The Unintended Consequences of Foreign Aid: Theodore Dalrymple explains how Western policies have poisoned the water supplies of 70 million in Bangladesh

Posted by Theodore Dalrymple

Well-intentioned policies can have disastrous outcomes. Theodore Dalrymple explains how philanthropic Western policies have poisoned the water supplies of up to 70 million in Bangladesh.

The home page of my internet service provider carries news stories. The other day, I noticed two that were next to one another. The first reported that there were record numbers of passes at high grades in the GCSEs, and the other reported that British employers were complaining that young Britons lacked basic skills such as the ability to read and add up.



Could these two phenomena be related in some way, I wondered? Reader, I think that possibly they could be related: indeed, the relationship is so obvious that it hardly needs elaboration.



The juxtaposition of stories is often interesting and instructive. For example, in The Lancet for 11th August 2007, there was a laudatory profile of Joseph Graziano, a pharmacologist and dean of research at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. Professor Graziano heads a team that is trying to tackle arsenic poisoning from the consumption of well-water in Bangladesh. His work, he said, was his life, and I am sure he was not exaggerating. Such dedication is indeed beyond praise.



Six pages away from the profile was another item about the arsenic-poisoning in Bangladesh. It carries a picture of a Bangladeshi man holding up his hands displaying "the characteristic blackening" of arsenic poisoning. Two of the fingers of his right hand have been amputated because of arsenic-induced gangrene.

The text of the article begins with these words:

More than 70 million people in Bangladesh are estimated to be exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from their drinking water in what WHO has called the "largest mass poisoning of a population in history".

The symptoms of long-term exposure ot arsenic begin with the blackening of the hands and feet, progressing to nodular growths, and later to open sores and gangrene. Eventually, it can lead to cardiovascular and reproductive damage and to virulent cancers of the bladder, skin, lungs and liver. In children, the exposure is also thought to lead to learning difficulties and other neurological effects. Researchers� say that the arsenic poisoning could double Bangladesh's cancer mortality rate within two decades.

Once people have been exposed for several years, conservatively estimated at a decade, the DNA damage almost guarantees that cancer is imminent.

You can't just make this a natural history of arsenic poisoning.

The sad irony is that the problem is the unintended consequence of a campaign in the 1970s and 1980s by international development organisations, including UNICEF, to get villagers to stop drinking dirty surface water.

For such a massive disaster, the response by international aid agencies has been small, especially since researchers estimate that substantial mitigation could be achieved for less than US$100 million.

The challenge now is to try to influence policies in Bangladesh, but very cautiously. We don't want to be a bunch of white guys going in and saying, "we know what to do" - the way the international agencies that promoted the original well-digging programme did.

one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,

It all makes work for the working man to do.

Here are the effects:And one of those researchers is reported as having said that:What caused the largest mass poisoning of a population in history? After all, the people of East Bengal have not always suffered from arsenic poisoning. Professor Graziano is reported as having remarked:No, indeed not - for, as we are told, relatively sotto voce as it were:It was they who advised and paid for the wells that seem to have poisoned up to half the population of the country.Let us perform a small thought experiment. Let us suppose that a commercial mining company had, in the course of its operations, poisoned the water supply of 70,000,000 people in this quite specific way. Would that have been regarded as "a sad irony", an unintended consequence of its search for profit, or perhaps as something rather more sinister and indeed typical of the way such companies operate? Would there not have been large demonstrations, probably turning soon to violence, against that company by those in the developed world who habitually express their solidarity with the impoverished victims of exploitation by their own nations' multinationals? It is unlikely that we would ever hear the end of the matter - in such a case, quite rightly.When people buy their UNICEF Christmas cards, how many of them know what the organisation, and others like it, have wrought in Bangladesh? It isn't even as if such organisations feel any institutional guilt - The Lancet reports that:In a way this is understandable. As Professor Graziano puts it:As it happens, I don't really believe that the situation in Bangladesh is a sad irony at all, though of course I don't go as far as to say that it was wished by anybody. I worked for a number of years in another country, Tanzania, in which foreign aid did, or at least permitted and actually paid for, a great deal of harm to be done. It was foreign aid, and foreign aid alone, that enabled the government to remove a very high percentage of the rural population from where it was living and dump it in collectivised villages, as well as to destroy the viable commercial farming sector, thus condemning the country and its inhabitants, apart from senior members of the ruling party, to many years of quite unnecessary pauperdom.As I quickly discovered in Tanzania and elsewhere, foreign aid offers a lucrative career in good working conditions to middle class people of the developed world who want a little adventure in their lives, and who would once have been colonial officers; and it offers tempting opportunities for malversation of funds to their bureaucratic counterparts in the Third World. This symbiosis is the natural consequence of asking precisely the wrong question: not where wealth comes from, but where poverty comes from.As far as I am aware, not a single country has ever been lifted from poverty to prosperity by foreign aid, though no doubt many individuals have been so lifted. I do not mean any personal asperity when I remark that, when Professor Graziano told The Lancet that working with the multidisciplinary team which is trying to solve the arsenic poisoning of Bangladesh wasI could not help but think of that line from the old Flanders and Swann song to the effect thatis a writer and worked for many years as an inner city and prison doctor.