Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will not criticise the provision of aid, as I have seen genuinely good efforts being made to make things better on the ground, but I will be critical in dealing with the bigger picture. I started to read Jason Hickel’s book, The Divide, for the second time last weekend. It is such an amazing read. Everybody should read it if he or she wants to know how this world is operating. I want to read from it:

[T]he aid budget is [small] ... compared to the structural losses and outward flows that the global South suffers. Yes, some aid goes a long way towards making people's lives better, but it doesn't come close to compensating for the damage that the givers of aid themselves inflict. Indeed, some of this damage is caused by the very groups that run the aid agenda: the World Bank, for example, which profits from global South debt; the Gates Foundation, which profits from an intellectual property regime that locks life-saving medicines and essential technologies behind outlandish patent paywalls; and Bono, who profits from the tax haven system that siphons revenues out of global South countries.

This is not an argument against aid as such. Rather, it is to say that the discourse of aid distracts us from seeing the broader picture. It hides the patterns of extraction that are actively causing the impoverishment of the global South today and actively impeding meaningful development. The charity paradigm obscures the real issues at stake: it makes it seem as though the West is 'developing' the global South, when in reality the opposite is true. Rich countries aren't developing poor countries; poor countries are effectively developing rich countries - and they have been since the late 15th century.

Poverty in the global South is not a natural condition any more than is the wealth of the West. Poverty is, at base, the inevitable outcome of ongoing processes of plunder - processes that benefit a relatively small group of people at the expense of the vast majority of humanity. It is delusional to believe that aid is a commensurate, let alone honest and meaningful, solution to this kind of problem. The aid paradigm allows rich countries and individuals to pretend to fix with one hand what they destroy with the other, dispensing small bandages at the same time as they inflict deep injuries, and claiming the moral high ground for doing so.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the West Bank in Palestine. On one particularly hot afternoon, my hosts drove me down into the Jordan Valley to interview some farmers there about water issues. Along the way, bumping along a gravel track, we came across a huge white sign jutting out of the desert rocks. The sign announced a USAID initiative 'to help alleviate recurring water shortages' by adding a new well in the area. It was branded with the American flag and bore the proud words: 'This project is a gift from the American People to the Palestinian People.'

Mr. Hickel's book further states:

A casual observer might be impressed: American taxpayer money offered generously, in the spirit of humanitarianism, to assist impoverished Palestinians struggling to survive in the desert. But Palestine doesn't have a shortage of water. When Israel invaded and occupied the West Bank in 1967, with the backing of the US military, it asserted total control over the aquifers beneath the territory. Israel draws the majority of this water - close to 90% - for its own use in settlements and for irrigation on large industrial farms. And as the water table drops, Palestinian wells are running dry. Palestinians are not allowed to deepen their wells or sink new wells without Israeli permission - and permission is almost never granted. If they build without permission, as many do, Israeli bulldozers arrive the next day. So Palestinians are forced to buy their own water back from Israel at arbitrarily high prices.

This is not a secret. It is happening out in the open, and the farmers I spoke to know it all too well. For them, the USAID sign only adds insult to injury. It's not that they lack water, as USAID implies; it's that the water has been stolen from them. And it has been stolen with US support. In 2012, just two months before my visit, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 66/225, calling for the restoration of Palestinians' rights to their own water. One hundred and sixty-seven nations voted in favour of the resolution. The United States and Israel voted against it.

I tell this anecdote not just as an example of how aid often misses the point, but to illustrate a much larger truth. Poor countries don't need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty - the underlying architecture of wealth extraction and accumulation - development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade. We will continue to watch the poverty numbers rise, and the divide between rich and poor countries will continue to grow. This is a difficult truth to swallow for the millions of well-meaning people who have been sold on the development story.

I will conclude by making a point I raised with the Tánaiste about a month ago. I was highlighting the unbelievable humanitarian crisis in Yemen in which the US, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and European countries, mainly France and the UK, are involved. Up to 13 million people are at risk of starvation and up to 100,000 have been killed. It is a war crime of the worst type. The Tánaiste told me that the Government was giving extra aid to them. It should close the facility at Shannon Airport instead and not bother giving them aid. Stop facilitating their destruction. The Government can keep the aid.

See this speech in context