Norm posts a long excerpt from am article in the Melbourne Age advocating increased aid to fight hunger.

Famines create headlines, but chronic malnutrition is a wider problem. About 800 million people in the world regularly do not have enough to eat...

John Howard's comment that non-government aid agencies should stop complaining about Australia's foreign aid level because trade globalisation is the answer to development - echoing Alan Oxley's argument on this page (on November 19) that aid does not work - seems unthinkingly cruel...

...aid does work, has worked, is well-documented, by the World Bank, the UN and many other international bodies. The international aid group Oxfam was originated by a group at Oxford (including Australian-born Gilbert Murray) in response to the terrible Greek famine of 1941.

But what of the famines, in the lifetimes of most of us, in India, China, Bangladesh, and other parts of Asia and south America, that regularly killed millions upon millions? These no longer happen. In the Third World overall, the number of people starving - defined by the UN as having insufficient food to perform light physical activity - has fallen from 35 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent today.

It is true that trade has played a large role in these countries' development, but so has aid.

If there is ever to be a morally ordered, just, or even a reasonably secure world, surely the first principle must be that all the world's people should be fed. This is not rocket science.

Aid does not reduce hunger. It never has at any time or any place. It provides a few meals and they are welcome, but since it does not continue forever or reach everyone it really doesn't help except where the problems are temporary. If a disaster or a war happens and food imports to cities from rural areas are stopped, or if a bad harvest happens, then aid can help those who are visible. Aid provides short term help to those in the eye of the camera.

The vast majority of those 800 million hungry people mentioned in the article are farmers. They live far away from cities and cameras. Aid never reaches them because they are spread all over the landscape. There are no trucks to haul food to them, no fuel even if there were trucks, and no roads for the trucks even if they had convoys to supply them like a military operation. Foreign aid only feeds those in and near port cities, and only for a while.

It's not that we do not have a duty to help or that it is bad to provide a few meals for hungry city people, it's that the programs advocated by advocates, activists and NGOs are useless distractions from real problems. They are entertainment really, a balm to soothe guilt feelings.

The help that is needed is improved agricultural systems. The reason the famines noted in the article have not been repeated are that their governments have become a bit less authoritarian, allowing farmers to make sensible plans, and the green revolution happened, bringing improved cultivars, fertilizers and pesticides to food insecure nations.

That revolution has not spread to all corners of the world and won't so long as they can't afford the inputs. Better technologies such as pest resistant cultivars are cheaper but the same NGOs that claim to care about hungry people block the use of those cultivars.

Hungry people need a hand up not a hand out. Aid and technology transfer can get them started on the road to self sufficiency and real hunger reduction. Trade can keep them going. Good governance that doesn't punish industrious and successful growers, that protects their farms, can make it a permanent solution and position the formerly starving people to become educated, healthy, happy humans. It takes years to restore exhausted land so that it consistently yields. It takes decades to raise healthy children with well nourished bodies and minds that can power them to further improvement. The problem of hunger is a problem of development not aid, and a result of bad governance. Aid can help in a temporary crisis for otherwise self sufficient societies, but if they have never been self sufficient and don't have workable systems then sending a few bags of grain to them won't help, even if there are roads and trucks and fuel. It mainly just supplies organized crime in port cities and provides food weapons to corrupt politicians.