Hungry

Working in a developing country, you quickly realize that nothing works the way you thought it would.  The dirty, naked, African babies with fly encrusted eyes from commercials are not always lurking around corners, waiting to break your heart.  And though your first urge if you did happen to come across one would be to empty your wallet to fix this problem, your quarters and dimes would be poor fodder for a hungry child.  Hunger may not work how you thought.

To begin with, not all hunger is created equal.  Many of the world's malnourished children ate breakfast, lunch and dinner today, and snacks in between.  Even so, their bellies bloat, hard and round, with shadows showing between their ribs, skinny limbs carrying them around. Named kwashiorkor malnutrition, this illness means they're eating--just not the right balance of things.  Carbohydrate loading and a low-protein diet (usually coupled with gastrointestinal distress) can lead to long term and sometimes irreversible damage.  Marasmus malnutrition, on the other hand, is an illness faced by children trying to grow up with no food at all--a hallmark of famine, war, extreme poverty, and lack of access.  These two problems require two very different solutions.

In both cases, the normal procedure seems to be to send boat loads of plumpy'nut (an amazing nutritionally rich sweetened bar used to combat malnutrition) to villages and let people figure out how best to deal.  When there is no food, and no other options, this makes perfect sense. Refugees, displaced persons in war, and drought would all be good reasons for this.  But when having no food is NOT the cause of malnutrition, you can't just throw food at a child to solve this problem.  I personally met dozens of mothers while working in Burkina Faso who managed to get their babies up to weight using plumpy'nut, sometimes in just a few weeks--and then I saw them come back in two months, as the plumpy'nut ran out, and they still had no idea how to feed their children correctly, even though all the resources were already available.

As has been seen before, throwing free shoes, money, and food at developing countries rarely fixes anything and often makes things worse.  There are shoe makers, business owners, and food vendors in most of even the most impoverished places.  By dropping a load of free shoes in the middle of a village, you put all the cobblers out of business.  By dropping a bunch of money on a country, you buy a new land rover for a politician.  By dropping a bunch of free grain, you ensure a farmer will make no money that year. 

So should we stop trying to help developing countries? No, but aid organizations have to work smarter and be more responsible.  Free money and development should not go hand in hand.  That was development 50 years ago.  It's time to be better.