Shuffling the Deck - Canadian Foreign Aid

The Harper government is shortening the list of beneficiaries of Canadian foreign aid. Without explaining the rationale on which the Harpies cut the winners from the losers, the new focus will be on Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, the Caribbean, Colombia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Indonesia, Mali, Mozambique, Pakistan, Peru, Senegal, Sudan, Tanzania, Ukraine, Vietnam and the West Bank/Gaza.

International Co-operation Minister, "Odious Bev" Oda said the idea is to get the greatest bang for Canada's buck rather than handing out dribs and drabs to many needy states.

This could be an excellent opportunity to restructure Canada's foreign aid along, let's say, environmental lines. After all, we're per capita next only to the US in carbon emissions and anthropogenic global warming is already afflicting a number of nations, particularly in the Sahel. So why don't we take half the money and send it to the global warming victims of our excess and leave the other half to help innocent victims of war in places like Darfur, the Congo, Afghanistan and West Bank/Gaza.

It just seems to me if we're trashing peoples' livelihoods in far off lands, the least we can do is give them first dibs on our foreign aid assistance.

Now, More Than Never

First you drive up grain prices, then you cut aid to those you've hurt most. Neat trick, eh?

Grain prices are up, everybody knows that. Wheat alone has shot up around 80% in the past year and corn, well it's way up too, in part due to diversion of stocks for ethanol production. It's a great time for agribusiness but, in fairness, it might not be quite so good if you're starving.

As the Washington Post reports, soaring grain prices are being met in the U.S., not with a commensurate increase in funding, but with a commensurate decrease in the amount of food that'll go to those who need it most:

"The U.S. government's humanitarian relief agency will significantly scale back emergency food aid to some of the world's poorest countries this year because of soaring global food prices, and the U.S. Agency for International Development is drafting plans to reduce the number of recipient nations, the amount of food provided to them, or both, officials at the agency said.

USAID officials said that a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months has generated a $120 million budget shortfall that will force the agency to reduce emergency operations. That deficit is projected to rise to $200 million by year's end. Prices have skyrocketed as more grains go to biofuel production or are consumed by such fast-emerging markets as China and India."

Relax, it's not like the poor have SUVs anyway. They don't even need ethanol.