The other day I was talking with Developing World Awareness Club President Alan Wright when he told me 30,000 children die every day of preventable causes.
He elaborated: “AJ, these are preventable causes such as malnutrition, diseases with cheap vaccinations and lack of access to clean water. Imagine if those were American children, and we watched them die and did nothing.”
I immediately told Alan not to worry because, lucky for us, I had a plan.
The plan is simple – every time you go to a restaurant, ask for some extra packets of ketchup – the more the better. You can ask for barbecue sauce, honey mustard or sweet and sour, but really, ketchup is the best because it is the only condiment that passes as a vegetable (according to Reagan administration guidelines). Now once you finish your meal, stick the extra ketchup packets in an envelope, label it “AFRICA” and take it to the post office.
The best part about this idea is everyone can do their fair share. It will be a huge grassroots movement. I already have a campaign slogan: “Colonialism and Imperialism are past: Now is our time to Ketchup on Development!” I am planning to call Ronald McDonald to get his thoughts about the campaign and to see if he’d like to be its spokesman.
See, the great thing about ketchup is you probably could live off it forever because it’s got lycopene (I don’t know what that means, I just know the bottle says it fights cancer). Then once those in need got ketchup, they could spend their time developing because they would have plenty of food. Alan seemed skeptical of my idea, so I took my idea to the pros.
I asked Professor Andrew Blum, head of the International Development and Conflict Management minor, what he thought of Ketchup Development. He told me: “It’s a bad idea, but not for reasons you might think.” I looked at him skeptically. I mean, Ronald McDonald was practically on board!
He explained to me international aid really has to be tailored to the needs of the country receiving aid, and not to the needs of the donor country. This means my idea of Ketchup Development, while a great sell to the American people, is not very well tailored to the needs of those in developing countries.
We have made mistakes like Ketchup Development, though maybe not as large scale. Blum recalled a story of the United States showing up in Laos with a bunch of wheat, when in Laos, the people’s entire diet is based off rice and would not have the slightest idea what to do with wheat.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident. One of our aid programs is Food for Peace, which dumps subsidized U.S. farm goods on developing economies and floods their markets, driving down the price of the agricultural goods most developing economies rely on for income. Blum told me it was a sort of a Catch-22 – the programs that are easy to sell to the American people, like the dumping of subsidized agricultural goods, aren’t effective. So when we use these easy tactics to sell programs, people see they don’t work and then claim aid does not work at all.
International development must be tailored to those who need it. Whether you choose to acknowledge it, international development attacks the root of some of the biggest global issues today: war, terrorism, HIV and AIDS, avian flu, poverty and immigration, to name some of the most important ones. While sending items like ketchup may make us feel warm and fuzzy, it is only by sending what people need – money, resources and experts – that we would be making sure we are really as good as we claim to be.
So, will we just send ketchup to make ourselves feel better, or will we attack the root causes that create this tragedy so we can realize the kind of world we want to live in?
AJ Burton is a junior government and politics major. He can be reached at ajburton@umd.edu.
