Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

1,000 Days to Reach the U.N.’s Millennium Goals—and It’s Not Looking Good

April 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Aid-Stat-Screencap

The 2012 list of how much money the world's wealthier countries gave to international development schemes is out. They are giving less and less. The stats are from the cheerily-named Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD), which studied its members. Aid was down 4 percent last year and 2 percent in 2011, according to a statement. The downward trend is the steepest reduction in aid in 15 years. The interminable European economic crisis is a key culprit in this. The numbers show aid budgets crashed hardest in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal—nations slammed by ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, The 101
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Burma’s Redemption More Domestic Than Imported

May 18, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Flag of Burma

Today’s diplomatic hardball over U.S. sanctions in Burma would be a great Graham Greene novel, were there any evidence the program played a central role in the dictatorship’s unraveling. Burma analyst Andrew Selth at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Australia and investigators at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, among others, argue that foreign pressure isn’t the stick that beat reform into Burma. It’s the carrot, and not much of one. The basic argument is pretty simple and goes like this: Burma’s longtime strongman, Than Shwe, got old and passed power ... Read More

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Paul Theroux on What’s Really Wrong With Africa

April 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Paul Theroux on What’s Really Wrong With Africa

Paul Theroux’s new novel, The Lower River, is one of a series of books in which the longtime author and travel writer reimagines seminal events in his own life. Like his protagonist, Ellis Hock, Theroux was in the Peace Corps in Malawi in the early 1960s. In his 44 books — fiction and nonfiction — he has never shied from commenting on the possibilities and perils humans face in their quest for solutions. Here is his recent conversation with Pacific Standard Editor-in-Chief Maria Streshinsky: Question: You have said it is contemptible “to stay home and invent the exotic, as Saul ... Read More

More like this: Culture, May-June 2012
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Review: Seeing Haiti’s Distress as People, Not Statistics

November 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
A Promise in Haiti

Confronted with large-scale natural or man-made disaster, most people have great difficulty making sense of, or being able to relate to, it in the context of their own experiences and daily lives. Suffering is much more easily dealt with when broken down into small, easy-to-digest portions. Reading Anne Frank’s diary lets us identify with her and almost able to imagine the tedium mixed with fear of detection while hiding from the Nazis, or the misery and horror of her final weeks in Bergen-Belsen. The tragedy of the Holocaust — too big, really, for anyone to fully comprehend — acquires ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Foreign Aid Should Deliver Science, Too

July 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The United States Agency for International Development once had a robust record on science and technology, including work that helped lead to new crop strands and oral rehydration solutions for use in parts of the world where some of the biggest development challenges are drought and deadly diarrhea. That record all but disappeared over the last 15 years. "The funding dried up, the institutional structures went away, the scientists left the agency,” said Raj Shah, who became USAID’s administrator a year and a half ago. “By the time I got there, there were only two scientific ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Building Mosques: Realpolitik vs. Constitution

May 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

The United States Agency for International Development published a proposed rule change in the Federal Register back in March that startled many legal scholars and civil libertarians. The agency, which is responsible for doling out the State Department's economic and humanitarian assistance throughout the world, wanted to update two paragraphs in a federal regulation governing who is eligible for U.S. aid money overseas. USAID funds, the updated rule proposes, may in the future be used "for the acquisition, construction, or rehabilitation of structures that are used, in whole or in part, ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Helping World’s Poor? There’s An App for That

March 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A growing number of foreign aid organizations have been coming around to the novel idea that the well-off could best help the world’s poor simply by giving them money. Don’t build roads or fund public health campaigns or proffer job skills — just give people cash. The idea has been floated, among other places, in the aptly titled book Just Give Money to the Poor, which Miller-McCune reviewed last summer. As far as how to go about doing that, though, a parallel seismic shift in the reality on the ground in the world’s poorest countries could enable aid organizations to scale up the ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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Foreign Aid for a Frugal Age

February 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

As they prepared to take control of the House of Representatives, congressional Republicans were also getting ready to take on foreign aid — with a scalpel or a meat-ax, depending on how one parsed words. U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, conservative South Florida Republican and incoming House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, told Agence France-Presse she wants "to cut the U.S. State Department and foreign aid budgets and use U.S. contributions to force reforms in multilateral organizations like the United Nations." And Foreign Policy magazine suggested that Rep. Kay Granger — a Texan who is ... Read More

More like this: March-April 2011, Not the Editor's Letter, Politics
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Making Seed Aid Blossom

November 18, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

The summer floods continue to leave Pakistanis struggling to survive. Some areas are reporting 100 percent crop losses and tens of thousands of livestock deaths, making Pakistan’s agricultural future uncertain at best. Around 17 million acres of crops are under water or destroyed, and many of the animals that have survived have nothing to eat. With the wheat-planting season already under way, experts fear that crops for the next two years could be affected if farmers are unable to plant by this November. The Pakistan Emergency Response Fund, set up by the United Nations, has thus far ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics
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Letting Your Good Intentions Backfill My Budget

November 6, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

Donors in the world's richest nations send tens of billions in aid to developing countries every year, and it's no secret that corruption and malfeasance hinder those efforts. But there's another, less well-known predicament that affects aid to poor nations: fungibility. Instead of supplementing the money that a government spends for a particular purpose — like fighting HIV/AIDS — donor dollars may just replace local outlays. Donations intended to boost the amount of money devoted to a worthy cause might actually reduce it. Development economists and experts disagree on how common ... Read More

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