Ryan C Briggs

Edward Miguel, an economics professor at University of California at Berkeley, gave an interview to American Public Media. The APM article was given the unfortunate title “Using foreign aid to stop conflict” [my emphasis]. Based on the title, I was prepared to write a scathing post on the difficulties of providing relief aid in conflict situations, let alone using aid to actually stop a conflict.

It turns out that the article is mistitled and Dr. Miguel offers an interesting discussion on the links between poverty, climate change, and violence. His basic idea is that poverty and famine will increase due to climate change and that aid should be able to prevent some cases of violence by reducing poverty. His words:

What can be done about this looming catastrophe? First, Western nations must use foreign aid to stop African conflicts before they start. Aid should act as insurance. We know economic volatility like drought increases the risk of armed violence, so aid donors can identify the countries at greatest risk by tracking the weather. Once they know which countries are experiencing droughts or other major economic shocks, foreign aid could be ramped up quickly to bolster short-run economic conditions. This could head off political instability and violence.

The short article is worth reading, but the idea of basing aid on weather tracking is too sci-fi for me. We can’t get a reliable weather report for a week in the future, so how can we get one in time to ramp up aid disbursement? Also, famines are usually caused more by skewed food distribution than a lack of production. Aid can effectively make up for a temporary food shortage due to a poor harvest, but it cannot fix the political situation that lead to a skewed distribution of food in the first place.

When thinking about charged issues like famines, it is important to keep in mind the imperfections of our tools. This applies to the technology or methods that we use to allocate aid, and doubly so to aid itself.