…the New Internationalist was not long independent of its launch funding by UK charities Oxfam and Christian Aid. Those agencies felt development issues needed to be more widely discussed, having been appalled that a big cut in the British government’s overseas aid budget had met with little public protest. I wonder, then, what they made of this trenchant assessment of aid.
‘Foreign aid is a waste... In practice, the humanitarian aims of aid are often usurped by more utilitarian political and commercial concerns… The amount of aid received by a poor country has less to do with poverty than with how much it is willing to accommodate itself to the current global economic system…’ (nin.tl/NIonaid1979)
