The Self-Appointed Altruists - Part I
Their arrival portends rising local prices and a culture shock.
Many of them live in plush apartments, or five star hotels,
drive SUV's, sport $3000 laptops and PDA's. They earn a two
figure multiple of the local average wage. They are busybodies,
preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional altruists.
Always self-appointed, they answer to no constituency. Though
unelected and ignorant of local realities, they confront the
democratically chosen and those who voted them into office. A
few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are the
non-governmental organizations, or NGO's.
Some NGO's - like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans
Frontieres, or Amnesty - genuinely contribute to enhancing
welfare, to the mitigation of hunger, the furtherance of human
and civil rights, or the curbing of disease. Others - usually in
the guise of think tanks and lobby groups - are sometimes
ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at
the service of special interests.
NGO's - such as the International Crisis Group - have openly
interfered on behalf of the opposition in the recent elections
in Macedonia. Other NGO's have done so in Belarus and Ukraine,
Zimbabwe and Israel, Nigeria and Thailand, Slovakia and Hungary
- and even in Western, rich, countries including the USA,
Canada, Germany, and Belgium.
The encroachment on state sovereignty of international law -
enshrined in numerous treaties and conventions - allows NGO's to
get involved in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like
corruption, civil rights, the composition of the media, the
penal and civil codes, environmental policies, or the allocation
of economic resources and of natural endowments, such as land
and water. No field of government activity is now exempt from
the glare of NGO's. They serve as self-appointed witnesses,
judges, jury and executioner rolled into one.
Regardless of their persuasion or modus operandi, all NGO's are
top heavy with entrenched, well-remunerated,
extravagantly-perked bureaucracies. Opacity is typical of NGO's.
Amnesty's rules prevent its officials from publicly discussing
the inner workings of the organization - proposals, debates,
opinions - until they have become officially voted into its
Mandate. Thus, dissenting views rarely get an open hearing.
Contrary to their teachings, the financing of NGO's is
invariably obscure and their sponsors unknown. The bulk of the
income of most non-governmental organizations, even the largest
ones, comes from - usually foreign - powers. Many NGO's serve as
official contractors for governments.
NGO's serve as long arms of their sponsoring states - gathering
intelligence, burnishing their image, and promoting their
interests. There is a revolving door between the staff of NGO's
and government bureaucracies the world over. The British Foreign
Office finances a host of NGO's - including the fiercely
"independent" Global Witness - in troubled spots, such as
Angola. Many host governments accuse NGO's of - unwittingly or
knowingly - serving as hotbeds of espionage.
Very few NGO's derive some of their income from public
contributions and donations. The more substantial NGO's spend
one tenth of their budget on PR and solicitation of charity. In
a desperate bid to attract international attention, so many of
them lied about their projects in the Rwanda crisis in 1994,
recounts "The Economist", that the Red Cross felt compelled to
draw up a ten point mandatory NGO code of ethics. A code of
conduct was adopted in 1995. But the phenomenon recurred in
Kosovo.
All NGO's claim to be not for profit - yet, many of them possess
sizable equity portfolios and abuse their position to increase
the market share of firms they own. Conflicts of interest and
unethical behavior abound.
Cafedirect is a British firm committed to "fair trade" coffee.
Oxfam, an NGO, embarked on a campaign targeted at Cafedirect's
competitors, accusing them of exploiting growers by paying them
a tiny fraction of the retail price of the coffee they sell.
Yet, Oxfam owns 25% of Cafedirect.
Large NGO's resemble multinational corporations in structure and
operation. They are hierarchical, maintain large media,
government lobbying, and PR departments, head-hunt, invest
proceeds in professionally-managed portfolios, compete in
government tenders, and own a variety of unrelated businesses.
The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development owns the license for
second mobile phone operator in Afghanistan - among other
businesses. In this respect, NGO's are more like cults than like
civic organizations.
Many NGO's promote economic causes - anti-globalization, the
banning of child labor, the relaxing of intellectual property
rights, or fair payment for agricultural products. Many of these
causes are both worthy and sound. Alas, most NGO's lack economic
expertise and inflict damage on the alleged recipients of their
beneficence. NGO's are at times manipulated by - or collude with
- industrial groups and political parties.
It is telling that the denizens of many developing countries
suspect the West and its NGO's of promoting an agenda of trade
protectionism. Stringent - and expensive - labor and
environmental provisions in international treaties may well be a
ploy to fend off imports based on cheap labor and the
competition they wreak on well-ensconced domestic industries and
their political stooges.
Take child labor - as distinct from the universally condemnable
phenomena of child prostitution, child soldiering, or child
slavery.
Child labor, in many destitute locales, is all that separates
the family from all-pervasive, life threatening, poverty. As
national income grows, child labor declines. Following the
outcry provoked, in 1995, by NGO's against soccer balls stitched
by children in Pakistan, both Nike and Reebok relocated their
workshops and sacked countless women and 7000 children. The
average family income - anyhow meager - fell by 20 percent.
This affair elicited the following wry commentary from
economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern:
"While Baden Sports can quite credibly claim that their soccer
balls are not sewn by children, the relocation of their
production facility undoubtedly did nothing for their former
child workers and their families."
This is far from being a unique case. Threatened with legal
reprisals and "reputation risks" (being named-and-shamed by
overzealous NGO's) - multinationals engage in preemptive
sacking. More than 50,000 children in Bangladesh were let go in
1993 by German garment factories in anticipation of the American
never-legislated Child Labor Deterrence Act.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, observed:
"Stopping child labor without doing anything else could leave
children worse off. If they are working out of necessity, as
most are, stopping them could force them into prostitution or
other employment with greater personal dangers. The most
important thing is that they be in school and receive the
education to help them leave poverty."
NGO-fostered hype notwithstanding, 70% of all children work
within their family unit, in agriculture. Less than 1 percent
are employed in mining and another 2 percent in construction.
Again contrary to NGO-proffered panaceas, education is not a
solution. Millions graduate every year in developing countries -
100,000 in Morocco alone. But unemployment reaches more than one
third of the workforce in places such as Macedonia.
Children at work may be harshly treated by their supervisors but
at least they are kept off the far more menacing streets. Some
kids even end up with a skill and are rendered employable.
"The Economist" sums up the shortsightedness, inaptitude,
ignorance, and self-centeredness of NGO's neatly:
"Suppose that in the remorseless search for profit,
multinationals pay sweatshop wages to their workers in
developing countries. Regulation forcing them to pay higher
wages is demanded... The NGOs, the reformed multinationals and
enlightened rich-country governments propose tough rules on
third-world factory wages, backed up by trade barriers to keep
out imports from countries that do not comply. Shoppers in the
West pay more - but willingly, because they know it is in a good
cause. The NGOs declare another victory. The companies, having
shafted their third-world competition and protected their
domestic markets, count their bigger profits (higher wage costs
notwithstanding). And the third-world workers displaced from
locally owned factories explain to their children why the West's
new deal for the victims of capitalism requires them to starve."