was clear-eyed about the extent of human suffering among the bottom half of the world’s population. He would have disliked Gramsci’s celebrated injunction, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”—he stood for realism of the intellect, optimism of the will. And the fact that his optimistic scenario for what could be achieved has not come to pass does not necessarily mean that Grant was wrong to say—as, were he alive today, he almost certainly would say—that there was every reason to believe that it could do so. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,” and all that.

There are fundamentally two views of development aid, and they are incompatible. The first is Grant’s, which is essentially that, after many false starts, we now know how to do development, and that what is lacking is political commitment and money from the donor side, and political commitment and fiscal responsibility on the part of the governments and the elites of the recipient countries. The opposing view is that, no matter our good intentions, and the literally tens of thousands of people in development ministries, relief groups, international and local development NGOs, and popular movements, we still do not know what we are doing. Those who favor an emphasis on entrepreneurial assistance rather than aid-based development solutions, the subtlest of whom by far is William Easterly, who runs the Development Research Institute at New York University, argue not only that much aid is wasted—about this optimists and skeptics largely agree—but that, after five decades, outside aid, whether given by governments or by the increasingly important philanthropic sector, above all the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has done little to alleviate the condition of the world’s poor. What is needed is private enterprise, and the more the better. As Easterly has put it, “the parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism.”

The critique from the left has important points of overlap with Easterly’s view. Colin Leys’s classic work The Rise and Fall of Development Theory, which was published in 1996, two years after James Grant had made his sweeping claims for the effectiveness of development aid, argued that the theoretical assumptions that have underpinned development policies since the 1950s no longer hold true, if indeed they ever did. The deregulation of international trade and the free movement of capital—that is, the move away from the post - World War II regime of regulation in which economic interventions by the state could be effective, which is the signature result of globalization—means that development aid on the traditional model has had fewer and fewer positive effects. As the longtime editor of the Socialist Register, Leys would probably not endorse this view, but a strong case can be made that just as it had been a mistake for supporters of communism who nonetheless opposed the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba to keep saying that not one of these actual communist regimes had lived up to the doctrine’s emancipatory potential, so it is time to admit that there is only “actually existing” development, and that it has not worked.