Quotes of the Day

Aid to the developing world is one of those things whose motives have been mixed and muddled. In the age of empire, imperial powers built up infrastructure to make their colonies more productive and get primary goods quickly to market: railways, ports and canals linked the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. In the wreckage left by World War II, the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan were premised on the idea that economic development was the handmaiden to peace. More recently, charitable organizations (which have been playing a role in development for centuries) responded to humanitarian emergencies in the poor world that aroused public sentiment in the rich one, like the famines in Biafra in the 1960s, and Bangladesh in the 1970s. When Bob Geldof and his friends formed Band Aid/Live Aid in response to the 1984-85 Ethiopian famine, in which a million people died, "Feed the world" became the chorus of not just a pop record but the donor world, too.

That is good charity, but bad development theory. Development is all about the long term — about building up the skills and infrastructure that sustain economic growth. Food aid was never meant to be more than a temporary stopgap before the implementation of slower, lasting solutions. In his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus argued that famines were simply a case of too many people with not enough food. Malthus noted that populations tended to grow faster than food supply — and predicted global catastrophe without drastic population reductions. In 1981, the economist and Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen outlined an alternative view, arguing that lack of food was just one cause of famine. Inequality was just as important. In famines, it is the poor that die, not the rich. In practice, good development combines those approaches and more. Raise food production. Reduce population growth. (And do both as equitably as possible.) Give a starving man a fish, sure. But when he's recovered, give him a rod and have a chat about contraception.

Most of the world has followed such basic rules, to good effect. The world has grown richer and food aid has declined, from 20% of all official development assistance in the 1960s to less than 5% in 2005, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). But we're still feeding Africa. East Africa accounts for 4% of the world's population but 20% of food aid, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization; for all Africa, the figures are 14% and 35%.

The arguments against long-term handouts of food — dependency, corruption, the disincentive effect, a tendency for outside shocks to be exaggerated in a country with little capacity to plan for them — are well known. Africa provides arresting proof of their validity. Today the continent can no longer feed itself, and its share of world agricultural trade is much less than it was two generations ago. Globalization of agriculture — a process as old as sailing ships — means products that originated in Africa are now grown elsewhere. Coffee came from Ethiopia; Vietnam now grows more than all Africa. Palm oil was originally exported from West Africa to the industries of Europe; today Indonesia is a major producer and Nigeria a major importer. Often, donors are scrambling to make up ever bigger shortfalls in ever more desperate circumstances. The World Food Programme says emergency food aid rose from $258.1 million in 1989 to $2.8 billion in 2003. The OECD adds humanitarian disasters are becoming "more frequent, more severe and longer."

What Africa needs is sustained development programs, homegrown where possible, assisted by the outside world when that makes sense. It needs investment in human capital, in women's health and education, in infrastructure (the imperial powers were not wrong about that), in trading regimes that enable African nations to export their produce without protectionist barriers. Get those fundamentals right and there is no reason why Africa should not feed itself again.

It's not as if the poorest of the poor don't plan for the long term. The problem is that in present circumstances, their plans are little lessons in tragedy. On a reporting trip a few weeks ago to southern Ethiopia, where hunger now threatens millions, photographer Thomas Dworzak and I visited the village of Gode. Some 20 children had died there. We saw goats, cows and chickens roaming. We asked, Why hadn't the villagers slaughtered the animals? Germeda Koro, who had two children being treated for malnutrition, replied: "Look, maybe one or two children get sick. But if you kill your animals, you're ruining the whole family." In the absence of billions more dollars for long-term development, that is what planning looks like in Ethiopia today. Letting a child die to save a family.

• ALEX PERRY
• After billions of dollars in food aid, Africa needs different kinds of development programs