These days you can’t sit through an hour of TV without being subjected to a barrage of ads from sundry organisations that claim they’ll eradicate poverty and improve healthcare in Africa, South America, Asia and Eastern Europe– provided, of course, you open up your purse strings. Strangely, the frequency of these ads seems to be in inverse proportion to the bad news on the economic front. It’s hard to believe that these organisations are soliciting funds at a time when Kiwis themselves are reeling under a prolonged economic recession.
Welcome to the world of New Zealand charities, a market where the easy money has long since been pocketed but where organisations are now looking for innovative ways to generate cash. Call it the Slumdog Spinoff, a new phenomenon that these outfits have chanced upon to make you part with your dollar – hard earned or not.
Take the World Vision advertisement on TV3. The same person that conducts those impromptu tastings of Heller’s Bacon in European cities can be seen exhorting you to donate freely for buying school desks for children in India. Coincidently, the ad started appearing days after the movie, Slumdog Millionaire, became big news in New Zealand. However, what’s shocking is that donations are being solicited under the banner of the ‘40 Hour Famine’, giving the impression to the lay public that there is famine in India.
According to World Vision New Zealand CEO Lisa Cescon, in 2008 more than 120,000 people raised over $2 million. "It's extraordinary that even in a recession when family budgets are tight, Kiwis reached deep into their pockets and acknowledged the worse plight of others in places they'll probably never, ever go,” she told the media last year. “This will help make a huge difference in World Vision projects in Malawi, Honduras, Cambodia, India, Bangladesh and Vanuatu – to name a few."
A country like India gets a double whammy here. First, they splash a big ‘Famine’ logo on your TV screen, implying that there are people starving in India. Then they bracket India (which is planning a manned moon mission in 2015) with Malawi and Vanautu (countries where life expectancy, per capita income and calorie intakes read like the scores of The Netherlands cricket team after an encounter with Brett Lee).
World Vision isn’t the only one that is riding the Slumdog wave; there is at least one more charity that rolls out a similar spiel on prime time television (using the “poor Indians” bait) to grab our attention and make a lunge for our dollars.
Isn’t it ironic that people belonging to a $90 billion economy are being asked to donate to people in a $1000 billion economy? Frankly, India doesn’t need aid or charity. What is happening in India is economic gentrification on a scale that’s unprecedented in human history. Every year dozens of millions of people are joining the ranks of the middle class that’s double the size of America’s – 600 million. Plus, there are over 50 million rich folk who lead a lifestyle that the elite class in any country would envy.
In fact, the number of wealthy Indians is rising faster than any other segment. For instance, when the Mumbai stock market went north after last month’s general elections, it created 143 billionaires in three minutes of trading. And that’s during a global recession.
So does that mean that the rest of the population of 550 million is poor? Hardly. There is an aspiring 350 million lower middle class that’s rapidly merging with the true middle class. The poor would number around 200 million, but wait, these are poor not because of lack of opportunities but because of social problems and government inertia. However, there is no famine in India, which is able to feed all its 1.2 billion people – and is a net food exporter.
Compare that to the United States where over 35 million people are facing chronic starvation. These are official data provided by the US Department of Agriculture and experts say the real figure could be higher. “We will soon have the most food stamps recipients in the history of our country,” says Jim Weill, president of the US’ Food Research and Action Center. All across the country, from LA to Detroit to New York, the soup kitchen lines are getting longer. "Right now they are really fighting for their lives," says global economic analyst Alan Bragman.
However, such a tragic situation is under-reported in the American media and glossed over by Washington DC.
In contrast, in August 2001, in the face of clearly unsubstantiated (and scaremongering) reports in the Indian media of starvation among some nomadic and reclusive tribesmen in the thick forests of eastern India, the Indian government – despite denial by local bureaucrats – activated the food supply system. Soon trains from the granaries of Punjab and Tamil Nadu were whizzing east carrying millions of sacks of wheat, rice, millets, barley and pulses.
After the warehouses in the nearest railhead were full, the trains deposited the grain on the railway platforms and finally they just idled at the platforms because there was simply no space to unload. And finally, the truth came out (which the officials had maintained all along): eight tribesmen had died because they munched on a poisonous seed, which resembled their regular wild staple.
What’s happening in New Zealand and some western counties is of a similar nature. Charities are ratcheting up the scaremongering to collect larger and larger amounts from the public. But a country that has the world’s third largest army, fourth largest air force and fifth largest navy; which has 15 million new mobile phone connections each month; which launches satellites in lunar orbit; which has five of the world’s 10 richest persons; which has the world’s first billion dollar home (actually $2 billion), doesn’t need charity or aid.
India is the second largest investor in Britain after the US; in the past couple of years it has bought steel giant Corus, Land Rover and Jaguar, and has donated millions of dollars to Oxford and Cambridge Universities.
Kiwi money is better spent locally – in Mangere, Manurewa, Hastings, Invercargill.
However, if you are easily parted with your money and still want to send it to India, read this extract from a paper prepared by professor Shyam J. Kamath of California State University for the CATO Institute: “Foreign aid to India has been an unmitigated disaster. It has acted as both a catalyst and an encouragement for the politicisation of the Indian economy. It has also encouraged corruption, rent seeking, and graft. Foreign aid has been – and continues to be – predicated on an outdated and false theory of development economics that assumes that only capital and access to technology are needed for economic development.”
After the tsunami in India a few years back, charities worldwide collected a few hundred million dollars in aid. But since many of the charities were fronts for evangelistic organisations, the end result has been that the eastern Indian coastline now has a church every 500 metres, causing considerable social upheaval.
Before you send off that cheque, just pause to think: charities have been working for over a hundred years yet have barely made a dent in the poverty in Africa. On the other hand, hard work, private enterprise and heavy investment in roads and industry has transformed the economies of once poor countries such as Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, and of course India.
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Rakesh Krishnan is a Features Writer with Fairfax New Zealand