The Road to Hell (31 page)

It was then that the young technician realized for the first time what his real job was. As an officer of the Ministry of Agriculture, Abdi Dheere was expected to help the friends of Siyaad. For years it had been illegal to sell or transfer land. Now it was happening quickly, outside of any new laws or
procedures. Government ministers were buying the land and planting it or reselling parts of it for huge profits.

“One thing is very clear to everyone,” Abdi Dheere said. “The government cared only about the production of bananas. Siyaad gave as much as possible to any group that wanted to produce bananas. But these groups were his own people. In all the time I worked there, I never heard a thing about encouraging the production of basic agriculture. Ninety-nine percent of letters and circulars were about banana production.”

Some of the policies he was asked to execute were actually detrimental to food production. For example, he was told to implement flood-prevention procedures to protect the bananas. In the same areas, small-scale farmers relied on floods to irrigate their land. “In lower Juba we have land depressions where water gathers during rains. Eighty percent of the farmers planted behind the receding water. If you wanted to help small farmers you shouldn't be protecting the land against floods. We really needed to be helping people capture the water before it receded back to the river. But the regime was never interested in helping people become self-sufficient.”

It wasn't just the former state-owned farms that were being snapped up by Siyaad's inner circle. Traditional farmers were forced out of business by low prices and were either driven off their land or forced to sell it cheaply. In essence, the West's surplus grains were subsidizing the production of bananas and other crops that did not compete with Western agricultural interests. And Somalia's elite were making millions of dollars at both ends of the system. All this was made possible by food aid—and as more farmers were forced off their land, food aid became more necessary. The cycle of food-aid dependence was self-sustaining.

And what about the donors? Did they care what their aid was doing? A World Bank study charged that donors were concerned only with their own domestic agricultural situation. “[D]onors' food aid budgets are primarily influenced by prospects for commercial exports of their food surpluses rather than being determined in accordance with the needs and objectives of recipient countries to reduce their food import dependency. Accordingly, donors usually reduce their food aid budgets when prospects for commercial exports of surpluses are good and increase than when those prospects are poor. As a result, significant price fluctuations are likely to occur in the domestic food market, particularly when the former decision of donors happens to coincide with a poor harvest in the recipient country and the latter with a good one.”

The World Bank released this study in the form of a “discussion paper”
entitled
Food Import Dependence in Somalia: Magnitude, Causes, and Policy Options
, by Y. Hossein Farzin in 1988, when Somalia was well past the point of no return. The introduction to the paper points out that this is not a full-fledged study but merely a discussion paper: “preliminary and unpolished results of country analysis or research that is circulated to encourage discussion and comment; citation and the use of such a paper should take account of its provisional character.” In reality, the “discussion paper” format is a technique used to release controversial data. It gives the Bank the option of distancing itself from the conclusions while at the same time covering its ass when, down the line, someone asks them how they could not have known what was going on. By 1988, when it had long been apparent that food aid had methodically undermined Somalia's civil society, such a study was required. The Bank released it just in time to relieve itself of responsibility when the government collapsed.

The paper concluded: “Somalia has become, alarmingly, and more than any other country in Sub-Saharan Africa, dependent on imported food. This is particularly striking when one notes that the Somali economy has been predominantly agricultural/pastoral and that, up until the early seventies, it used to be self-sufficient in food grains.” Farzin examined Somalia's food imports, excluding emergency food for war and drought, and concluded that food imports had grown at an annual rate of more than 21 percent.

“[T] he share of food import in total volume of food consumption rose from less than 33 percent on average for the 1970-79 period to over 63 percent during the 1980-84 period.” This later period coincides with Western involvement in the Somalia economy and the beginning of U.S. and EEC food-aid programs to Somalia. It should also be noted that this was a period without a significant drought or food emergency in Somalia, nor was there any increase in Somali exports: Food-aid imports were replacing production, putting farmers out of business.

The discussion paper determined that the growth of food aid in Somalia was fourteen times higher than the growth of food consumption. Food was dumped into Somalia as fast as donors could get it there. The discussion paper then said what everyone knew, and what most avoided saying: “[B]y increasing the supply (or sometimes oversupplying the market), food aid often acts to dampen domestic food prices or, at least, prevent them from rising, thereby reducing incentives to domestic producers of food crops and exacerbating the national food deficit. This disincentive effect had been strong in the case of Somalia because food aid (a) substantially augmented
total food imports rather than just replacing commercial imports, and (b) has been sold in the domestic market at prices significantly below import parity levels evaluated as a realistic market exchange rate.”

Farzin identified another problem with food aid: “Food aid, when provided for an extended period of time, can change the food habits of consumers (particularly that of urban groups) in the recipient country through replacing traditional food grains by imported substitutes. This has certainly been the case in Somalia, where there has been a notable shift in consumption out of sorghum and maize to rice and wheat products.” This, of course, is the primary goal of food aid in the first place as articulated in congressional testimony and in the language of the Food for Peace Act. Get them hooked so they'll buy our food.

Despite all this evidence, NGOs and advocates of food aid continue to hoist up pictures of starving children and claim that food aid has brought significant improvements to the developing world. USAID continues to claim that its programs improve “food security” in countries where they operate. However, in July 1993, the U.S. General Accounting Office had this to say about the food programs: “AID has no strategy for assessing the impact of its programs on enhancing the food security of people in recipient countries, nor has it determined whether food aid is an efficient means for accomplishing this goal.”
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This might have been an interesting comment when food aid began back in the 1950s, but coming as it did in 1993, after more than thirty-five years of food-aid programs, it points to gross negligence or perhaps malfeasance on the part of USAID, the Department of Agriculture, and NGOs involved in food aid.

Here are other comments from that same report:

This is what I had noted when 1 worked for Catholic Relief Services fourteen years before the GAO report was published. The organization's definition of success was based solely on the number of people fed. Neither CRS nor USAID had the expertise or the inclination to seriously study what all that food was doing to the individuals or the societies where it was being dumped.

A
separate but related problem in Somalia was caused by the currency generated by the sales of food. First, sales of Title III commodities were supposed to be used in development projects. But donors turned a blind eye as those “counterpart funds” were pocketed by officials all along the food chain. Farzin's study found that “the donors of food aid have rarely requested the government to use the counterpart funds (local currency) generated from the sales of food aid to provide incentives to domestic food grain producers. Where there had been any conditionality on the use of such funds, it has often been limited to payment to donors' project contractors and personnel to cover their local costs.” In other words, as long as the donors had their expenses covered, they let the government do as it pleased with the rest of the money.

A separate U.S. study also criticized the use of these counterpart funds: “Control of these funds was sloppy at best. Despite donors' efforts to monitor use of counterpart currency, ministries used development projects for personal gain through sweetheart contracts, overinvoicing, and false documents.”

The author of the U.S. study, David Rawson, is too kind to the donors. The truth is they didn't want to monitor the use of funds. It was a no-win proposition for them. The government was going to steal the money whether the donors could account for it or not. Siyaad Barre was not afraid of aid bureaucrats and foreign diplomats. The only way donors could control the funds would be to cut them off—stop the food—and they weren't going to do that. Siyaad and his cronies knew it. The donors would keep dumping food; the regime could keep the cash flowing.

The donors used the food aid to save themselves money. It never mattered that the Somali economy was being destroyed, that corrupt Somali officials were getting rich. The elite of Mogadishu society, donors and government big-wigs, were fat from aid. And when they met at diplomatic cocktail parties they could slap each other on the back and congratulate themselves on a job well done, while servants offered hors d'oeuvres and Indian Ocean breezes filled their seaside villas.

In 1991 and 1992, the U.S. Department of State's Center for the Study
of Foreign Affairs, noting that a number of African states were drifting, or had drifted, into anarchy, decided to look into aid programs to those countries. Rawson's report was the result of that concern. It had not escaped the attention of the policymakers in the State Department that the three largest recipient states in Africa—Somalia, Zaire, and Liberia—had drifted over the edge and experienced a total governmental meltdown.
The Somali State and Foreign Aid
is a fascinating study that concisely summarizes what all the diplomats in Somalia had known for a long time: Rawson's findings corroborate what many of my Somali sources told me. As Raghe explained, few documents confirm what was going on in Somalia. Or, as Rawson writes, “The Somali government, already the least literate of bureaucracies, has lost such government documents as existed in the chaos of civil war.”

Rawson doesn't issue indictments, but he asks the right questions: “Were donors aware of Somalia's intractable problems? Or had they unintentionally contributed to those problems?” From the report, the answer to the first question is, clearly, yes.

In 1987, donor assistance to Somalia was at an all-time high. Even as Siyaad increased repression, Germany, the United States, and Italy kept pouring money into the country to support what it perceived as its transition to a free-market economy. But, as Rawson notes, “Cooperation with donor guidelines was ad hoc and arbitrary at best. By September 1987, Somalia had fallen off the stabilization/structural adjustment wagon and attempted a return to fixed currencies and state controls.
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When that happened, the state discovered that the production of Somali shillings to provide counterpart currencies for donor inputs in commodities and foreign exchange had so pumped up the economy that inflation went through the roof. The demand for goods fueled by intakes from false invoicing, inflated contracts, and outright appropriation of donor funds sent the Somali economy into a deep trade and payments imbalance.”

Instead of converting hard currency to Somali shillings to pay for development work, the foreign organizations were importing food. The Somali government printed the currency to pay for it—but the new bank notes weren't backed by new reserves of foreign exchange. The more development
projects NGOs did, the more money the government printed. The result was massive inflation.

Rawson writes about a World Bank $33 million structural adjustment loan given to Somalia in June 1989: “In retrospect, nothing about Somali economic behavior inspired optimism, particularly the kind of optimism that would advance a $33 million loan on the basis of Somali ‘commitments' to reform.” The misleading part of this statement is the opening “in retrospect.” It was clear at the time, but aid organizations tend to fulfill their own mandates; they give aid, regardless of circumstances. All this happened while a civil war in the north was spinning out of control. The writing was on the wall; Siyaad would fall. But the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank were plotting their next moves to finance Somalia's economic transformation.

And these so-called development agencies kept right on financing the destruction of a country. Their actions were eroding Somalia's economy, making people poor, and, in a bizarre way, creating a need for more and more aid, more and more NGOs. It was a cycle that eventually would consume itself.

A
t Raghe's urging, I traveled to the northern city of Hargeysa—capital of what, since 1991, has been the self-declared independent republic of Somaliland—and met with Abdi Aden Nur, who had once worked for the NRC and now held the title of Director of Food Aid and Relief Services. Abdi Aden was one of those whom most people regarded as honest. Like Shirdon, he had done his best to make things work from the inside. I had also dealt with him when I worked in Somalia, reporting back to him on occasion about the corruption I found at the NRC. A small, wiry man in his late seventies, with bright eyes and a quick step, he spoke freely about his days at NRC.