Philanthropy

Anne Applebaum is a writer that I usually like a lot,  and I usually try to maintain a more or less neutral stance on things, but this article in Slate is just wrong-headed. She attempts to make a case for a humanitarian military intervention in Burma, an argument I’ve heard others make. It is a bad idea.

Applebaum doesn’t specifically mention it, but her argument is clearly coming from a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) point of view. For those who are new to the term, R2P is a newish, burgeoning international norm that asserts that governments have a responsibility to protect (hence the phrase) their own citizens. When they can’t or won’t, it is the international community’s responsibility to do so. It has wide support, a lot of enemies, and the Security Council has cited it (among a host of other reasons) to support military interventions. Personally I think it is a pretty good idea.

R2P emerged in a 2001 report (follow the link above) that lays out in pretty vague terms the justifiable reasons for an R2P-intervention:

“Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraord-
inary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring
to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of the following kind:

A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which
is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or
a failed state situation.

B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing,
forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” (emphasis added)

I admit that you can make a fair case that the current situation in Burma qualifies under letter A. It involves a large scale loss of life and  state neglect.

But R2P doesn’t just gives a threshold for the type of humanitarian catastrophe that we need before an intervention can be launched. It also offers a set of utterly reasonable “precautionary principles”. These are so logical that even if Applebaum isn’t thinking of R2P, they should/would be part of any military planning nonetheless. They suggest that any military action should have “reasonable prospects” of success. You should have a pretty good idea that you’ll be doing more good than harm when you send in the guns. Military actions should also be the “last resort”. We don’t have either of those here.

Just to be clear. Your military intervention can do two things: kill people and blow things up. You don’t protect someone, you threaten to kill their attacker. The R2P argument is strongest when there is a group of people who are being attacked, because then you can use your military to kill the bad guys - like in the Magnificent Seven. It still makes sense when you have two or more groups fighting each other and a bunch of civilians stuck in the middle - like uh, real life. In either of those cases people are facing flying bullets anyway.

But in this case what would the military do? Use fighter wings to defend air drops of food? That seems harmless enough, but what happens when that food hits the ground and is taken into the junta’s system? Who defends the humanitarian workers then? Troops and artillery I guess, but now we’re fighting a ground war with the junta, and we’ve created a conflict where there wasn’t one before. That isn’t what the people of Burma need right now.

I’m absolutely not saying that the junta is good. They’re not. They are very bad leaders who deserve to be removed. But the norm of humanitarian intervention is best reserved for civil conflicts or other cases of violence and kept out of natural disaster response.

This report from the Center for Health and Gender Equity actually came out in April, but it just appeared in my Google Alerts today. The report argues that the US government - still one of the world’s largest providers of condoms through foreign aid - should send more female condoms. They are currently 2% of US condom buys. The Center wants this percentage to be increased so that there can be a serious effort to market female condoms and get more people using them.

The idea is that female condoms allow women to protect themselves and their partners from STIs without having to convince a many to wear a condom. It makes sense for cultures where conversations about sex are highly taboo, I guess. I still have to wonder if men in these relationships (whether transactional or romantic) don’t still have enough power to demand no condom use at all.

This is getting into a very technical area, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert. But I think it is a legitimate question if the female condom is just a bad product that people won’t use, or if it needs to be marketed better. Few people like female condoms, but it isn’t as if regular condoms are universally popular - so customer satisfaction is clearly not the only important factor. If the female condom wasn’t so weird and alien, maybe it would be used more. But what percentage of our foreign aid needs to be spent on priming the female condom supply, versus ensuring a sufficient supply of the product that people already know?

Rightfully there is a lot of attention going to the Burma cyclone tragedy, and the attempts to get aid to those in need. Personally I like this article from the BBC, which gives a good rundown of the specific risks and the political wrangling that surrounds the issue.

At times like this it is helpful to remember the mantra: “The people of Burma do not deserve to die because they have a bad government.”

The Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is considering  starting a loan program for countries that can afford it, but still need help buying HIV meds. I guess it makes sense in a way, but it is a pretty stark change from the traditional wisdom on foreign aid loans, isn’t it? I thought the idea was that a country would develop and over time its economy would get better and it could repay the loan. Like taking student loans because you know you’ll make more money when you get out. Or buying a house because (cough cough) it’s a good investment.

I suppose the idea is that if you don’t take care of your HIV problem your economy will fall apart anyway, so by that logic it is a good investment.

This op/ed from the Times of India is worth a read. It discusses the rising wealth of many Indians, and argues that a rise in personal philanthropy is not coming along with it. India has 52 billionaires, the most in Asia. But it has only 4 people on the Forbes list of 48 top Asian philanthropists.

Of course, it depends a lot on how you measure philanthropy. A lot of Indian billionaires might be giving generously but unanimously, or giving to poor family members even. But it does indicate that India’s wealthy are not sharing their wealth. I wonder how much this is an Indian thing, though. The op/ed gives prominent examples of US philanthropists, but that isn’t statistically meaningful. There must be more US billionaires than Indian billionaires. A few examples of the generous doesn’t demonstrate a Western priority on giving.

But the author does give a great qute from US philanthropist Christopher Hohn, “‘A man who dies rich, dies disgraced”.

According to a survey of Latin American immigrants, the number of people sending remittances home to Latin America has fallen significantly in only a few years. In 2006 73 percent of immigrants from the region sent money home, but now it is only half. The fall is credited to anti-immigrant sentiment in the US that makes people afraid to call attention to themselves. The dollar amounts have also fallen, and the weak dollar is making the remittances that do go through less valuable.