The modern aid business began in 1859 at the battle of Solferino in Italy. Locals banded together to bring water to soldiers dying of thirst,to saw off infected limbs,and to care for the enemy as well as their own. This well-intentioned,if dispersed,activity encouraged a Swiss Calvinist businessman,Henri Durant,who witnessed the battle,to set up the International Committee of the Red Cross and to help draw up the Geneva Conventions.
Most aid these days is development money that is apportioned to schools,clinics and agriculture. But Linda Polman,a Dutch journalist who has spent years travelling in war zones,is more interested in the alleged vanities of emergency aid. Ms Polman seems to be reflexively outraged; her previous book excoriated the United Nations. In The Crisis Caravan her ire is directed at the ghoulish cavalcade that sweeps in after wars,famines and natural disasters. Even supposedly saintly charities,such as Médecins sans Frontières and Oxfam,soil themselves,she believes,serving their own mostly financial interests above those of their victims.
The rise in satellite television and the internet has promoted and accelerated coverage of disasters,but the media industrys losses have damaged the quality and depth of the reporting. Too many journalists now find themselves in hock to the charities that fly them around free. Emboldened,aid workers inflate numbers of the starving. Journalists go along in the hope of getting a story into the paper. The complicity is worst with television; camera crews get footage of starving children,and charities an increase in donations.
Ms Polmans prose is scorching. But when it comes to solutions,the author admits she has none. She does not argue for doing nothing at all anymore,only that the option of doing nothing must be available and that we no longer exempt the [emergency aid system from criticism. That skirts the moral question of humanitarian assistance in the crowded 21st century,which is how to resolve the tyranny of the present and ensure the kind of help that will safeguard the future.
© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010
